Jonson, Shakespeare, and Aristotle on Comedy

Jonson, Shakespeare, and Aristotle on Comedy relates new under-standings of Aristotle’s dramatic theory to the comedy of Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare. Typically, scholars of Renaissance drama have treated Aristotle’s theory only as a possible historical influence on Jonson’s and Shakespeare’s drama, focusing primarily on their trage-dies. Yet recent classical scholarship has undone important misconcep-tions about Aristotle’s Poetics held by early modern commentators and fleshed out the theory of comedy latent within it. By first synthesizing these developments and then treating them as an interpretive theory, rather than simply an historical influence, this book demonstrates a remarkable consonance between Aristotelian principles of plot and its emotional effect, on the one hand, and the comedy of Shakespeare and Jonson, on the other. In doing so, it also reveals surprising similarities between these seemingly divergent dramatists.

Jonathan Goossen is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Ambrose University in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

Routledge Studies in Shakespeare

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21 Shakespeare and Complexity TheoryClaire Hansen

22 Women and Mobility on Shakespeare’s StageMigrant Mothers and Broken HomesElizabeth Mazzola

23 Renaissance Ecopolitics from Shakespeare to BaconRethinking CosmopolisElizabeth Gruber

24 Shakespeare’s Lost PlayhouseEleven Days at Newington ButtsLaurie Johnson

25 Shakespeare’s Hamlet in an Era of Textual ExhaustionEdited By Sonya Freeman Loftis, Allison Kellar, and Lisa Ulevich

26 Shakespeare’s SuicidesDead Bodies That MatterMarlena Tronicke

27 The Fictional Lives of ShakespeareKevin Gilvary

28 Jonson, Shakespeare, and Aristotle on ComedyJonathan Goossen

Jonson, Shakespeare, and Aristotle on Comedy

Jonathan Goossen

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Acknowledgements ix

Introduction: Aristotle, Jonson, Shakespeare 1

1 The Poetics and Comedy 15

PART I 29

2 Comic Error and the Hoax 31

3 “Laid flat” in the “flame and height of their humours”: Exposure in Jonson 39

4 Shakespeare’s Exposure of “seeming” 57

PART II 77

5 Indignation 79

6 Jonson’s Shifting “furor poeticus” 87

7 “Kill Claudio”: Indignation and Pity in Shakespeare 104

PART III 121

8 Catharsis 123

9 “Checked by strength and clearness”: Jonson’s Comic Catharsis 138

10 The “strange course” of Shakespeare’s Comic Catharsis 161

Conclusion: The “Comedy of Affliction” 181

Bibliography 193Index 205

Contents

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A book is proof that its author owes much gratitude to many people. I am particularly grateful to John Baxter, whose classes sparked my interest in Aristotle, whose attentive reading of Renaissance literature is a model for my own, and whose persistent enthusiasm for my work has helped bring it to publication. Joel Altman read both the disserta-tion from which this book emerges and sections of the revised man-uscript, commenting percipiently on each. Christina Luckyj, Ronald Huebert, and Bruce Greenfield also sharpened my thinking in its early stages. Brent Nelson first taught me careful scholarship. I am grateful to him, Ken Graham, and Fr Luc Bonnel for wise counsel, and to Jason Quiring for listening. Tim Heath winsomely set me on my feet as an assistant professor at Ambrose University, and my current colleagues there, Rita Dirks, Darren Dyck, Ken Nickel, and Joel Thiessen make it a thought-provoking and happy place to work. I heartily thank Jennifer Abbott at Routledge for her early and eager interest in this book and Michelle Salyga for deftly carrying it through to publication. Christine Jacob has been an artful research assistant in the final stages of writing.

Because life is larger than scholarship, I am most grateful to my fam-ily. My parents Ted and Mary Goossen instilled in me an early love for books and ideas and the ability to work hard to understand them. My children Jacob, Luke, Madeleine, and Mark provide me first-hand experience of the indignation, laughter, and love about which I have written. With Cindy Goossen, I know the “mysterious law” of marriage, “founded in reason, loyal, just, and pure”; she makes me the happiest man I know.

Through various scholarships and grants, The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Killam Trusts, and Dalhousie University financially supported the initial stages of this proj-ect, and Ambrose University, the latter. I am grateful to each.

Earlier versions of portions of this book have appeared in the Ben Jonson Journal and in Animus: The Canadian Journal of Philosophy and the Humanities; I thank the editors of each journal for permission to reuse that material here.

