the new inn and the problem of jonson's late style

ANNE BARTON

ONSON’S late plays have never been loved. But The N e w Inn has endured over the centuries a battering which seems to set it apart from all the others. Gifford’s supposition that its original

audience walked out on it, that the comedy was never heard through to the end, has been demonstrated to be false. I t is clear, nonetheless, that the play was a crushing failure when it was first performed by the King’s Men at Blackfriars in 1629. Moreover, i t was never seen at court, although Jonson had intended that it should be and had even prepared a special epilogue for the occasion. In the past, Jonson had often reacted with violence to what seemed to him the incomprehensible refusal of the public to appreciate particular plays. Poetaster, Sejuncrs, and Catiline all elicited angry protests from an author convinced that he had thrown pearls before swine, that the ignorant censure of the multitude had been allowed to overbear the praise of the judicious few. There were reasons, however, why the failure of The N e w Inn should hit him harder and call forth a more intemperate reaction than any of those previous disappoint- ments. Jonson in 1629 was a man both seriously ill and down on his luck, partially paralyzed as the result of a stroke, solitary, and poor. The Blackfriars epilogue confesses frankly that “the maker is sick, and sad.’’ Within the play itself, Love11 redefines courage in ways that obviously bear upon Jonson’s own position at the time:

The things true valour is exercis’d about, Are poverty, restraint, captivity, Banishment, losse of children, long disease: The least is death. Here valour is beheld, Properly seene; about these it is present:

396 English Literary Renaissance Not trivial1 things, which but require our confidence. (IV. iv. 105-10)1

“Trivial1 thngs,” in the context of Lovell’s speech as a whole, are affairs of honor, duellos, taking exception to a personal slight. The younger Jonson had participated eagerly in more than his share of such engage- ments. Now, bed-ridden and aging, the man who once ran Gabriel Spencer through in revenge for some nameless insult had been forced to chasten and redefine his notion of the heroic.

It was characteristic of Jonson, however, that, whatever fortitude he might be able to summon up in order to endure the simultaneous on- slaught of poverty, restraint, loss of children, and long disease, the one thing he could not bring himself to accept was artistic failure. The very epilogue which admits that the poet is now sick and sad also affirms somewhat truculently that, despite these handicaps, there is absolutely nothing wrong with his mind or his creative powers. When The New Inn was attacked and derided, he rose to its defense with such fury and violence that even Carew, that devoted son of Ben, was moved to remon- strate with his adopted father. Jonson published The New Inn in 1631 with a bitter title-page proclaiming it to be a comedy “never acted, but most negligently play’d, by some, the Kings Servants. And more squeamishly beheld and censured by others, the Kings Subjects.” He also lashed out in another “Ode to himselfe,” a poem even more violent than the one he had composed after the attack upon Poetaster in 1601. Loftily, he gave the offending spectators leave to

Run on, and rage, sweat, censure, and condemn: They were not made for thee, lesse, thou for them

Say, that thou pour’st them wheat, And they will acornes eat:

Twere simple fury, still, thy selfe to waste

To offer them a surfet of pure bread, On such as have no taste!

Whose appetites are dead! (11. 9-16)

Ironically, Lovell’s definition of what true valor ignores or brushes aside encompassed what was to be Jonson’s own case after the derisive reception of The New Inn. According to Lovell, the truly valiant man associates that quality with others:

The waiting maids, 1 . Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Jonson are taken from Bmjonson, ed. C. H.

Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1925-52). I have altered i/j and u/v spelling forms to accord with modern practice. Quotations from Shakespeare are from the Riverside edition, ed. G. Blakemore Evans pf a/. (Boston, 1974).

Anne Barton Or the concomitants of it, are his patience, His magnanimity, his confidence, His constancy, security, and quiet; He can assure himselfe against all rumour! Despaires of nothing! laughs at contumelies! As knowing himselfe advanced in a height Where injury cannot reach him, nor aspersion Touch him with soyle! (IV. iv. 130-38)

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Modern critics anxious to rescue The New Inn as parody, a play sup- posedly mocking the aristocratic activities upstairs as well as the below- stairs turbulence of “The Light Heart,” have pointed out that Lovell is incapable of living up to his own stoic or Platonic recommendations.2 This agonized, moody, and passionate man is demonstrably not the un- perturbed and godlike creature celebrated in his own speech on valor. Nor, as Lady Frampull’s despairing suitor, is he willing to content himself with a purely “spiritual1 coupling of two soules” (111. ii. lOS), although he defines it as the most excellent kind of love. At the end of the comedy, Lovell takes his lady off to bed, and on a hand-fast, not a re- ligious sanction, with as much alacrity-if with considerably more dignity-as Beaufort takes Laetitia.

There is certainly a discrepancy between Lovell’s ideal and his practice, but it is scarcely surprising, let alone deflationary in effect. Shake- speare’s Portia, in The Merchant of Venice, was acutely aware of the difference between knowing what it is best to do and doing it, of that gap between idea and realization which reduces potential churches to chapels and palaces to huts. I t is a rare divine indeed who can follow his own instructions. Portia herself can speak of the quality of mercy like an angel, and then hunt Shylock pitilessly into the earth, in apparent forgetfulness of her own brief. Lovell’s two speeches in the court of love are deliberately heightened and hyperbolic: formal counsels of perfection offered as part of a game turned unexpectedly serious. Radiant and moving though they are, they represent an ideal that no one in the play can possibly realize, although some characters approximate it more nearly than others.

2. The widespread acceptance of an ironic reading of TheNew Inn appears to derive from E. B. Partridge’s chapter in 7% Broken Compass (New York, 1958). Partridge’s interpretation has been greatly extended by Larry Champion in Ben jonson’s ‘Dotages’: A Rmnsidrration ofthe Late Plays (Lexington, Ky., 1967); in C . G. Thayer’s Benjonson. Studies in the Plays (Norman, Okla., 1 W ) ; in Robert E. Knoll’s Benjonson’s Ploys: An Introduction (Lincoln, Neb., 1964); and in the article “A Guide to The New Inn” by Douglas Duncan, Essays in Criticism, X X (1970), 311-26. The ap- proach seems to have been initiated by Rayburn S. Moore, “Some Notes on the ‘Courtly Love’ System in Jonson’s The New Inn,” Essays in Honor of W. C. Curry (Nashville, 1954), pp. 13342.

