SOURCE: "Facts of the Matter: Satiric and Ideal Economies in the Jonsonian Imagination," in Ben Jonson's 1616 Folio, edited by Jennifer Brady and W. H. Herendeen, University of Delaware Press, 1991, pp. 64-86.

For those of you who are interested in getting ahead, I have one suggestion: have a father who owns the business and have him die.

—Malcolm Forbes

In tragedy, characters die; in comedy, they do not. Though Jonson observes this generic rule scrupulously—Puntarvolo's dog, in Every Man Out Of His Humour, is his only real casualty—death nonetheless looms unusually large as a plot device in many of his comedies. In Volpone most of the characters are waiting for the hero to become a corpse, and he seems to comply at the beginning of the fifth act. The Alchemist is set in plague-ridden London, in a house that the master has vacated after the death of his wife—a bereavement that allows him to marry the desirable Dame Pliant, herself recently widowed, at the end of the play. In Epicoene Truewit suggests a plan to extract Dau-phine's inheritance from his uncle Morose: "ha' him drawne out on coronation day to the tower-wharf, and kill him with the noise of the ordinance". In the same play the rich and titled Amorous La Foole informs us that the onset of his good fortune coincided with the moment when "it pleased my elder brother to die"; the prodigal Penyboy Junior, hero of The Staple of News, pays a similarly chilling tribute to his "loving and obedient" father: "a right, kind-hearted man / To dye so opportunely." Jonson's characters revel in the possibilities opened up for them by the mortality of family members or associates, or plan to obtain such freedom by facilitating their demise.

Mosca's highly charged combination of servility and aggression in this passage—the way he elaborates Volpone.'s plan with a little too much relish—is a reminder that the death of the patron hardly need imply the ruin of the parasite.

In Jonsonian comedy, death creates opportunities. The converse is also true: the conventional impossibility of death within the play makes ordinary comic rewards inaccessible for some of the characters. Because there is no generically appropriate way to eliminate that recurrent Jonsonian type, the bad husband, Celia cannot marry Bonario in Volpone, nor can Mistress Fitzdottrel marry Wittipol in The Devil is an Ass. Because Morose remains alive at the end of Epicoene, Dauphine cannot yet come fully into the inheritance that will ensure his prosperity. Because Volpone does not really die, Mosca cannot assume clarissimo rank and marry the avocatore's daughter.

Jonson's way of conceiving of death is very much at odds with the usual comic mode. As Northrop Frye observed in The Anatomy of Criticism, "an extraordinary number of comic stories, both in drama and in fiction, seem to approach a potentially tragic crisis near the end, a feature that I may cell the 'point of ritual death.'" In the cases Frye has in mind, the gratification of the comic characters depends upon overcoming or avoiding the threat of death; the audience applauds rather than regrets their survival. In Jonson, by contrast, the generic immortality of the comic characters seems not part and parcel with a comic emphasis upon gratification, but rather, a constraint upon that gratification.

The frustrated murderousness of Jonsonian comedy is, I shall argue, best understood in the context of his general assumptions about the forces of production, exchange, and consumption. A number of critics—L. C. Knights, Raymond Williams, Don Wayne, and Walter Cohen, among others—have discussed such issues in terms of Jonson's reaction to the nascent capitalism and moribund feudalism of the early seventeenth century. My approach will differ from theirs in two respects. On the whole, I shall be less concerned with social causes than with literary effects. Moreover, I shall argue that the Marxist orientation of most criticism in this field has rendered a crucial issue invisible. Critics influenced by Marx tend to take the fundamental character of material life for granted: the economic relations between Jonson and his various audiences, or among Jonson's contemporaries in Jacobean London, provide what seems to them the proper interpretive framework for an understanding of Jonson's career. In my view, however, Jonson struggles with the problem of whether material life, however it may be defined, really possesses this priority, this hermeneutic privilege. The first part of the essay describes some of the ways such considerations manifest themselves in his comedies. The second section suggests some reasons why the economic axioms of Jonsonian comedy often seem suspended or reversed elsewhere in his oeuvre, especially in the masques and in certain celebratory poems. This suspension or reversal underlies the generic divisions that organize Jonson's own presentation of his writing and have, usually without explicit discussion, organized most writing about Jonson ever since. The last part of the essay briefly considers the impact of Jonson's economic assumptions upon the idiosyncratic conception of artistic production that makes possible his publication of the Folio Workes.

The fundamental principle of what I shall call Jonson's "satiric economy" might, anachronistically, be called the law of the conservation of matter. In the comedies and the satiric epigrams, he represents a world that contains a predetermined quantity of substance, a quantity not subject to increase. Jonson repeatedly singles out for ridicule the perpetual motion machine, the "Eltham-thing" that mysteriously derives something from nothing, not because anyone in the early seventeenth century has scientific grounds for dismissing such a phenomenon, but because it violates a basic intuition about the nature of the material world. Alchemy plays upon the same wishfulness, promising wealth and immortality for everyone at the same time with a blithe disregard for reality as Jonsonian comedy defines it.