Acknowledgements

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Ben Jonson called Aristotle “the first accurate critic and truest judge, nay, the greatest philosopher, the world ever had.”1 The literary- theoretical musings in his commonplace book, Timber, or Discoveries, demonstrate both substantial knowledge of and high regard for Aristotle’s Poetics, including its brief words on comedy. Jonson’s dramatic prologues make regular mention of Aristotelian ideas, and the plays themselves delib-erately manifest these. Indeed, in his conscious reaction against what he saw as the inanity of the homegrown Elizabethan comic stage and his equally conscious recourse to classical ideals, Jonson has been seen as the godfather of the neoclassical comedy that would come to dom-inate the English stage during the Restoration. William Shakespeare, despite not leaving us any writings as theoretically explicit as Jonson’s, was also clearly aware of the Aristotelianism that so influenced both his friend and the seventeenth-century continental stage. Yet in oppo-sition to Jonson, Shakespeare seems to deliberately ignore or even vio-late such principles, often preferring to explore the dramatic possibilities of the native comedic tradition that Jonson dismissed. These different responses to Aristotelian theory form an important plinth in the later critical construction of Shakespeare as the free, intuitive poet of nature and Jonson as the brilliant but plodding poet of art. Similarly, from the Romantics forward, Aristotle and his Poetics have been seen as one of the chief sources of those stultifying dramatic rules that smothered Jonson but were powerless over Shakespeare. This book challenges these commonplace beliefs about Aristotle’s theory, often still held by English literary critics, and in light of this challenge, reassesses the relationship of Shakespeare’s and Jonson’s comedy both to Aristotle’s ideas and to each other. When a set of misunderstandings of Aristotle that originated in the sixteenth century and obtains to the present are corrected, his os-tensibly prescriptive and pedantic theory becomes strikingly exploratory and subtle, and as a result, strikingly relevant to understanding not only Jonson’s comedy, but Shakespeare’s as well.

Perhaps surprisingly, from the time of its writing in the fourth century BCE through to the mid-sixteenth century CE, the Poetics was usually regarded as a text of marginal importance. It had little circulation in

IntroductionAristotle, Jonson, Shakespeare

2 Introduction

the ancient world, likely due to its interest in objective literary struc-ture rather than in the predominant critical concerns of ethical effect and verisimilitude. Compounding this problem of its unusual approach to literature was the Poetics’ painfully unpolished state: it was one of Aristotle’s esoteric, or unpublished, works, probably little more than his lecture notes on the topic, and thus maddeningly laconic. What mod-est influence Aristotle’s literary theory did have in the ancient world was due not to the Poetics, but largely to his On Poets, a published dialogue that seems to have popularized his theory for a wider audi-ence than the more technical Poetics ever garnered. The On Poets has long since disappeared and is only known to us in fragments, which demonstrate significant overlap with the Poetics: On Poets contained a survey of the history of several poetic genres, the definition of poetry as mimēsis, or “representation,” Aristotle’s distinction of comedy from tragedy on the basis of the characters each represents, and an explana-tion of tragic and comic catharsis. Indeed, Horace most likely drew his knowledge of Aristotle from the On Poets when he wrote his Ars Poetica (ca. 18 BCE), as did the Roman grammarian Macrobius and the Neopla-tonic philosopher Proclus at the end of antiquity.

The Poetics originally consisted of two books, of which our cur-rently extant version is but the first.2 The second almost certainly fulfilled the promise made at the end of the first to treat comedy and lampoon as the first does tragedy and epic. Book 2 was still known in the third century CE to the Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry as the promised treatment of comedy, but it had certainly disappeared by the sixth century. Book 1 continued to make occasional appearances after this: around 700, it was translated into Syriac and then in 923, into Arabic. This latter translation forms one of only three sources on which all modern editions of the Poetics are based; the two others are Greek manuscripts of Byzantine provenance, dating from the tenth and fourteenth centuries. While the Arabic version was translated into Latin as early as the thirteenth century, the Poetics was almost entirely unknown in the West until Aldus Manutius printed a Greek edition in 1508 that began attracting scholarly attention. Its promulgation was aided especially by Alessandro de Pazzi’s 1536 Latin translation, which was frequently reprinted. Often, translation (usually into Latin, but oc-casionally into Italian) and commentary were closely interwoven, as in the work of Francesco Robortello (using Pazzi’s Latin, 1548) and Lodovico Castelvetro (in Italian, 1570).