398 English Literary Renaissance In the last book of I l Cortegiuno, and in his own Asolani, Pietro Bembo

had gone much further than Lovell in his depreciation of physical love. Where Lovell is fundamentally concerned to subordinate sense to spirit in love relations, Bembo urged a total and uncompromising trans- cendence of the body upon all but the very young. They are excused only because, as he feels, they cannot control their passions. The mature lover can, and should. Yet, historically, Bembo was a prelate involved with one long-term mistress, by whom he had children, and with several other, more ephemeral ladies. Even so Ben Jonson, the man who wrote Lovell’s speech on valor, found that when The New Inn was mocked by its audience, its Senecan ideal of perfect composure beneath Fortune’s blows was beyond his capabilities. Obviously, he did not intend this to happen. It was an accident, and one he could well have done without. I t seems curiously appropriate, nonetheless, given the self-consciousness of The New Inn, the games it plays with the relationship between real life and the theatre, that Jonson, like his own hero, should find himself help- lessly measuring the gap between life as it should be lived, and as one’s own unruly feelings and reactions dictate. The truth of the play extends beyond its apparent artistic limits.

I

The New Inn is not set in London, nor indeed in any city. It takes place in the hostelry of “The Light Heart” at Barnet, a market town among the fields on the great North Road about eleven miles from London. If, as I believe, The Tale ofa Tub is not an early play hastily revised in 1633 to accommodate a satire on Inigo Jones, but a piece of nostalgic and deliberate Elizabethanism entirely characteristic of Jonson’s last years, then the country-town setting of The New Inn some four years earlier represents an innovation in his dramatic work. A state of mind as well as a physical place, The Light Heart” sometimes trespasses upon the sym- bolic territory of Spenser’s House of Alma. Certainly it possesses a spiritual topography of its own, one which associates different characters with various regions of the house, according to their positions on a ladder of attitudes and values reminiscent of the one Lyly had established years before in Endimion. Lyly’s scale ran from the spiritual love of Endimion and Cynthia at the top, through the rational but earthly attachment of Eumenides to Semele, to the purely physical bond uniting Tellus and Corsites, to end in the parodic wooing of the grotesque Dipsas by Sir Tophas. The New Inn shadows Lyly in the carefully graded

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relationships of Lovell and Lady Frampull, Latimer and Pru, Laetitia and Beaufort, while presenting its own version of the Dipsas/Geron/Tophas entanglement by way of the Host’s final recognition of the old Irish charwoman in the inn as the real Lady Frampull, his lost wife. As with the two quotations from Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (11. v. 82 and 11. vi. 4), this recollection of an early Elizabethan play seems to me entirely conscious on Jonson’s part: further evidence for his virtual obsession at this point with a dramatic past he had once scorned but with which, at the end of his life, he finally came to terms.

Like the Smithfield of Bartholornew Fair, although in very different ways, the inn at Barnet lays claim to inclusiveness. It provides, as the Host himself points out (I. iii. 126-37), a metaphor for the world, unlike Lovewit’s house in The Alchemist or the troubled abode of Morose. Even more important and unexpected, it functions in some of the ways we normally think of as Shakespearean. The hostelry of “The Light Heart” is like Arden, Illyria, or the wood near Athens in that it is a place to which people come-most of them, by implication, from the city-and in which they can be transformed. I t is an environment heightened and extraordinary, where characters discover, some of them very belatedly, who they really are. These discoveries are not, as they were with Wasp, Overdo, or Zeal of the Land Busy, merely destructive, the shattering of a pretense. In t h s play, even more strikingly than in The Devil is an A s s and T h e Staple of N e w s which precede it, Jonson admitted the possibility that people may actually learn from experience, that they can meta- morphose themselves and change. They do so here not through the specious means of linguistic alchemy, as practised by Face and Subtle, but fundamentally and-in both senses of the phrase-for good. This premise, absolutely central to Shakespearean comedy, Jonson had re- sisted for most of his dramatic career. But it lies at the very heart of The N e w Inn.

Characters capable of growth and change cannot be limited by fixed and immutable “speaking” names. In The N e w Inn, Jonson jettisoned another long-standing artistic habit. He replaced the old Aristotelian essential names associated with his earlier comedies, and still present with a vengeance in T h e Staple of News , by a nomenclature more mixed, flexible, and ambiguous. O r at least he did this with the serious, above- stairs characters of the comedy. In the last scene of Act I, the Host of “The Light Heart” asks Lovell a direct and important question: “But is your name Love-ill, Sir, or Love-well? / I would know that.” And Lovell

400 English Literary Renaissance replies gloomily, “ I doe not know’t my selfe, / Whether it is”(ll.95-97). Only the action of the comedy can resolve the question, affirming in the end the positive possibility, Love-well. A similar ambiguity surrounds Lady Frampull, the woman Love11 adores. The word fiampull itself was uncommon-although it also appears, significantly, in T h e Tale of a Tub (11. iv. 18)-and possessed the pejorative meaning of peevish or fret- ful. But it could also signify hkh-spirited. In the course of the comedy, Lady Frampull comes to embody the attractive as opposed to the doubtful conno ta tion.3

Beaufort and Latimer, Lovell’s rivals for the hand of Lady Frampull, have neutral Shakespearean names, names suggesting their aristocratic status, but nothing about the individuals they really are. The christening of Laetitia and Pru, the women Beaufort and Latimer even- tually marry, is more complex. In The Masque of Beauty, the second of the great court entertainments which Jonson and Inigo Jones devised for King James, Laetitia was one of the figures who adorned the Throne of Beauty itself: “In a vesture of divers colors, and all sorts of flowers embroidered theron. . . . A garland of flowers in her hand; her eyes turning up and smiling; her hair flowing, and stuck with flowers.”4 As D. J. Gordon has pointed out, Laetitia was the third of the three Graces.5 She was identical with Euphrosyne, the “heart-easing Mirth” of Mil- ton’s L’AIfegro. This is Laetitia’s role in The N e w inrr as well, or at least it ought to be. The name acquires other dimensions once it is used natu- ralistically in a play, as opposed to the controlled and emblematic world of the masque. By Beaufort, that light young lord whose love is an- chored completely in the senses, the name Laetitia is customarily abbreviated to “Lettice.” He uses this familiar Elizabethan diminutive in ways that make it clear how much he regards the girl as part ofovid’s banquet of sense: something to be physically savored and devoured: “Let me have still such Letrtice for my lips” (11. vi. 19); “I have beene

3. The Host, Lord Frampull, is said to have married “Sylly’s daughter of the South” (Argu- ment, 1.3, and I. v. 60). The OED points out that from c. 1550 to c . 1675 silly was very exten- sively used in senses 1-3, and in a number of examples, it Is difficult to decide which shade of meaning was intended by the writer.” The OED’s 1-3 does not include the ironist’s reading of “foolish” or “ridiculous,” although it does (presumably as Jonson wished) permit the mind to weigh the possibilities of defenselessness, innocence, unsophistication, and the pitiable against each other, and to discourage the idea that Lord Frampull’s wife has behaved in a manner that is merely absurd.