Less fantastic methods for achieving real or apparent increase seem likewise out of the question. Jonson's comic characters typically produce nothing. Despite the illusion of social comprehensiveness produced by such plays as The Alchemist or Bartholomew Fair, Jonson generally excludes from his comedies the artisan classes that populate Shakespeare's cities—the Athens of A Midsummer Night's Dream or the Rome of Julius Caesar and Coriolanus—and that occupy a crucial social place in such "city comedies" as Dekker's Shoemaker's Holiday or Middleton's Trick to Catch The Old One. The farmer Sordido, in Every Man Out Of His Humour, interests Jonson not as a producer of foodstuffs but as an entrepreneur plotting an illegal manipulation of the grain market. For Volpone, maintaining a distance from the processes of agriculture and manufacture is a matter of pride: "I gaine / No common way." Even such "unnatural" forms of production as usury, the breeding of money from money—certainly a phenomenon which engages the moral imagination of many Renaissance playwrights—rarely figures significantly in Jonsonian comedy. In consequence, social life in Jonsonian comedy is a zerosum game. What one person has, another cannot have. What one person acquires, another must forfeit. Jonsonian comedy is not a form in which one or a few "blocking characters" attempt to prevent social communion, but one in which every character, at least potentially, is a "blocking character" to every other.

Jonson's characters are thus preoccupied with transferring objects and services: buying and selling, giving and stealing. But the "law of the conservation of matter" dominates more than commercial relations narrowly conceived. Jonson is fascinated with inheritance laws, which prescribe a way of managing one of the most significant forms of economic transfer: the reallocation of wealth after death of the owner. Theoretically such laws ensure the solidarity and continuity of the family by providing for the orderly conveyance of property from generation to generation. In Jonsonian comedy, however, they tend to become instruments of rupture and alienation. Perhaps it is not surprising that the rules of primogeniture give junior members of the family powerful parricidal incentives. But in Jonsonian comedy, their elders are at least as quick to perceive their gains in terms of their relatives' losses. "Shall my sonne gaine a benevolence by my death?" asks Sordido in Every Man Out Of His Humour, moments before his suicide attempt:

Or anybody be the better for my gold, or so forth? No. Alive I kept it from 'hem, and (dead) my ghost shall walke about it, and preserve it; my son and daughter shall starve ere they touch it.

"How I shall bee reveng'd on mine insolent kinsman" exclaims Morose in Epicoene, as he plans to add to his family in order to subtract from it: "This night I wil get an heire, and thrust him out of my bloud like a stranger." Corbaccio, hoping to inherit Volpone's estate himself, disinherits his son.

The sexual constraints of Jonson's comic characters are subject to the same constraints as their financial affairs. In most Renaissance plays, especially in those written for the adult acting troupes, male characters far outnumber the female characters. But Jonson's contemporaries rarely represent this discrepancy as a serious source of frustration; in their plays, there are usually enough marriageable young women to match with the suitable men. In Jonsonian comedy, by contrast, the scarcity of women almost always presents problems. If one character marries, then another cannot; Lovewit's successful courtship displaces Surly, Subtle, Drugger, and Face in The Alchemist, just as Winwife's displaces Quarlous and Cokes in Bartholomew Fair, and Pol-Martin's displaces Squire Tub, Chanon Hugh, Judge Preamble and John Clay in A Tale of a Tub. Many of the women have already been claimed before the play begins. Even Sir Epicure Mammon, imagining himself surrounded by abundance of all kinds, assumes that his sexual companions will be the wives of other men, and that he will have to bribe the husbands to permit his adultery. In almost all the plays widows, prostitutes, and married women represent the main sexual opportunities for unmarried men, and widows the best matches as far as property is concerned.

These "second-hand women" are not the only commodities that have been used before. In a world in which nothing new can be created, everything anyone owns has necessarily had an indefinite number of previous owners. In the first act of Volpone, Mosca's Pythagorean play suggests that even the soul is not a uniquely personal possession. Characters must appropriate setting and props. When Volpone wants to disguise himself as a commendatore, he must go to elaborate lengths to obtain a uniform; Mosca gets a soldier drunk and strips him, so that somewhere offstage a naked and baffled man is presumably looking for his garments—a situation Jonson exploits to greater comic effect in Every Man In His Humour. In Epicoene Truewit and his friends plague Morose by "translating" LaFoole's noisy dinner party into his house. In The Alchemist the three schemers take over a house left temporarily empty by the death of its mistress and the flight of its master. In Bartholomew Fair the fictional setting is as provisional as the actual setting, a playhouse used at other times for bear-baiting. Hence the quarrels between Joan Trash and Lanthorn Leatherhead over the ground they have leased; hence the necessity for the temporary Court of Pie-Powders, or "Dusty-Feet," in which Adam Overdo so ineffectively dispenses justice among a transient population.

