The classical context of Ben Jonson's "other youth"

Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Spring, 2003 by Bruce Boehrer

Epicoene's self-conscious comparison between Ben Jonson and an unnamed "other youth"--possibly Shakespeare--may best be read in the context of classical notions of the aging process, which conceive of "youth" ("iuventus") as a category encompassing the ages from roughly twenty to forty-five and which define that category in terms of sexual potency and military service. While invoking this classical conception of the masculine life cycle, Epicoene also realigns the determinants of "youth" so as to foreground rhetorical and literary performance. thereby effecting a shift in its vision of empowered virility away from arms and toward letters.

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At the start of his recent book on biographical and critical issues in the work of Ben Jonson, Jonson's Magic Houses, Ian Donaldson reconsiders a well-known crux from Jonson's comedy Epicoene (1609). As Donaldson observes,

Epicoene . . . is about a man who hates noise and women yet marries a supposedly silent wife in order to... disinherit his troublesome nephew. In the second act of the play, this disagreeable character is visited on the eve of his wedding by one of his nephew's friends,

who, in a lengthy tirade fulfilling and exceeding Morose's wildest nightmares, warns him of the many perils of marriage. All women, argues Truewit, bring noise, terror, and tribulation to a household, but one kind ... to be avoided above all others.. . is the female critic: the sort who will "censure poets, and authors, and stiles, and compare 'hem, DANIEL with SPENSER, JONSON with the tother youth, and so forth" (II.ii.115-9). (1)

In reviewing this passage, Donaldson seeks, like many before him, to identify the "tother youth" to whom Jonson implicitly compares himself, and, again like some before him, Donaldson decides that Shakespeare is a strong contender for the role. (2) My aim here is neither to add to the substantial list of other candidates nor to refute Donaldson's claim (in fact the evidence I advance may lend some support to his position). On the contrary, I simply wish to sketch in some of the classical background to this peculiar passage from Epicoene by noting that it seems to employ a Latin, rather than a vernacular, sense of the opposition between youth and old age.

I

Jonson's reference to "the tother youth" has been glossed repeatedly, in ways that help clarify the problem it presents. If on one hand Samuel Daniel and Edmund Spenser bear comparison as heroic or narrative poets, it would seem obvious--at least in hindsight--that Jonson and Shakespeare form an equally apt pair for comparison. That, at least, is how it seemed to Edmond Malone, who thus declared that "In his Silent Woman... Jonson perhaps pointed at Shakspeare, as one whom he viewed with fearful, yet with jealous, eyes: 'So they may censure poets and authors, and compare them: Daniel with Spenser, Jonson with t'other youth, and so forth.'" (3) William Gifford responded to this conjecture with a lengthy and contemptuous note that reads, in part, "A more improbable conceit than the above has rarely been hazarded. With what propriety could Shakspeare be called the t'other youth? He was now in his 46th year, a time of life to which such an expression can scarcely be applied . . . When a man of 35 speaks of a comp etitor of 46, he does not usually call him the t'ot her youth." (4)

Gifford's objection gains additional force from the demographic record, such as it is. The grim actuarial realities of early modern life are common knowledge, (5) and most everyone now realizes that the brutally short life expectancies of Renaissance Europe cannot be "discounted by attributing the low expectation to the large extent of infant mortality's affecting the averages." (6) It is perhaps less well-known that these demographic realities seem to have affected Renaissance notions of the aging process itself, with the result that individuals are regularly described in the period as being elderly by the time they hit their early forties. (7) But even from a more optimistic nineteenth-century standpoint, as Gifford notes, Jonson's reference to youth threatens to disrupt any implicit comparison between him and Shakespeare. On this basis, among others, Gifford favors John Marston as the unnamed playwright of comparison.

More recent commentators have addressed this problem in various ways that generally prefer Gifford to Malone. In her 1906 Yale edition of Epicoene, Aurelia Henry thus remarks that "It is doubtful to whom Jonson refers" as "the tother youth," but that in any case Malone's suggestion of Shakespeare has been "crushed" by Gifford. (8) C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, typically leery of historicist woolgathering and just as typically hospitable to self-contained, formalist habits of reading, short-circuit the debate entirely by claiming that "the tother youth" is simply a second reference to the aforementioned Daniel. (9) L. A. Beaurline favors Gifford's suggestion of Marston, while also resurrecting another eighteenth-century candidate, Thomas Dekker. (10) Johanna Procter offers a fairly unusual defense of Malone's position, in effect agreeing with Gifford's objection but discounting it as irrelevant to the play's dialogue: "the tone here is of good-natured banter (in 1609, Jonson was hardly a 'youth'- -36 or 37), and the reference is probably to Shakespeare ... who was about six years older than Jonson." (11) And most recently I, too, have expressed discomfort with Jonson's self-denomination as a thirty-six-year-old "youth." (12)