4. Renjonson: The Complete Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel (New Haven, 1%9), p, 68. 5. 0. J. Gordon, “The Imagery of Ben Jonson’s ?‘he Masque of Rlacknesse and The Masque of

Beautie, ”]oumul of the h’arbuy and Courtauld Institutes, Vl (1943), 134.

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bold with a sallad, after supper, / 0’ your owne lettice, here” (V. iv. 3-4); “YOU sowre the sweetest lettice / Was ever tasted”(V. v. 113-14). Beaufort’s reduction of a divine figure to a woman who threatens to become, like Littlewit’s Win in Bartholomew Fair, mere matter for ingestion (I. ii. 14-16), is disturbing, but it is only one of the complica- tions surrounding this name.

Not only Laetitia’s name, but also her identity as a relation of Lady Frampull’s are of course supposed to be a fiction. They conceal the person of one Frank, the Host’s son, dressed up as a girl for the sake of decorum, so that Lady Frampull will seem to have a female companion of her own rank, and also in the hope of adding to the merriment of the court of love. But the joke is more intricate than its creators know. The last act reveals that Frank, paradoxically, was a false name, and Laetitia a true one. The Host’s supposed son really is the girl he has pretended to be. Moreover, he is also Lady Frampull’s long-lost sister, the person whose name he adopted in jest. Jonson had often sneered at romantic comedy in the past. Even in the “Ode to himselfe” appended to The New Inn, he was deploring the taste of his audience for “some mouldy tale, / Like Pericles” (11. 21-22). Frank/Laetitia stirs memories, nonetheless, of Shakespeare’s Rosalind, the girl disguised as the boy Ganymede, who then impersonates Rosalind for the benefit of Orlando, and of Perdita, a Whitsun queen who actually is the thing she plays, although she has to be cajoled by Camillo and Florizel later into pretending to a royal identity that was always hers. The New Inn carries the situation of As You Like I t and The Winter’s Tale to the breaking point. A servant called Jeremy who becomes Captain Face is one thing. A girl called Laetitia, who pretends to be a boy called (of all things) Frank, who then pretends to be a girl called Laetitia, makes one glad that Pirandello never read this play-especially when one remembers that a boy actor played the part.

O n the rare occasions when Shakespeare used Aristotelian “speaking” names, he tended either to transcend or deny them. In ,? Henry IV, Francis Feeble, the woman’s tailor, is the man who marches off stal- wartly to the wars, affirming that “no man’s too good to serve’s prince, and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next” (111. ii. 236-38), while Justice Silence, once he is drunk, becomes the noisiest man at the party. The real truth of the squabble over the name of Lady Frampull’s chamber-maid, exactly why it was that her original designation as “Cis” caused such hilarity, will probably never be re-

402 English Literary Renaissance covered. What matters is that in changing it reluctantly to Pru, as he did in the printed text of the play, Jonson simply exchanged one generic name for a lady’s servant, a menial, for another. Like Abigail later, both Cis and Pru were type names for a female domestic in the period.6 And, as with Feeble, the whole point about Pru’s name is that it con- spicuously fails to define her. Despite it, despite her origins and employ- ment, she is a lady: a woman of intelligence and sensitivity summed up neither by her class nor by the name which epitomizes that class. Jonson has overturned neo-classical principles of decorum. At the end of the comedy, Lord Latimer recognizes what Pru really is. Boldly annihilating all social barriers, he takes her to wife. He does thls because of a game, a game which begins by looking like all those debased and trivial ways of wasting time in Jonson’s earlier comedies-“substantive and adjec- tive” and “a thing done” in Cynthia’s Revels or the game of vapors in Bartholornew Fuir-but which quickly reveals itself as quintessentially Shakespearean. I t is, as much as Rosalind’s play-acting with Orlando or Perdita’s impersonation of a queen, a way of uncovering the real nature and best feelings of its participants.

There are, however, other games played in “The Light Heart,” apart from the one presided over by Sovereign Pru. In his contemporary poem attacking Jonson, “An Ode Against Ben Jonson on his playe of the New Inn,” Owen Feltham referred contemptuously to the below- stairs characters of the comedy:

Jug, Pierce, Peck, Fly, and all Your Jests so Nominal.7

Feltham’s poem is distinctly ungracious, even mean-minded, considering Jonson’s plight, but it does at moments strike almost by accident upon truth. The riff-raff of The N e w Inn, Pinnacia and Stuffe, or the disorderly rabble surrounding Fly and Sir Glorious Tip-To, all possess immutable and defining “speaking” names. Moreover, these names are the subject of remorseless and remarkably unfunny verbal play. Not only is Fly, as Latimer remarks, “fitted with a name”(I1. iv. 15), but so areTrundle, Bat Burst, Jordan, Jug, and all the rest of the militia of “The Light Heart,” as Jonson persistently demonstrates. Their activities are indeed, in a sense somewhat more complicated than Feltham seems to have recognized, nominal.” It is difficult to find the fantasies and ceaseless

duction to his edition of The New bin, Yale Studies in English, 34 (1908), p. xix.

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6 . G. B. Tennant points out the generic nature of the names “Cis” and “Pru” in the Intrc-

7. Herford and Simpson, XI, 339.

Anne Barton 403 gabble associated with the cellarage of the inn amusing, or even interesting. Jonson seems to have gone out of his way to deprive these people of the wit and energy, the inventiveness, which had so often rendered vice and folly oddly attractive in his earlier plays. Nor does this area of the comedy produce anything resembling a sub-plot, although critics sometimes talk as though it did. Yet The New Inn would be the poorer without this din, both symbolically and, I suspect, on the stage.

These “insolent, halfe-witted things,” “smatterers, insolent, and impudent” (11. v. 126, 127) exist primarily to enact the chaos of a lower world which does not admit the ordering influence of love. Pierce, the drawer, asserts at one point that “we are all mortal], / And have our visions’’ (HI. i. 129-30), but the dreams below stairs are very different from Lovell’s “vision,” his “dreame of beauty. I t is true that, by comparison with his namesake Mosca, Fly is a flat and disappointing crea- tion, a man of infinitely tedious jests. But he and his companions do not belong to the usual Jonsonian underworld the room they inhabit can be found in Spenser’s House of Alma:

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And all the chamber filled was with flyes, Which buzzed all about, and made such sound, That they encombred all mens eares and eyes, Like many swarmes of Bees assembled round, After their hives with honny do abound: All those were idle thoughts and fantasies, Devices, dreames, opinions unsound, Shews, visions, sooth-sayes, and prophesies;