Jonson's most successful and exciting characters therefore tend to be masters of the inspired assemblage of haphazard materials, and they exercise their gift even when it is not required by circumstances. In The Alchemist, Subtle outdoes himself when Abel Drugger requests a sign for his shop.

He first shall have a bell, that's ABEL;
And, by it, standing one, whose name is DEE,
In a rugg gowne; there's D. and Rug, that's DRUG:
And, right anenst him, a Dog snarling Er;
There's DRUGGER, ABEL DRUGGER. That's his signe.

Subtle takes a name that suits its druggist owner perfectly, splinters it into meaningless bits, and then recompiles the scraps into a bizarre and fortuitous array.

It is not surprising that these jerry-rigged arrangements are constantly threatening to crumble or explode. Even Jonson's geniuses of manipulation cannot manufacture something genuinely new, or something greater than its constituent parts. Those characters who take a satiric perspective upon the action or upon their fellow characters enunciate this principle clearly. For Epicoene's misogynists, women are baroque collections of alien materials, periodically reorganized. "All her teeth were made i' the Blacke-Friers: both her eyebrowes i' the Strand, and her haire in Silver-Street," confides Tom Otter to his friends.

Every part o' the towne ownes a peece of her…. She takes her selfe asunder still when she goes to bed, into some twentie boxes; and about next day noone is put together againe, like a great Germane clocke.

In The Alchemist, Surly deploys a similar strategy for different ends, ridiculting the alchemists by listing their diverse ingredients:

pisse, and egge-shells, womens termes, mans bloud,
Haire o' the head, burnt clouts, chalke, merds, and clay,
Poulder of bones, scalings of iron, glasse.

This particular form of satiric rhetoric evokes a world made up of substances that stubbornly retain their original, inassimilable characteristics even as they are endlessly rearranged and forced into surprising and precarious juxtapositions.

The paucity of material resources in Jonsonian comedy and satiric epigram puts a premium on the ability to make several uses of the same thing.

Jonson represents Gut as a sort of bank, changing the coin of gluttony for the coin of venery. But the transformation is merely an apparent one. "It"—the twice-tasted meat, the raw material of gratification—is still identifiable after its transfer and re-use.

Related to Gut's perversely ingenious multiplication of pleasurable effects is the talent for swift circulation demonstrated by so many of Jonson's comic characters. For if one thing can be in two places at nearly the same time, then it is almost as if one thing had become two. Thus the alchemists double their effectiveness by doubling their roles: Face plays both the Captain and the Apprentice, Dol both the sister of a lord and the Faerie Queen. In Volpone Mosca admires his own ability to

rise,
And stoope (almost together) like an arrow;
Shoot through the aire, as nimbly as a starre,
Turne short, as doth a swallow; and be here,
And there, and here, and yonder, all at once.

Thomas Greene [in "Ben Jonson and the Centered Self," Studies in English Literature, Vol. 10, 1970] cites this passage to support his argument that "Volpone asks us to consider the infinite, exhilarating, and vicious freedom to alter the self." But mobility is not the same as self-alteration, and Mosca is really applauding here not his aptitude for metamorphosis but his ability to occupy more than one space at one time—to be "here, / And there, and here, and yonder, all at once"—and to create thereby a dizzying illusion of plurality. Epicure Mammon, more indolent than Mosca, plans to achieve the same effect with mirrors:

glasses
Cut in more subtill angles, to disperse,
And multiply the figures, as I walke
Naked between my succubae.

The various forms of sexual fetishism in which Jonson's characters indulge are yet another way of creating spurious abundance; when Sir Voluptuous Beast, or Volpone, or Nick Stuff dress their wives or mistresses in various exotic attires they do so in order to fantasize multiple partners where there is actually only one.

The fact that things in Jonsonian comedy are not created but merely transferred also affects the imaginative lives of the characters in more subtle ways. When Mosca must persuade Corvino to prostitute Celia to Volpone, he invents a story about how Volpone has been temporarily revived by the application of the mountebank's medication. He elaborates the lie by describing the difference of opinion among Volpone's doctors about how the treatment ought to proceed:

one would have a cataplasme of spices,
Another, a flayd ape clapt to his brest,
A third would ha' it a dogge, a fourth an oyle
With wild cats skinnes.

These treatments, according to orthodox Renaissance medical doctrine, work by soaking the infection out of the patient, removing it from the sufferer to the less valuable ancillary object—a process that renders especially horrible Corvino's willingness to donate his wife, "lustie, and full of juice," to the enterprise of reinvigorating Volpone. Mosca's delight in exposing the depths of Corvino's awfulness is obvious here and elsewhere, but it is less clear whether Mosca realizes that his fiction represents a disguised version of his own parasitic ambition to transfer Volpone's special attributes—wealth and social status—from their original source to a disgusting but supposedly beneficial attachment.