The literary-critical environment of Cinquecento Italy into which the Poetics re-emerged was not unlike that of the classical world. Poetic literature, for all intents and purposes, was seen as a form of rhetoric intended, in Horace’s frequently (though not entirely accurately) cited dictum docere et delectare, “to teach and to delight.” Italian commen-tators thus tended to read the Poetics as they had read Horace’s Ars

Introduction 3

Poetica, as a rhetorical manual. Because of Horace’s own tendency to assimilate rhetoric and poetics, this reading habit distorted the Ars Poetica much less than it did the Poetics. Remarkably for a classical text, the Poetics’ emphasis falls not on an audience’s response to rhetoric or staged events and characters, but, as Stephen Halliwell observes, “on what [ Aristotle] regards as the objective emotive properties of the well- constructed plot” and “the internal or formal organization of the poem.”3 The Cinquecento’s rhetorical approach to literature, however, “exacerbated the drive towards a sharp definition of essential rules of lit-erary composition.”4 The effect of this on the Poetics was “one of simpli-fication and coarsening, grounded as it was in a willingness to fragment Aristotle’s ideas and assimilate them to formulations of doctrine found in the Ars Poetica.”5 Aristotle’s uniquely literary theory, then, was often obscured by Italian commentators’ interest in the rules of rhetoric.

This reading habit is exemplified in Renaissance explanations of “ catharsis,” the experience Aristotle famously identifies as the chief end of tragedy. As this book will consider in detail, leading modern classi-cists generally concur that with the word “catharsis,” Aristotle describes an effect resulting from the simultaneous intellectual comprehension of the plot’s principles of causality and the emotional response to plot and character aroused in its audience. The result is not simply a release or purgation of the emotions, as is popularly thought, but in some fashion a habituation or education of them. Aristotle’s belief, insists Richard Janko, is that “sometimes one should feel such emotions as pity, anger or fear, if they are felt towards the right object, to the proper degree, in the correct way, and at the right time.”6 When exercised in response to well-wrought drama, emotions “such as pity and fear” (identified by Aristotle as those evoked by tragedy) “are consistent with reason and are a reflex of its judgments,” rather than antagonistic to it.7 But strongly conditioned by the docere et delectare maxim, Cinquecento commentators usually understood catharsis to be Aristotle’s account of the didactic utile of drama. Drama teaches directly and explicitly: its events warn us away from vice or exhort us to virtue by showing the results of each, and its characters evince either laudable, virtuous traits or reprehensible, vicious ones from which an audience is to take their cue. As Halliwell explains, “it was in the belief that katharsis entailed a straightforward moral protreptic that a majority of [Renaissance] in-terpreters reduced the idea to an inappropriately basic level of didacti-cism.”8 This sort of overt moralizing is what Jacob Bernays reacted to in the nineteenth century when he put forward what would become the view of catharsis that remains most familiar to us: the entirely amoral purgation of undesirable, subconscious emotions.9 Contrary to Bernays, current interpreters agree with Renaissance commentators that cathar-sis does indeed have a moral dimension, yet one that is more subtle and sophisticated than they described.

4 Introduction

Even more fundamentally affected by the Renaissance’s rhetorically inflected reading habits was Aristotle’s central insistence upon and ac-count of the unity of dramatic action. At the heart of the Poetics is the assertion that “tragedy is the representation of a complete i.e. whole ac-tion,” a principle that applies equally to comedy.10 By “action,” Aristotle means the sum of the various incidents portrayed in the play, or, in the most significant sense, what happens. To best represent an action, a dra-matist must arrange a series of incidents united not merely by subject or chronology, but by the philosophical notions of “probability or neces-sity” (1451b): the “structure of the incidents,” explains Stephen Halliwell, must demonstrate above all “causal or explanatory lucidity.”11 This is a more sophisticated proposition than it might seem. George Whalley lik-ens action in Aristotle’s account to a “trajectory traced by a projectile”: after launch, its flight path is inevitable, yet “because it is a man who…makes choices, [he] determines the flight, [and] is not simply propelled, is not a mere victim.”12 The best plots portray such an action paradoxi-cally, Aristotle explains, using incidents that “happen contrary to expec-tation but because of one another” (1452a). Under the strong influence of the century’s rhetorical approach to poetics, however, Robortello (for example) transmutes probability and necessity, Aristotle’s central terms for describing the all-important relationship between the disparate inci-dents of a unified plot, “into principles for relating the poem to nature and to the beliefs of the audience.”13 Halliwell argues that he and oth-ers reduced philosophical and structural unity to the “jejune notion of the merely believable or convincing,”14 a simplification still regularly made by literary critics.15 Famously, Italian commentators then pro-ceeded to fold unity of action into the doctrine of the three “unities,” essentially inventing those of place and time. These latter two dictated that a play “cannot represent any action except such as occurs in one place” or setting “and within the space of twelve hours.”16 Yet nowhere does Aristotle prescribe either the unity of place or of time.17 Rather, these were a direct result of the belief that Aristotle’s theory required close dramatic verisimilitude. Toward this end, Castelvetro even went so far as to subordinate the unity of action – the only one that counts for Aristotle – to those of place and time. Bernard Weinberg’s summary of Cinquecento interpretations is accurate, if overstated: in the hands of the Italians, “Aesthetic preoccupations have disappeared” from the Poetics, he concludes, “and their place has been taken by rhetorical and physical concerns” of a much more rudimentary order.18 Yet for later critics of Renaissance English drama, “the unities” of time and place would come to be accepted as one of the central features of Aristotle’s theory and a primary example of his stifling pedantry.