And all that fained is, as leasings, tales, and lies.*

In The New Inn, Jonson asks us to mind true thngs by what their mockeries be. Even as Colonel Tip-To is a travesty of the soldier Love11 really is, so the games played in the lower regions of the house are idle, inconsequential, and unlovely as those which engage Lady Frampull and her entourage are not. In the case of Pinnacia and Stuffe, the fantasy is positively corrupt. When the tailor and his wife arrive at the inn, Pin- nacia is wearing the rich dress Lady Frampull had ordered for Pru as Sovereign of the court of love. I t seems that the tailor has a habit of clothng his wife in the garments meant for various aristocratic ladies, pretending that she actually is the customer in question, sweeping her off to the country, and lying with her in the name of the great lady whose dress she wears. After such an encounter, the dress is delivered

19091, 1, 285). 8. 7 h e Faerie Queme, 11. ix. 51 ( 7 h e Poeficd U’orks ~fEddmundSpcnser, ed. J. C. Smith [Oxford,

404 English Literary Renaissance to its proper owner.

The game is a less attractive version of the one Puntarvolo played with his wife in Every M a n Out of His Humour, his attempt to keep his marriage fresh and interesting by pretending to be a wandering knight like Launcelot, courting a lady in a castle, never seen before.9 In The New Inn, it brings down upon its inventors a punishment strikingly harsh and merciless for a play which is otherwise so tolerant and for- giving. Stuffe is tossed in a blanket, his wife stripped down to her shift, and both of them sent back to London as objects of public mockery and scorn. One sees why this should be so. In a comedy where the reversal of roles between Lady Frampull and her servant Pru, a reversal expressed in terms of Pru’s assumption of her mistress’s clothes, is so important and emotionally charged, its travesty cannot help but be punished with unusual severity. Pinnacia and Pru are parallel figures: both put on the clothes of someone above them in station. When Pru does this, like Shakespeare’s Perdita, her unusual dress serves to reveal her innate aristocracy and intelligence; by play-acting, she uncovers the person she really is. Pinnacia in her finery, on the other hand, demonstrates nothing but her own unalterable vulgarity. This is a matter not of social class, but of what one makes of oneself. Nor can a marriage be kept alive by such fraudulent means. At the very end of The New I n n the Host, restored to his position as Lord Frampull, promises the wife whom he once treated badly and who has now beyond hope been restored to him, that he will marry her “every houre oflife, hereafter”(V. v. 156). This, it is implied, is the right way of nurturing a relationship, never taking it or the other person for granted, as opposed to the essentially self-regarding impersonations of Pinnacia and her husband.

The New I n n begins with an argument between the Host and Lovell. I t seems that t h s guest occupies himself in a melancholy way in his chamber, inventing obscure scientific experiments intended to illumi- nate the nature of life among the lower orders of being. Or, as the Host puts it:

9. Volpone’s mind also leaps forward, before he has managed to seduce Celia at all, to their subsequent lovemaking in different roles (111. vii. 221-35), and a similar impulse seems to lurk behind the banquet of the “gods” in Poetaster. For the persistence of this form of sexual fantasy (and examples could obviously be added from all strata of society) see Robert Roberts, A Ragqed Schooling: Crowing Up in the Classic S lum (Manchester, 1976). p. 208.

Anne Barton

drawing fleas Out of my mattes, and pounding hem in cages Cut out of cards, & those rop’d round with pack-thred, Drawne thorow birdlime! a fine subtilty! Or poring through a multiplying glasse, Upon a captiv’d crab-louse, or a cheese-mite To be dissected, as the sports of nature, With a neat Spanish needle! Speculations That doe become the age, I doe confesse! (I. i. 25-33)

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Apart from these sordid prefigurations of the activities of the Royal Society, a game intellectually more respectable than the investigations favored by Tip-To and Fly but still less than cheering, Lovell displeases the Host by subsisting on a beggarly diet and refusing to drink. Jonson creates the impression of conflict between the sanguine man, his version of Chaucer’s Harry Bailey, and his saturnine opposite. Not, however, for long. Once Lovell and the Host begin to talk and to take one another’s measure, they shift positions. The Host may claim to be “Lord, and owner of the Heart, / Of the Light Heart in Bampt”(1. ii. 38-39), but he conceals beneath his extroverted exterior a view of life even more despairing and pessimistic than that of the guest he chides. He is a mysterious drop-out from society, a man who has chosen to become a de- tached non-participant. Unlike Crites, Horace, or Overdo, Jonson’s earlier observers of society, the Host does not try to judge. He merely looks on, from a position both passive and removed, at a spectacle he regards as entertaining but unreal:

I imagine all the world’s a Play; The state, and mens affaires, all passages O f life, to spring new scenes, come in, goe out, And shift, and vanish; and if I have got A seat, to sit at ease here, i’ mine Inne, To see the Comedy; and laugh, and chuck At the variety, and throng of humors, And dispositions, that come justling in, And out still, as they one drove hence another: Why, will you envy me my happinesse? Because you are sad, and lumpish. ( I . iii. 128-38)

It is an odd, a maimed kind of happiness. The Host, moreover, is unable to maintain his pose of lighthearted

detachment. When Lovell suggests that Frank, the Host’s son, might become his page and accompany him to court, he provokes a reaction from

406 English Literary Renaissance the father so bitter that it makes his own view of the world seem positively sanguine by comparison. The Host admits that there was a time when such training might have benefitted a young man:

I that was, when the nourceries selfe, was noble, And only vertue made it, not the mercate, That titles were not vented at the drum, Or common out-cry; goodnesse gave the greatnesse, And greatnesse worship: Every house became An Academy of honour, and those parts- W e see departed, in the practise, now, Quite from the institution. ( I . iii. 52-59)

This is an obviously romantic view of the past, of the kind occourt that Spenser dreamed of in the proem to Book VI of T h e Faerie Queene. In T h e N e w Inn, it locks into a general mood of nostalgia, a harking back to Elizbethan forms of life and art that is absolutely central to the play. I t also helps to explain why the Host refuses to engage in society except on his own aloof terms, why his apparent conviviality is really a rejection of the contemporary world around him.

Lovell is struck by the Host’s diatribe, and also by his evident good breeding, if puzzled as to why a man “i ’the game, which all the world is” (I. iii. 107) should voluntarily choose the sordid role of inn-keeper. At the end of the conversation, the original intentions of the two have abruptly reversed: the Host is now concerned to keep Lovell as a guest in his inn, while Lovell is equally determined to leave it. Lovell’s desire for departure has nothing to do with dissatisfaction with the Host, a man (as he says) “I was now beginning / T o tast, and love”(1. v. 21-22), but arises because he learns that Lady Frampull with her train of attend- ant suitors and her chamber-maid Pru has just arrived at “The Light Heart.” Lady Frampull is the woman who has cast Lovell into the positively Burtonian love melancholy from which he suffers. She is captious, eccentric, and apparently cruel, someone who plays with men without ever committing herself emotionally. Also, he has decided that it would be dishonorable for him, in any case, ever to declare his passion, for he could not do so without becoming a rival to young Beaufort, who also loves her and who happens to be the only son of Lovell’s patron and dearest friend, now deceased, who left the boy in Lovell’s care.