Even the characters' fantasies of plenitude founder on their unshakable awareness of actual scarcity. Jonson's comic voluptuaries do not share the complacency of their counterparts in Spenser and Milton—characters like Comus, who represents the world as generously, even over-generously supplied with the stuff of hedonistic consumption:

Wherefore did nature powr her bounties forth
With such a full and unwithdrawing hand,
Covering the earth with odours, fruits, and flocks,
Thronging the seas with spawn innumerable,
But all to please, and sate the curious taste?

In Milton's masque, the Lady calls attention to the error in Comus's logic, the fact that apparent excess is achieved only by the deprivation of others. Volpone or Sir Epicure Mammon need no such interlocutor: they tend themselves to be perfectly explicit about how things were obtained and from where they were derived. Volpone tries to dazzle Celia with

A diamant, would have bought LOLLIA PAULINA,
When she came in, like star-light, hid with jewels
That were the spoiles of provinces.

He cannot evoke the gorgeousness of the imperial concubine without recalling at the same time the vast spaces emptied by Rome's colonial predations. In The Alchemist, Epicure Mammon's gustatory peroration reaches a climax as he imagines himself dining upon the "swelling unctuous paps / Of a fat pregnant sow, newly cut off." While it is usual to eat a piece of an animal, and not the whole thing, here this humdrum fact is made to seem unusually disturbing. Sir Epicure is typical of Jonson's characters in connecting consumption with despoliation, and with the competitive displacement of other claimants, the fetal piglets, for the same resource. Given what we already know about his temperament and preferences, his vivid evocation of the freshly mutilated animal seems positively matricidal.

At first glance it seems hardly in the interests of Volpone or Sir Epicure to dwell upon the conditions in which abundance is achieved. Why do they insist, then, upon the ruin they leave in their wake? Perhaps because in a world in which nothing is created and everything is endlessly recycled, the only definitive means of self-assertion is a form of consumption that destroys the article. Volpone offers Celia gems not to display but to eat, pearls not to wear but to "dissolve, and drink": "and, could we get the phoenix, / (Though nature lost her kind) shee were our dish." The phoenix here represents the ultimate of desirable objects as the Jonsonian comic character conceives them. Because it is unproliferating it must be endlessly recycled, and though it cannot increase it is liable, at least in Volpone's mind, to destruction. Volpone does not deny scarcity, as Milton's Comus does, because by acknowledging that fact he has discovered a perverse compensatory pleasure.

In the masques and in many of the celebratory poems, the basic laws of the Jonsonian satiric economy seem to have been abrogated. "To Penshurst" celebrates a miraculous agricultural abundance, a landscape teeming with spontaneously generated edibles. "Earth unplough'd shall yeeld her crop, / Pure honey from the oake shall drop, / The fountaine shall runne milke," promises Pallas in The Golden Age Restored. In News From the New World the oft-ridiculed principle of perpetual motion once again makes its appearance, but this time it is invoked in earnest as an attribute of sovereign power.

For he
That did this motion give,
And made it so long live,

Could likewise give it perpetuitie.

What has happened? How can the same person subscribe both to the view that seems to be Jonson's in the comedies and to the view that seems to be Jonson's in the masques and the poems of praise? The difficulty of answering this question is suggested by the history of Jonson criticism, which has tended to segregate itself rigorously by genre.

Perhaps it is possible, however, to see Jonson's work in different genres as a series of strategies for representing possible relationships between desire and its objects, between demand and supply. Desire in the comedies is untrammeled but resources are scarce. Individuals struggle to accumulate all they can, but personal gratification proves incompatible with social justice in their world; even the most fortunate find that their desires outrun the available satisfactions. A better way of coping with scarcity, then, seems to be to restrain desire, to learn to be content with a little. This might be called a philosophical solution rather than an economic one, since it aims to change not the facts of the external world but the orientation of the perceiving subject. Its profound appeal to Jonson is evident in his poetry of resolution and self-denial, and in the rhetoric of his more admirable dramatic characters. Unfortunately it is a difficult course, requiring the virtual eschewal of sensual gratification. The other way to avoid an unpleasant discrepancy between demand and supply is, of course, to live in a world having the abundance to produce satiety.

The masques and many of the celebratory poems portray just such a world. But more than mere land-of-Cockaigne wishfulness informs these representations. In the idealizing genres Jonson draws upon a conceptual scheme available to him both in classical and in Christian political theory, which designates certain relationships and certain goods as beyond the economic order, exempt from the calculus of gain and loss. Such relationships involve not transactions but the cooperative realization of shared objectives, usually in a framework that recognizes a fundamental human affinity. A variety of relationships can be so described: for Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca the privileged relationship is friendship; in Plutarch it is marital love; in Augustine it is the relationship among faithful Christians.

