The poet of labor: authorship and property in the work of Ben Jonson

Philological Quarterly, Summer, 1993 by Bruce Thomas Boehrer

I want to start by revisiting a traditional distinction between Shakespeare, the poet of nature who never blotted a line, and Jonson, who blotted so many that he became famous for slow and laborious composition. I would rediscover this distinction in the briefest work that either poet ever produced: their names.

To put things as simply as possible, Shakespeare never bothered to regularize the spelling of his name, either in his personal practice or in the practice of others; Jonson, on the other hand, did. The evidence on both sides is extensive. In Shakespeare's case, the surviving signatures point in various different orthographic directions; he is "William Shakspere," "William Shakspeare," "Willm Shaksp," etc.(1) Quarto title-pages offer further variants, including "Shakespeare," "Shake-speare," and "Shak-speare,"(2) while the whimsy of the poet's contemporaries produces spellings as remarkable as "Shaxpere" and "Shakspeer."(3) It would remain for later figures, arguably beginning with Edmond Malone, to try and impose some uniformity on this wilderness.(4)

For Jonson, the case is largely reversed. His name--as commonplace in the sixteenth century as in the twentieth--had already acquired something like a de facto orthographic regularity, and as a result Jonson seems to have sought to personalize it by deleting the usual "h." In David Riggs's words, Jonson "changed the spelling of his own last name" so as to "proclaim . . . his uniqueness";(5) yet Marchette Ghute notes that

It was a policy to which his contemporaries paid no attention. His friends and

his enemies went on spelling his name with an h, and even the printers stopped

co-operating as soon as Jonson was no longer there to watch them.(6) Chute may overstate the bibliographical record here, but the general point holds. Quarto title-pages call the poet "Iohnson" until 1605; then his mature Horatian persona asserts itself in Sejanus, Volpone, Epicoene, The Alchemist, and the 1616 folio;(7) thereafter, "Iohnson" creeps back into the printings of 1631 and 1640, resurfaces in advertisements for the folio of 1692, and reappears on the title-pages of the 1710, 1716, 1729, 1732, and 1738 editions.(8) Meanwhile, Jonson's contemporaries displayed a perverse consistency in the spelling of his name; among the sixteen legal documents that Herford and Simpson reprint in their edition of Jonson's work, the "h" is virtually every--where except in Jonson's own signatures on two depositions.(9) Moreover, the poet's surviving autographs tell much the same story; he drops the "h" from his name in 1605, apparently just after his imprisonment for Eastward Ho.(10)

This pattern is hard to ignore. It conveys the overall impression of an author finding himself, in part, through literary revision of his own name--revision that he then sought, with uneven success, to impose upon printers and colleagues. Furthermore, this point may be urged as a commonplace of Shakespeare/Jonson scholarship, distinguishing the poet of nature from his pedantic, obstreperous colleague, and making Jonson the forebear of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary scholarship, with its rage for order. Where Shakespeare appears to have been genuinely indifferent to the alienating capacities of print, Jonson spent considerable time and energy trying to govern them; it is hardly surprising, therefore, that his efforts to do so should begin with the two most intimate--and arguably the two most important--words in his vocabulary.

Of course, it is suspiciously easy to draw such distinctions between Shakespeare and Jonson, and the present essay seeks in part to explain why. In fact, matters are a good deal more complicated than the preceding contrast implies, for Jonson's progressive tendencies are confused and qualified by various circumstances. First of all, he is no paragon of neoclassical regularity; he takes an unprecedented first step toward the neoclassical ideal, but his practice is not always consistent with his theory. Moreover, his irregularity is sometimes the most forward-looking thing about him; thus A. C. Partridge's old-style philological study of Jonson's accidence has noted the extent to which the poet's use of the possessive genitive introduces new forms while clinging to old ones at the same time.(11) In such cases (and the genitive of ownership is important for this essay), Jonson's tendency to re-think and re-systematize the structures of grammar generates considerable initial confusion. And further, such rethinking is done in the name of fundamentally reactionary goals, commensurate with a revival of Horatian classicism. To this extent, the novelty of Jonson's work derives not from his own determination to move in new directions, but rather from his inability to move in old ones;(12) his classicism falls victim to the discouraging fact that he does not live in Augustan Rome. Any effort to characterize Jonson as an avatar of the neoclassical literary dispensation must take all these facts into account.