This is the punctiliousness of an older, essentially chivalric, and now vanished world. As page to Beaufort’s father, Lovell served in the Eliza- bethan wars in France and became his patron’s friend. His loyalty to the

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past has made him vow never to interfere with young Beaufort’s suit. Condemned to silence by ths resolution, and doubtful anyway that Lady Frampull would accord him even the qualified and fractious cour- tesy she extends to her younger and more glamorous suitors, Love11 at the beginning of The New Irrn has reached a condition of despair. He is unable to stop loving Lady Frampull, but equally unable to do anything about it, except try to avoid the mingled pleasure and pain of her com- pany. Pru, Lady Frampull’s perceptive chamber-maid, recognizes t h s impasse. What she offers Lovell is a way of declaring his love without infringing his oath: he can do it as part of a game, not in earnest, in the theatre as opposed to real life. Without expecting anything to come of it except, in Sidney’s terms, the easing of a burdened heart, Lovell accepts his role. He agrees to participate in Lady Frampull’s court of love, and the decision is crucial.

In The Devil is an Ass, some thirteen years before, Jonson had in- vented a game that prefigured the one in The New Inn. Like the court of love, it was a way of discovering one’s identity and arriving at truth. Through the device of the cloak, Wittipol bought time in which to present Mistress Fitzdottrel with a searing image of her own misery in a loveless and unequal marriage. When, because of her promise to her husband, she could not reply to his love-suit, he adroitly proceeded to impersonate her, to say, in her imagined form, what he hoped and be- lieved she might be thinking. He was not far wrong. For a while, Mis- tress Fitzdottrel behaves as though the real woman had agreed to feel and be guided by sentiments her imitation in the game had expressed. The theatre dictates to life. The New Inn takes the examination of love somewhat hesitantly set up in The Devil is an Ass even further. It also extends its preoccupation with the confused relation between art and life.

In what seems to me the best and most perceptive commentary there is on The New Inn, Harriett Hawkins argues for a shfting, extended relationship between the actors on the stage and their audience in the theatre. The fact that feigning can reveal truth is passed on to us, as participants in the comedy of the world.10 Certainly The New Inn hammers upon the essential identity between life and the stage as self-consciously as Shakespeare had done in his last plays, and for some of the same reasons. Not only the Host, clinging to his right to remain immobile in the

10. Harriett Hawkins, “The Idea of a Theater in Jonson’s The New Inn, ”Rrnairsanrr Drama, I X (1966). 205-26.

408 English Literary Renaissance inn to watch the comedy, but Lovell and Lady Frampull customarily speak of the parts one can elect to play in life. When Pru objects that it would be sordid and illiberal of her to sell her mistress’s gown to the actors after she has finished with it, Lady Frampull brushes the scruple aside: “Tut, all are Players, and but serve the Scene” (11. i. 39). That new kind of theatrical self-consciousness which in The Devil is an Ass led Jonson to play upon the identity of Dick Robinson as Wittipol, and his past as a successful boy actor in women’s parts, has here been carried to an extreme.

At the end of Volpone, the Fox is condemned to lie in fetters, in the damp of a prison, until he becomes indeed the sick man he has so lucra- tively played. For Lovell and Lady Frampull, acting is converted into truth in a more encouraging way. They win through, by way of their roles in the court of love, to an understanding of their own emotions and desires and to their fulfillment. I do not believe that the ironic reading of The N e w Inn first elaborated by E. B. Partridge and extended by a number of subsequent critics can possibly be right. Richard Levin has attacked the idea that the above-stairs world of the comedy is parodic, a satire on the fashionable Neoplatonism of Henrietta Maria’s court, on the grounds that if Jonson had intended the play to be taken in such tongue-in-cheek terms, he would surely have said so in one or another of his irate defenses.” I t is odd too that none of Jonson’s defenders and friends registered any satiric intention. Levin concludes that The N e w Inn, like Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, is just a bad play, a shot that missed. While I do not accept Levin’s artistic judgment here, I think he is right about the inherent improbability of no one, including Jonson himself, pointing out that The N e w Inn was really a burlesque if that was how it was conceived and meant to be taken.

Although it could be mocked (and was), although it undoubtedly led to some courtly sophistries and excesses, Henrietta Maria’s Neoplato- nism was by no means frivolous, immoral, or unconsidered. Roy Strong and Stephen Orgel, in their work on the Caroline masque, point out that Charles and his queen were the first English royal couple to be celebrated, by their own wish, as a married pair. Far from being an incite- ment to adultery, as many literary historians have claimed, her Neo- platonism was really an attempt to reform the sexual morals of the court according to the model provided by the royal marriage. It was fundamentally serious. Strong and Orgel describe it as “a political assertion,

11. Richard Levin, “The New New Inn and the Proliferation of Good Bad Drama,” Essays in Criticism, X X I I (1972). 4147.

Anne Barton 409

exactly consonant with, and indeed implied by, the King’s absolute monarchy. About the Queen revolved all passion, controlled and ideal- ized by her Platonic beauty and virtue, as about the king all intellect and will. This may be poetry, but it is also politics. 12 It does not seem very likely that Jonson, who in 1631 was carefully formulating the nature of royal Neoplatonism in Love’s Triumph Through Callipolis and Chloridiu, two of the subtlest and most finely wrought of his masques, and who was also the author of Love’s Welcome A t Bolsover (1634), should have been mocking the ideal in 1629.

O n the evidence ofJames Howell’s Familiar Letters, Neoplatonism as a court game, a below-stairs travesty of the royal ideal, manifested itself only in 1634, five years after T h e N e w Inn.13 This would seem to be the point at which an essentially serious idea became trivialized, so that Davenant in his masque T h e Temple o f L o v e (1635) and in his comedy T h e Platonic Lovers (1636) could mock its fashonable excesses while retaining respect for, and indeed celebrating, its embodiment in the union of Charles and Henrietta Maria. I t is important to notice too that whatever the courtly pretense of complete rejection of physical love, praise of the perfection of the royal marriage in the period rarely omits to mention its fruitfulness. As in Spenser’s Hymne of Love” and “Hymne of Beautie, Donne’s Ecstasy, or Sir Kenelm Digby’s extraordinary Private Memoirs (1627), the love which begins by coupling souls ultimately joins bodies too. Digby speaks of it as “the height of that happiness which this life can afford, and which representeth notably the infinite blessed state wherein the almighty God reigneth, by uniting two persons, two souls, two wills, in one; which by breathing together produce a divine love; and then their bodies may justly strive to perpetuate that essence by succession, whose durance in themselves is limited.” 14 This is essentially the bond which unites Love11 and Lady Frampull at the end of T h e N e w Inn, and I do not think we are meant to find it ridiculous.