The kinds of goods realized in such relationships—love, virtue, skill, knowledge, peace of mind—are neither limited in quantity nor subject to private appropriation. In The City of God Augustine writes:

The possession of goodness is by no means diminished if it becomes or remains a shared possession. On the contrary, the more harmonious and charitable are those who share it, the more the possession of goodness is increased. Thus he does not possess goodness who refuses to possess it in common; and the more he shares it, the more he acquires himself.

In such circumstances the competitiveness that pervades social relations in Jonsonian comedy becomes pointless, or even self-defeating. If one person becomes virtuous, knowledgeable, skillful, or loving, another person is not thereby forced to relinquish those traits. Thus Jonson distinguishes true love from the "frequent tumults, horrors, and unrests" of "blind Desire":

These chains and knots are not experienced as painful or coercive; the love is uncompetitive, nonoppositional, the combination of soft and sweet with soft and sweet.

In the masques and in many of the poems Jonson represents these noncompetitive relations and goods as socially fundamental. He celebrates union, indivisibility, generosity, harmony—between kings and subjects, between England and Scotland, between bride and groom, between parents and children, between guest and host, between masquer and spectator, and even, early in his career, between poet and stage designer. He "willingly acknowledges" Inigo Jones's contribution, he writes in The Masque of Queenes, "since it is a vertue, planted in good natures, that what respects they wish to obtayne fruictfully from others, they will give ingenuously themselves."

Some forms of human excellence, however, seem competitive in their very essence. A certain kind of martial honor can be won from or lost to another, as Shakespeare's Hal claims in Henry IV, Part 1:

Percy is but my factor, good my lord,
To engross up glorious deeds on my behalf;
And I will call him to such strict account
That he shall render every glory up.

When Jonson treats such virtues in the masques, he consistently minimizes or dissolves the element of rivalry. A Challenge at Tilt, for instance, is structured as a chivalric contest. The masque begins with "two Cupids striving the day after the marriage." It emerges that one attends the groom and one attends the bride; each insists that the other is an imposter. To settle their dispute, they produce ten champions on either side who enter the lists and joust on the behalf of each. Eventually, however, Hymen appears to inform the rival Cupids that "this is neither contention for you, nor time, fit to contend." The argument turns out to have been misconceived: "you are both true Cupids." Moreover, not only is each Cupid legitimate, but they are necessary to one another's well-being: "your natures are, that either of you, looking upon the other, thrive, and by your mutuall respects and interchanges of ardor, flourish and prosper." In A Challenge at Tilt Jonson acknowledges the traditional knightly values of courage, strength, and martial skill, but he redefines them in terms of the cooperative virtues of marital harmony.

The communal emphasis of Jonson's "ideal economy" does not imply that all kinds of goods need be possessed in common. A confrontation in Poetaster clarifies Jonson's logic. The inferior Crispinus, hoping to be accepted into Maecenas's circle of poets, tries to ingratiate himself with Horace. Knowing no better, he assumes that Horace subscribes to the comic strategy of competition, appropriation, and displacement: "Let me not live, but I thinke thou and I (in a small time) should lift them all out of favour, both Virgil, Varius, and the best of them; and enjoy him wholy to our selves." The shocked Horace responds heatedly:

Sir, your silkenesse
Cleerely mistakes MECOENAS, and his house;
To thinke, there breathes a spirit beneath his roofe,
Subject unto those poore affections
Of under-mining envie, and detraction,
Moodes, onely proper to base groveling minds:
That place is not in Rome, I dare affirme,
More pure, or free, from such low common evils.
There's no man greev'd, that this is thought more rich,
Or this more learned; each man hath his place,
And to his merit, his reward of grace:
Which with a mutuall love they all embrace.

This conception of distributive justice is as old as Aristotle's Politics. Horace does not deny that some are thought more rich, some more learned; he simply denies that the perception of inequality interferes with mutual love. Indeed, in the traditional view a legitimate hierarchy of entitlements is not only an acceptable but virtually an essential feature of peaceful relations. For in that case "each man hath his place," whereas when all think themselves equal, or believe themselves to be denied equality by merely contingent factors, competition inevitably breaks out—between Mosca and Volpone, among the Collegiate Ladies in Epicoene, between Subtle and Face in The Alchemist.

The kinds of goods that are realized in the ideal sociopolitical realm ordinarily are immaterial ones. Thus in the tradition Jonson inherits, the ideal economy of "mutuall love" is always distinguished sharply from the economy of materialist expediency. Seneca writes:

The foolish avarice of mortals distinguishes between possession and ownership, and does not believe anything its own which is held in common. But the philosopher judges nothing more fully his own than that which he shares with the human race…. When rations are distributed among a group of people, each one takes away only so much as is allotted to him…. These goods, by contrast, are indivisible … and they belong as much to everyone as they do to each person.

Similarly in Cicero's De Amicitia, Laelius deplores those who

value their friends as they do cattle or sheep, preferring those from whom they expect to profit most. Therefore are they cut off from the most beautiful and most natural friendship, which is desirable in and for itself.