In light of the dominant accounts of Aristotle’s literary theory avail-able to Shakespeare, it is hardly surprising that he seems to have dis-regarded what he would likely have known of it.19 Notably, both The

Introduction 5

Comedy of Errors and The Tempest self-consciously submit to these pseudo- Aristotelian “unities” of time and place (along with the genuinely Aristotelian concept of unified action). But most often, Shakespeare mentions the “rules” only in apologies for violating them. The Chorus in Henry V apologetically asks the audience to “Linger your patience on and well digest / Th’ abuse of distance,” referring to the play’s violation of the unity of place by way of its international settings (2.0.31–32).20 Elsewhere, the character Time in The Winter’s Tale refers to the violated unity of time when he implores the audience:

Impute it not a crimeTo me or my swift passage that I slideO’er sixteen years and leave the growth untriedOf that wide gap, since it is in my powerTo o’erthrow law….

(4.1.4–8)

And though he makes no such explicit mention of the rules in Antony and Cleopatra, by treating events that historically took place in the span of ten years and by shuttling between Rome, Greece, Parthia, and Egypt, Shakespeare seems deliberately to thumb his nose at the same two unities. From these and other examples arise the ubiquitous crit-ical commonplace that Aristotle’s theory is simply incompatible with Shakespeare’s drama.

It must be acknowledged that much work of great importance was accomplished by the scholars of the Cinquecento, and that significant voices did dissent from the majority on important aspects of the Poetics’ ideas. Castelvetro, for example, steadfastly denied that Aristotle required exemplary moral types for characters or a didactic end from drama. Robortello moved beyond Donatus and the usual Terentian accounts of comedy and attempted to transpose Aristotle’s analysis of plot and character onto it. Later, the Dutchman Daniel Heinsius would provide, in his 1611 Latin translation and commentary, De tragodiae constitutione, what Halliwell judges to be “probably the purest and most illuminating statement yet achieved of some of the chief ideas of Aristotle’s work,” especially those of unified action, mimesis, and catharsis, which had been most frequently distorted.21 Importantly, Heinsius’s work was one of Jonson’s main avenues to Aristotle. While Jonson seems to happily accept the three unities and other Cinquecento literary principles as au-thentically Aristotelian,22 in both his dramatic and theoretical writings, Jonson clearly perceives with Heinsius the preeminent significance of unified action. As we shall see, his musings and paraphrases of Heinsius in Discoveries contain “a much fuller and more accurate statement of the Poetics’ essential doctrine of unity of action” than most previous and subsequent scholars arrived at.23