Nor do I think that the verse of T h e N e w Inn can be read as Partridge, Champion, and their adherents would have it read. That Lady Fram- pull’s comments and replies in the court of love are extravagant and exaggerated is true. This does not make them parodic. As a conscious participant in a game, one to which heightened language is appropriate, she is acting. As she will later confess to Pru, her language was a “vizor”

p. 55.

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12. Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, f np fnnrs : The Theatre nJttheStuart Court (Berkeley, 1973).

13. James Howell, 7‘hr Farniiiar Lerrers, ed. Joseph Jacobs (London, 1890). pp. 317-18. 14. Sir Kenelm Digby, Pnoate Memoirs, ed. H. Nicolas (London, 1827). p. 9.

41 0 English Literary Renaissance beneath which she attempted to hide the real turmoil of her emotions, the extent to which she was genuinely and unexpectedly moved by Lovell’s speech (IV. iv. 292-95). Like Hamlet’s feigned madness, an antic disposition concealing a genuinely hysterical state of mind, Lady Fram- pull’s hyperbolic expressions both are and are not in her control. Al- though Pru has hoped the court of love may do Love11 some good, she does not see at the time just how devastating its effect on her mistress is. Only Lord Latimer, the man whose clear-sightedness and discrimination will allow him, at the end of the comedy, to marry the person Pru really is beneath the disguise of her social class, suspects what is happening to Lady Frampull. As Pru admires her lady’s dissembling-“Well fain’d, my Lady: now her parts begin!” (111. ii. 178); “Excellent actor! how she hits this passion!” (111. ii. 210); “You can faine! / My subtill and dissembling Lady mistresse” (IV. iv. 14445)-Latimer is altogether less certain: “But doe you thinke she playes?”(III. ii. 214); “Sure she is serious!” (111. ii. 254); “I feare she meanes it, Ptw, in too good earnest!” (IV. iv. 146).

As it turns out, Latimer’s instincts were entirely correct, piercing through Lady Frampull’s rhetoric to the truth beneath. But he is the only person on stage who does so. After the court has disbanded, even Pru finds it so hard to believe in Lady Frampull’s transformation that she drives her mistress into a frenzy: “I sweare, I thought you had dis- sembled, Madam, / And doubt, you do so yet” (IV. iv. 310-11). This continued incredulity provokes Lady Frampull to assail Pru as “dull, stupid, wench. . . . an idiot Chambermayd!” (11.311-13) and, in the next moment, to find herself forced for the first time in her life actually to apologize to a servant. Pru refuses to be treated like ths:

Pru. Why, take your spangled properties, your gown, And scarfes. Lad. Pru, Pru, what doest thou meane?

Pru. I will not buy this play-boyes bravery, At such a price, to be upbraided for it, Thus, every minute. (IV. iv. 319-23)

When Lady Frampull tries to excuse herself-“It was a word fell from me, Prcr, by chance” (1. 325)-she is told smartly: “Good Madame, please to undeceave your selfe, / I know when words do slip, and when they are darted / With all their bitternesse” (11. 326-28).

111

When he published The New Inn, Jonson irately prefaced it with an

Anne Barton 41 1

Argument” outlining the plot act by act and also with an account of the nature and behavior of the chief characters. One sees why he was tempted to do ths. That original Blackfriars audience had simply not followed the action, and he was concerned that his readers should not fall into the same trap. All the same, it was a mistake. Ideally, we ought to be unsure, as the court of love proceeds, whether to believe the interpretation of Lady Franipull’s behavior offered by Latimer or by Pru. When Pru’s mistress reaches for an extravagant alchemical image-

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How am I changed! By what alchimy Of love, o r language, am I thus translated! His tongue is tip’d with the I’liilosophers stone, And that hath touch’d me th[o]rough every vaine! I feele that transmutation o’ my blood, As I were quite become another creature, And all he speakes, i t is projection! (111. ii. 171-77)

-we should not know whether this transmutation is like one of Face and Subtle’s deceits or a declaration of real passion.

Arguably, Lady Frampull at this stage is not certain herself. At the end of the first hour, she declares (in what is surely an aside) that she “could begin to be in love with him, / But will not tell him yet” (111. ii. 233-34). One suspects that she is deceiving herself as to the strength of her own feelings, understandably enough given the suddenness of her capitulation, but it is important that we should experience just why it is that Lovell, Pru, and indeed everyone but Latimer, can assume that she is only acting a part. To retain, at this point, too clear a memory of Jonson’s description of the third act is to imperil the scene’s subtlety and dramatic power:

she, who had derided the name of Love before, hearing his discourse, is now so taken both with the Man, and his matter, as shee confesseth her selfe enamour’d of him, and, but for the ambition shee hath to enjoy the other houre, had presently declar’d her selfe: which gives both him, and the spectators occasion to thinke she yet dissembles, notwith- standing the payment of her kisse, which hee celebrates. (“Argument,” 11. 73-80)

This account flattens out and simplifies something psychologically more complex.

Of course, even without the “Argument,” any reading of The New Inn after the first must necessarily be made with a consciousness of how the play ends. Yet there is a sense in which t h s play is like Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale in that the surprises of its last act are, miraculously, renewable. In Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster, once you know that the

412 English Literary Renaissance page Bellario is really a girl, the play can never be experienced in the same way again. The authors were quite aware of this fact. Philip Edwards is surely right in pointing to the difference between the first reading of a play by Beaumont and Fletcher and all those which come after. There is indeed a different, a more intellectual, pleasure to be derived once you know the truth about Bellario’s sex or the real relation- s h p between Arbaces and Panthea. I t derives from uncovering those clues which were present all the time, sophisticated double meanings carefully buried in the text, but distinguishable only the second time around.15 This is not true, however, of Hermione’s resurrection in The Winter’s Tale. There are almost no retrospective double meanings. Be- tween Acts I11 and V she is simply, and irrevocably, dead. The play gen- erates no hope or expectation of her return and, when it does restore her to life, irrationally and quite mysteriously, we experience it as a miracle every time. The New Inn is an even more extreme and artistically self- conscious play than The Winter’s Tale-which is saying a great deal-but the surprises of its last act seem to me generically similar to Shake- speare’s, not to those of Beaumont and Fletcher. The presence of Jonson’s plot summary and account of the characters cannot really destroy t h s effect, any more than it is destroyed by a second reading. Still, one would not like to introduce a performance or rereading of The Winter’s Tale with a synopsis revealing what Hermione was doing during the sixteen years in which Perdita was growing up. One both knows, and one does not. Even more important, it seems to me that the pre- fatory material of The New Inn has impeded understanding of what Jonson was trying to do in the comedy. In this sense, even more than the furious and faintly absurd “Ode to himselfe,” it was misjudged.