In both passages the nature of the ideal is rendered vividly apparent by its contrast with the quantifiable and limited material order, the world of money, grain, and cattle. Likewise Jonson repeatedly makes a distinction between the "sensual" people who evaluate everything in terms of the limited, allocatable goods of the material world, and the elite—philosophers, artists, scholars—who seem able to transcend and despise that order. He contrasts the "carcase" or "body" of the masque with its "spirit" or "soul" or "inward parts," reminding us that the former is traditionally torn apart by members of the audience as soon as the revels have ended. Like all "bodies" it can be dismantled, appropriated, redistributed, destroyed. But the latter is exempt by nature from depredation and change.

The consequence of this rhetorical strategy is that relations based upon material considerations must invariably figure as inferior to, and at best secondary to, at worst incompatible with, the cultivation of virtue.

Sonne, and my Friend, I had not call'd you so
To mee; or beene the same to you; if show,
Profit, or Chance had made us.

Jonson's traditional convictions on the difference between the material and the ideal economy divide him from those moral philosophers later in the century and in the Enlightenment who try to found an ethics and a politics upon the material self-interest of the individual. He sees clearly enough the connection between a social order that emphasizes material accumulation and such personal characteristics as egoism and acquisitiveness, but he has no way of representing such characteristics as sources of the virtues. In his distaste for a social system organized around competitive market forces, Jonson seems to resemble more recent critics of capitalism, but his antiacquisitive attitude has different motives and different consequences. It is preliberal rather than postliberal. For Jonson, virtue requires the minimizing or the repudiation of material motives and a material basis.

The relationship between the material economy and the ideal economy is not, however, merely a simple one of contrast. In a characteristic passage in De Amicitia, Cicero claims that friendship is not dependent upon need:

It is indeed excessively sparing and meager to call friendship to a strict accounting, in order that debts might be balanced with receipts. It seems to me that true friendship is richer and more abundant. It does not watch stingily, anxious not to give more than it takes; nor does it worry that something might be wasted or spilled on the ground, or that more than the exact amount might be poured into the friendship.

Cicero maintains that friendship ignores gain and loss, but his language, far from eschewing materiality, explicitly insists upon the analogy between friendly generosity and material abundance. The relationships that are supposed to transcend economic considerations altogether, in other words, often seem to transcend merely the unpleasantness of scarcity. Jonson plays with this ambiguity in one of the poems to Celia in The Forrest. He invites his beloved to kiss him

Till you equall with the store,
All the grasse that Rumney yeelds,
Or the sands in Chelsey fields,
Or the drops in silver Thames,
Or the starres, that guild his streames…
That the curious may not know
How to tell 'hem, as they flow,
And the envious, when they find
What their number is, be pin'd.
("To the Same")

The mathematics of Celia's kisses are obscure. They vex the curious because they flow so fast that they cannot be distinguished, but they vex the envious because they are after all countable. They are both numberless and numbered.

In the poem to Celia, the difference between the infinite-in-principle and the infinite-practically-speaking seems inconsequential. But the politics of this difference can become significant. The moral value attaching to that which transcends material necessity is different from the moral value attaching merely to large material possessions. In "To Penshurst" the problem is vividly apparent. Jonson praises Sidney for hospitality and generosity, virtues he explicitly contrasts with competitive display and selfish consumption or "envious show." But he finds it difficult to specify the relation between the ideal and the material economy in the pastoral society he describes. On the one hand he asserts their radical incommensurability, and on the other hand he is unable to sustain a sense of the two kinds of reality as truly independent. When the tenants come to the great house with cakes and fruits, for instance, Jonson claims the gifts are superfluous.

"Free" here, as often in Jonson, is a highly charged word. It asserts that at Penshurst, transfers of goods neither impoverish the giver nor enrich the recipient. They are the sign and not the substance of the social bond; the loving relation of tenant and landlord seems liberated from the constraints of material necessity. But "free" also means "profuse." The tenants can bring gifts to the lord because they can easily spare them, the lord does not need them because he is already plentifully supplied, and the guest can eat as much as he likes because there is more than enough to go around.

Once again the language of the nonmaterial ideal collapses into the language of material abundance. Though Jonson wants to inscribe Robert Sidney's hospitality within the ideal economy, that hospitality takes an emphatically material form:

If generosity depends upon an agricultural surplus, then virtue seems unavoidably contingent upon a material order inferior by definition. Unless, that is, the causal relationship is reversed, and the wealth is a consequence of excellence, and not vice versa: the Sidneys, in other words, are rich because they are hospitable, rather than hospitable because they are rich. Jonson's most effusive flattery of his patrons often takes this form. In the dedicatory epistle to The Masque of Queenes, for instance, he writes to Prince Henry:

whether it be that a divine soule, being to come into a body, first chooseth a Palace fit for it selfe; or, being come, doth make it so; or that Nature be ambitious to have her worke aequall, I know not: But … both your virtue, and your forme did deserve your fortune. The one claym'd, that you should be borne a Prince; the other makes that you do become it.