IV

Nothing about The New Inn is as extraordinary as its ending. Nor, I believe, as gravely misunderstood. When Lovell has completed his two orations on love and valor, Sovereign Pru winds up the proceedings. “The Court’s dissolv’d,” she says, “remov’d, and the play ended” (IV. iv. 247). Jonson meant this quotation to be recognized. He makes Lovell pick it up, rephrasing it so as to bring it even closer to the original. He finds himself now, he complains, in a “gulfe of misery,” a “bottomlesse despaire”; “how like / A Court remooving, or an ended Play” (IV. iv.

15. Philip Edwards, “The Danger Not the Death: the art of Fletcher,”Jacobeon Theorre, Strat- ford-upon-Avon Studies 1 , ed. J. R . Brown and B. Harris (London, l W ) , pp. 159-77.

Anne Barton 413

250-52). John Donne’s verse epistle The Calme” was a poem Jonson loved. He told Drummond that he knew sections of it by heart. I think that Jonson meant his audience to recollect “The Calme” in its entirety at this point in The New Inn, not simply the line to which Pru and Lovell explicitly refer.

Donne’s poem is about a ship becalmed somewhere near the Azores in weather both windless and torrid. It is a world of utter immobility and stasis, a kind of life-in-death situation which prefigures the appalling condition of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner on that rotting sea, before the moon rises and before the water snakes-miraculously and redeemingly -begin to move.

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And all our beauty and our trimme decayes, Like courts removing, or like ended playes. The fighting place now seamens ragges supply; And all the tackling is a frippery. No use of lanthornes, and in one place lay Feathers and dust, today and yesterday.16

This is a world of the absence of human relationship too, where the quease paine,” as Donne calls it, “of being belov’d, and loving, 1s re-

placed by an isolation even worse, or else parodied in a macabre fashion: “Only the Calenture together drawes / Dear friends which meet dead in great fishes jawes. It is not just the powerful image of courts removing and of ended plays which operates in Jonson’s comedy. The useless clothes hung on the tackling, the silence and stillness, the helpless misery of having “no will, no power, and (almost) “no sense,” the inability to communicate, act, or find any relief from pain: this is precisely the at- mosphere Jonson means us to feel in The New Inn when the court of love ends, leaving everyone in a condition of frustration and impasse, with nothing accomplished.

Lovell, bound by his promise to Pru that in return for his two hours of courtship he will never address Lady Frampull again, has taken himself off miserably to a solitary bed

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Farewell the craft of crocodiles, womens piety, And practise of it, in this art of flattering, And fooling men. I ha’ not lost my reason, Though I have lent my selfe out, for two howres, Thus to be baffuld by a Chambermaid,

16. John Donne, TheSotires, Epigrams and Verse Letters, ed. W. Milgate (Oxford, 1967), p. 58, 11. 13-18.

414 English Literary Renaissance And the good Actor, her Lady, afore mine Host, Of the light Heart, here, that hath laught at all. (IV. iv. 273-79)

Lady Frampull, in despair, has succeeded only in quarrelling with Pru. Nor can she bring herself in cold blood to follow Lovell to his chamber and try to persuade him that what she spoke was said in earnest, not in jest. How much Lovell in his present state ofmind is likely to allow himself to be persuaded by an embassy from Pru, a description at second hand of Lady Frampull “mourning her folly, weeping at the height / She measures with her eye, from whence she is falne, / Since she did branch it, on the top 0’ the wood” (V. ii. 39-41), is open to doubt. The Host believes that the comedy has failed. He had hoped

like a noble Poet, to have had My last act best: but all fades i’ the plot. Love/ is gone to bed; the Lady Frampull And Soveraigne Pru falne out: Tipto, and his Regiment Of mine-men, a1 drunk dumbe. (V . i. 26-30)

I t is true that some expectation of mirth is to be derived from the fact that Beaufort is about to discover that he has married a boy, but the revelation is bitter, calculated to make him considerably more unhappy than Morose in a similar situation. The play seems to be over, and Jack not only hath not Jill, he seems unlikely ever to attain her. All of love’s labors are lost, and there is no sense of a future.

A t the beginning of the fifth act of Volpone, Mosca and the Fox were surprised to find themselves “recover’d and wrought out of error, / Into our way, to see our path before us”(V. ii. 2-3). They were, inconceiva- bly, back where they desired to be: at the safety of square one on the board. Despite the turmoil and the narrow escapes of four long acts, their situation is fundamentally unchanged, their business flourishing. In Volpone, Jonson insisted upon this as a logical ending-and then proceeded to destroy it. He sent Volpone out into the streets to gloat and to undo himself. In T h e New Inn also there are two endings. The second ending here, consciously contrived and artificial, is even more obviously like an old tale, like fiction in its wildest and most unmistakable form, than the conclusions of Cymbeline and T h e Winter’s Tale. Like them, and unlike Volpone, it is positive rather than negative, not punitive but for- giving. I t is as though Jonson had finally permitted himself a vision (and it is no more, nor less, than that) of earthly things made even, which atone together.

Anne Barton 41 5 The New Inn , up to the point of its fifth act, is a remarkably static

comedy. I t is filled with talk, but with little that one could describe as plot or action. Then without warning, it explodes into so much plot and event that no one has ever known quite what to make of the phe- nomenon. Northrop Frye, in A Natural Perspective, was responding entirely to Act V when he singled out The New Inn as the epitome of a play whose plot is too complicated and absurd even for comedy to sustain.17 The catastrophe is, of course, quite incredible. The Host’s son Frank, who played the part of Laetitia in the court of love, turns out to be Laetitia herself. Lord Beaufort, far from finding himself in the position of Morose, really is married. His initial and unattractive (if predictable) reaction to thus fact, the rejection of a bride he supposes to be a beggar- maid, turns to penitence and joy as she metamorphoses into Lady Frampull’s long-lost younger sister. The old alcoholic Irish charwoman takes off her eye-patch and her brogue, puts down her bottle of whiskey, and is revealed as Lady Frampull’s mother, and the missing wife of the Host-who is not called Goodstock at all, but is really the eccentric Lord Frampull. Lord Latimer transforms the chambermaid Pru into Lady Latimer, not because she has been discovered, like Laetitia, to have aristocratic origins, but simply for herself. The younger Lady Frampull, one that was ‘‘runne mad with pride, wild with selfe-love” (V. ii. 30), humbles herself and accepts Lovell-triumphantly established now as Love-well not Love-ill-as her husband. And, in a closing scene for which there are no precedents in Jonson, They goe out, with a Song.” The song is Lovell’s vision of beauty, that curiously translucent attempt to express the inexpressible which he wrote and recited earlier, now heightened and in a sense resolved by music.

This is not a combination of events conceivable in life as it is, and that is precisely the point Jonson is making. Yet this is no satire on romantic comedy. The verse does not read like that. The ending of The New Inn is curiously poignant, in the manner we associate with Shakespeare’s last plays. As with Shakespeare, all of these blatant im- probabilities, disarmingly confessing themselves as such, make us under- stand why and how much we wish that the world was really like this- for lost children to be found, true love to be rewarded, shattered marriages healed, for people who have lost and alienated one another to discover that, really, they have been together all the time. In the last

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17. Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development ofShakesparean Comedy and Romance (New York, 1%5), pp. 15-16.

416 English Literary Renaissance act of Cymbeline, Iachimo confesses his past crimes in a speech so flowery, contorted, and implausible as to call attention to its own arti- fice. He also manages to give an account of the wager in Rome, how Posthumus was led to set Imogen’s chastity on hazard, which was flatly untrue. The scene we actually see is not like that, either in circum- stance or motivation. The effect is to distance the revelations and accords of the last scene of Cymbdne from the action which has led up to them. The conclusion is set off as a fiction.

Something similar, but even more complicated, happens in The N e w Inn. Dyce seems to have been the first to point out the discrepancy in the Host’s two accounts of how he acquired Fly (11. iv. 17 and V. v. 127). Initially it seems that Fly was when the Host acquired “The Light Heart.” But in the last act, “Fly, was my fellow Gipsey”-as were all all the other below-stairs inhabi- tants of the inn. One would never have guessed, and the fact that the Argument supports the latter version does not invalidate the rival truth of the former. The comedy is also highly ambiguous about Lord Fram- pull’s connection with the gypsies, whether he shared their life before his lady left h m , afterwards, or both. The situation is made even more cloudy and contrdctory by the Host’s suggestion that the wife of the “Mad Lord Frumpul” was made melancholy by the mysterious loss of Laetitia “yong” and “upon it lost her selfe,” leaving home in a despair augmented by her sense of guilt at not producing a male heir (I . v. 67-72). At V. v. 108-10, however, and in the Argument, it is made clear that the discontented Lady Frampull returned after her flight, k s p s e d as a beggar woman, and then stole her own younger daughter.

These discrepancies do not seem to provide evidence either for Jon- son’s inattention or for the Host’s love of prevarication. He is not that kind of character. Rather, as in Cymbeline, they are differences which isolate the last act from the rest of the play. They should, moreover, draw our attention to other anomalies, ones even larger and more fundamental. The N e w Inn richly deserves a modern production. Its director, however, would have to ensure that the actors playing the Host, Frank, and the Nurse understood that each had two parts, not one, to discharge. A Hermione who collapsed in Act 111 of The Winter’s Tale signalling to her audience that her sickness was not mortal would be a disaster. Even so, in The N e w Inn, it is fatal to read the ending back into the earlier acts of the play. Between Acts I and V, the Irish beggar is what she seems, the Host is not Lady Frampull’s father, and Frank is

6‘ 9 , assign’d me over, in the Inventory,

Anne Barton 417 really a boy. I t is only the ending which transforms them, an ending which is a dream of order, harmony, and love. “Sure thou speakst / Quite like another creature, then th’hast liv’d,” the Host says in aston- ishment when his charwoman begins, after seven years as a kind of grotesque, to talk like a great lady (V. v. 26-27). Fictional, unrealistic, and aloof, the last scene of T h e N e w Inn, boldly rewrites or cancels those aspects of the past which do not contribute to this happy ending, while permitting us to remember their existence. Jonson excused himself in his epilogue for not haling in “the drunkards, and the noyses of the Inne” in the last act, on the grounds that the “vapours” of Fly and the down- stairs militia could only have been offensive in the conclusion. He was right, and not least because these particular gypsies metamorphosed have been so firmly defined by their “speaking” names and habits in the course of the comedy that we could not really accept or interpret their new identities if they stood before us. Fly and his associates inherit “The Light Heart,” the place Lord Frampull leaves behind. In the future which awaits the four married couples, they have no part.

Fuming and lashing out in the “Ode to himselfe,” Jonson referred contemptuously to Pericles as a mouldy tale.” Owen Feltham, in his poem attacking The N e w Inn, ironically swept the two plays together. Both in his view were rubbish and, by implication, rubbish of the same kind. The comparison was not imperceptive. In the plays written after Bartholomew Fair, Jonson seems at last to have come to terms with Shake- spearean comedy and with popular dramatic forms that he had earlier despised. The whole issue of Jonson’s Elizabethan and Shakespearean nostalgia is complicated and important, something both intensely personal and individual, and part of a more general trend in the 1620’s and 1630’s. I t is evident in Jonson’s Masque of Owls (1624), with its resurrection of Captain Cox and the splendors of the 1575 Kenilworth Enter- tainment, as in the Twelfth Night masque of The Fortunate Isles (1625), with its oddly regretful Tudor and Elizabethan pastiche. The Tale o f a Tub, The Magnetic Lady, perhaps the fragment of The Fall ofMortimer, certainly the unfinished The Sad Shepherd, are all extensions of this impulse. But it was, arguably, in The N e w Inn that Jonson constructed his most impressive and memorable lament for the age of Elizabeth and for the dramatist who was best in it.

In Epicoene, the degradation and decline of the present age had been measured through reference to the classical past. Bartholomew Fair sub- sequently, with its memories of Chaucer and Sidney and of Marlowe’s

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41 8 English Literary Renaissance Hero und Leunder, altered the touchstone. I t was English literature, especially the non-dramatic work of the early Elizabethan period, which sat in final judgment upon the debased activities of the Fair. But Shakespeare-with some help from Chaucer, Sidney, Spenser, Lyly, Kyd, and Donne-presides over The New Inn. When in the final moments of the comedy Lady Frampull and her father announce that they will bestow a marriage portion upon Pru, Latimer impatiently brushes the offer aside: Spare all your promis’d portions, she is a dowry” (V. v. 143). This is how the King of France took Cordelia, another maid who was most rich being poor, in the first act of King Leur (I . i. 241). The echo is as clear, and deliberate, as Jonson’s earlier quotations from Endimion, The Spanish Tragedy, or “The Calme.” The N e w Inn is riddled with moments like this, with memories of the past, references and allusions, both structural and verbal, to a vanished world. Jonson was defending something more than his own particular artistic reputation when he reacted so passionately to the denigration and misunderstand- ing of this fine and haunting play.

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NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD

the new inn and the problem of jonson's late style

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