This strategy solves Jonson's metaphysical problem, but at the cost of a grave implausibility. His own experience as an obese, pockmarked, impoverished, but immensely gifted artist, makes this position difficult for him to occupy long.

In the masques, the allegorical character of the representation provides another way of conceiving of the relationship between the ideal and the material economy.

The Machine of the Spectacle … was a MIKROKOSMOS, or Globe, fill'd with Countreys, and those gilded; where the Sea was expresst, heightened with silver waves. This stood, or rather hung (for no Axell was seene to supporte it) and turning softly, discovered the first Masque…. To which, the lights were so placed, as no one was seene; but seemed, as if onely Reason, with the splendor of her crowne, illumin'd the whole Grot.

The gorgeous gold-and-silver globe stands without an axle, turns without a mover, is lit not by ordinary lights but by "Reason, with the splendor of her crowne." This mysteriousness is a clue to the ideal nature of the representation—it expresses a truth beyond facts of the material world. For the "sense" or physical part of the masque, Jonson maintains, "doth, or should alwayes lay hold on more remov'd mysteries." Like the flattery in "To Penshurst" or in the prefatory epistle to Prince Henry, allegory makes the material a consequence of the ideal, rather than the other way around.

Yet even this solution to the dilemma fails to prove entirely satisfactory. In Jonson's description, the miraculousness of the represented plentitude is, of course, illusory. It seems "as if onely reason, with the splendor of her crowne, illumin'd the whole Grot," but what is actually being deployed here are the engineering skills of Inigo Jones, master-carpenter. If this skill is itself a kind of reason—a point I shall take up in the next section—it is certainly not of a form that transcends the material.

So Jonson's sense of the two economies and their relation to one another is never entirely settled. Materiality as he defines it is so bleak and limited that it requires supplementation: he must have recourse to another set of facts in order to account for the full range of human experience. But his evocations of ideal community turn out to be susceptible to reductive analysis. In a well-known analysis in The Country and The City, Raymond Williams accomplishes this kind of reduction for "To Penshurst," when he points out that Jonson suppresses the facts of labor on the estate, massively misrepresenting the nature of the rural economy. Jonson performs a similar demystification himself, when he praises Sir Robert Wroth for his domestic restraint:

Here the court world becomes subject to precisely those laws from which Jonson exempts it in the masques. In order to execute this act of satiric subversion, however, Jonson must possess an alternative, a new locus of ideal social order—in "To Sir Robert Wroth," the pastoral world of "un-bought provision." Of course the pastoral world itself can be seen in terms of the satiric economy, too, but this emphatically is not in Jonson's interest at the moment.

The Jonsonian satiric vision depends upon the availability of an alternative economy, an economy that does not redeem material relations, but transcends them. The transcendent gesture in Jonson, however, tends to be actually or potentially compromised, and its insecurity has led some perceptive readers to minimize its seriousness or even to overlook it entirely. Recent work on Ben Jonson has tended to concentrate upon his materialism, his emphasis upon the body in the plays and his almost corporeal presence in the poems. But Jonsonian idealism is, I think, not so much halfhearted as beseiged, threatened not only by the instability of the tradition as he inherits it, but by the suddenly heightened interest in material relations characteristic of the early modern culture he inhabits. It is not surprising that the political thinkers of the next few generations, in response to the massive social changes to which Jonson bears witness in his drama and poetry, should jettison the theoretical principles to which he still unsteadily adheres.

Throughout his career, Jonson strives vigorously to associate himself and his poetic vocation with the kind of social relationships that he portrays in the poems of praise and in the masques, and to ally the poet with the virtues that transcend the material economic order. But although many of his contemporaries conceive of rhetorical copia as in principle inexhaustible, Jonson rarely represents the poetic gift in terms of the abundance that characterizes his ideal economies. The poet-character Asper, welcoming "attentive auditors" in Every Man Out Of His Humour, describes one version of Jonsonian inventio:

For these, Ile prodigally spend my selfe,
And speake away my spirit into ayre;
For these, Ile melt my braine into invention,
Coine new conceits.

The Jonsonian poet is a self-consuming artificer. Thus the prudent artist provisions himself thoroughly beforehand, for as Jonson writes in Discoveries, "exactnesse of Studie, and multiplicity of reading … maketh a full man." The achievement of "fullness" not only guarantees the quality of the poetic product, but constitutes a kind of reinforcement for a "selfe" or "spirit" imagined as limited in quantity, dissolved and depleted by the act of creation.

Jonson's anxieties about the relative scarcity and non-renewability of creative substance apply not just to himself, but to the entire artistic community. In Epigrammes 79, Jonson explains that Sidney was unable to beget a son because he expended the available resources in other endeavors:

before,
Or then, or since, about our Muses springs,
Came not that soule exhausted so their store.

In Epigrammes 23, "To John Donne," Phoebus and the Muses concentrate so much of their attention upon Donne that Jonson, both celebrant and rival, is left stammering and inarticulate, forced to end his poem because he is unable to find the proper words for it. In "To Shakespeare," Chaucer, Spenser, and Beaumont already crowd the available space for poets in West-minster Abbey. Here Jonson seems to invoke scarcity and competitiveness only to deny their relevance; for Shakespeare, he declares, is not the rival of these "great, but disproportion'd, muses." But actually the struggle has merely been removed to another arena. Jonson imagines the British champion confronting and overcoming the classical dramatists.

The latter-born son acquires his place in the literary canon by displacing the first-born. "He invades Authours like a Monarch," writes Dryden of Jonson, "and what would be theft in other Poets, is onely victory in him." By asserting his own literary immortality, he necessarily excludes other possible claimants.

The poet as Jonson conceives him, then, seems linked more closely to the satiric than to the ideal economy. The creative faculty behaves like a material entity: it can be appropriated, reallocated, exhausted, competed for, stolen. The possibility of plagiarism distresses Jonson, almost alone among his contemporaries; he reviles Play-wright and Proule the Plagiary in the Epigrammes, and writes scenes of public humiliation for literary thieves into Every Man In His Humour, Cynthia's Revels, Poetaster, and Epicoene. Like the alchemists and the Bartholomew-birds of Jonsonian comedy, the plagiarist appropriates from others what he is unable to generate himself. But so, necessarily, does the "true" Jonsonian poet fashion what he needs from what he finds at hand, drawing upon his mind's carefully stocked treasury, converting "the substance, or Riches, of another Poet, to his own use." And he possesses, moreover, a lively concern for the material form in which the artistic results are presented to readers, supervising the printing and publication of his collected work in a large volume the sheer expensiveness of which testifies to the kind of poetic significance Jonson wishes to claim for himself.

Needless to say Jonson does not treat his own poetic gift as the stuff of satire. How does he exempt the true artist from the reductive materialism of the comedies? Both the economy of Jonsonian comedy, characterized by a relentless competition for a fixed number of resources, and the economy of the masque, characterized by uncompetitive abundance, are economies of consumption rather than production. Jonsonian poetic theory brings back the term missing both from the otiose worlds represented in the masques and the country house poem, and from the sterile world of the satiric genres. The Greek word poesis, Jonson emphasizes, means "production" or "making." "A Poeme," he writes in Discoveries, "is the work of the poet: the end, and fruit, of his labour and studye." That favorite Jonsonian word work refers to both process and product—a conceptual distinction he is always eager to elide. In the text of Hymenaei, he praises the set designed by his collaborator, Inigo Jones:

that which … was most taking in the Spectacle, was the sphere of fire … imitated with such art and industrie, as the spectators might descerne the Motion (all the time the Shewes lasted) without any Moover.

Jonson displaces our amazement from the mysterious self-sufficiency of the sphere to its actual dependence upon "art and industrie": to the very "Moover" its cunning construction seems to allow it to do without.

Thus reproductive sexuality, which Jonson is almost alone among dramatists in ignoring as a comic motif, figures largely in his metaphors of poetic production. In the Epigrammes poems are children, children poems. In Every Man Out Of His Humour, Asper describes himself as inseminated by appreciative spectators, who

cherish my free labours, love my lines,
And with the fervour of their shining grace,
Make my braine fruitfull to bring forth more objects,
Worthy their serious, and intentive eyes.
[Induction, ll.135-38]

It is significant that Jonson tends to imagine the artist's creative role not as male but as female. In the defense of his satiric methods and motives appended to Poetaster, he refuses to apologize for his "long-watched labors," the plays he brings forth once a year:

Things, that were borne, when none but the still night
And his dumbe candle saw his pinching throes.

These poetic pregnancies differ significantly from the blissful unions celebrated in the marriage masques, from the painlessly knotted minds of "An Epode," from the pleasurable dalliance with Celia: not the ecstasies of sexual consummation but the difficulties of childbirth provide his metaphors for the poetic process. Thus Jonson's sexual metaphors for poetic production coexist with metaphors derived from other forms of toil: coining, ironworking, cloth production, agriculture, housebuilding, cookery.

No matter how slow the style be at first, so it be labour'd, and accurate: seeke the best, and be not glad of forward conceipts, or first words, that offer themselves to us … the safest is to returne to our Judgement, and handle over againe those things, the easinesse of which might make them justly suspected.

We seem a long way from the ethic of "To Penshurst," and its happy acceptance of things that volunteer themselves to be consumed.

Jonson's audiences in his own time and in ours have often wished him more spontaneous, less costive. But in Jonson's conceptual scheme, the pain and difficulty that attend creation are the signs of its genuineness. The laboriousness of artistic production seems to allow him to exempt himself both from the implausibilities of his ideal worlds, and from the reductiveness of his satiric ones.