6 Introduction

Recent scholarship on the Poetics both confirms and expands Heinsius’s and Jonson’s intuitions. Simply the amount of it is remarkable: in English alone, no less than ten new translations and the groundbreaking studies of Leon Golden, Richard Janko, and Stephen Halliwell (to name three of the leading Poetics scholars working in English) have all emerged since 1970.24 Three topics especially relevant to Shakespeare’s and Jonson’s comedy arise from these classicists’ work. First, each has explored and demonstrated from different angles the centrality of unified action and plot construction to Aristotle’s theory. Second, each of these scholars has re-examined the place of catharsis within the Poetics by looking backward from it to the term’s usage by Plato and forward to the work of late antique Neoplatonists who knew Aristotle’s more substantial dis-cussion of catharsis in the On Poets. By so doing, each of these scholars has contributed to an emerging consensus on the nature of dramatic catharsis as a clarification or refining of emotion that occurs through an audience’s cognition of a play’s unified structure. Finally, Golden and Janko especially have given close attention to the nature of unified ac-tion and catharsis in comedy. Such studies necessarily look beyond the Poetics to reconstruct what Aristotle might have said in its lost second book. This book will take up three particular findings of relevance to Shakespeare and Jonson. Leon Golden uses the Nicomachean Ethics to expand the concept of comic hamartēma or “error” nascent in Chapter 5 of the Poetics. On the same topic, Richard Janko looks to the Tractatus Coislinianus, a tenth-century Byzantine manuscript that he argues is an epitome of the Poetics’ lost second book. He pairs an analysis of comic error with the Tractatus’s discussion of the comic hoax, one of the genre’s crucial plot devices. Finally, Golden finds in the Rhetoric a compelling argument that the comic emotion parallel to the pity and fear of tragedy is not simply laughter or pleasure, but nemesan, “righteous indignation.” When these various accounts are synthesized, a cohesive and compelling theory of comedy emerges.

The work of these scholars puts Aristotle’s literary theory into a unique relationship with Shakespeare and Jonson. Of course, Aristotle radically predates these dramatists as a theorist working from the very different practical basis of classical Greek theatre. As well, versions of Aristotle’s literary theory were current in Renaissance England and clearly influ-enced Shakespeare, Jonson, and their contemporaries. However, in the revelatory work of current classicists, Aristotle takes a place not unlike that of a theorist contemporary with us: despite the original date of his theory, crucial aspects of it are now being elucidated in a way that was previously unavailable, or at least during the Renaissance. This book takes these recent developments, synthesizes them into a coherent theory of comedy, and then uses this theory as a genuine interpretive theory, rather than potential historical influence. I argue that Shakespeare’s and Jonson’s comedies clearly evince key elements of what contemporary

Introduction 7

classicists are finding in Aristotle’s theory. By this light, Shakespeare becomes a whole lot more Aristotelian than his critics have allowed, and Jonson becomes so in ways remarkably different than have been presumed.

The anachronism of such an approach is a potential problem. As is logical, nearly every study of the Poetics’ relationship to Renaissance drama takes a historical approach, considering what readings of Aristotle’s theory were available to playwrights of the time and then assessing the potential influence of these readings on their drama. While this sort of work is obviously crucial, it tends to limit the Poetics to the category of mere source or influence, thus obscuring its primary identity as a literary-interpretive theory that offers ideas on how to understand drama, ideas that may well transcend the understandings of both the dramatists influenced or critics reading in any particular era. The strik-ing fact that central terms of our contemporary dramatic lexicon (plot, recognition, reversal, tragic flaw, and catharsis, to name a few) are first described in the Poetics asserts that it is surely possible to employ it as a theory; if so, then it would only be reasonable to use the most accu-rate accounts of its frequently terse and elliptical passages – regardless of whether such accounts emerged before or after the drama to which they are referred. Indeed, Jonson himself suggests that chronology does not necessarily determine relevance in his remarkable claim that before “either the grammarians, or philosophers…found out those laws [of poetry and drama], there were many excellent poets that fulfilled them” (Discoveries 586). Great poets may well agree with the theorists, but in Jonson’s estimation, they do not so much follow their rules as arrive at them independently by other, practical means. It should be possible, then, that Jonson and Shakespeare may both have arrived at Aristotelian principles without realizing it and before such principles were clearly understood by scholars. Jonson’s relationship to Aristotle via Heinsius bears out exactly this point: much of what he explicitly says in Discov-eries about dramatic plotting, the close relationship between comedic and tragic plot, and the effect of comedy is derived from the revised 1618 version of Heinsius’s 1611 work. Yet these dates of publication mean that Jonson could only have had access to the text’s formulations after he had written his most important comedies – works undeniably con-sonant with Heinsius’s explication of Aristotle. As James Redwine ob-serves, “Jonson seems to have found in Heinsius’ redaction of Aristotle a succinct statement of what he had been suggesting about the dramatic fable all along.”25 If Jonson’s drama could anticipate Heinsius, it should be possible that it also might anticipate modern scholars like Halliwell, Janko, and Golden.

The case is more difficult with Shakespeare. This is due in no small part to the long-standing critical assumption mentioned earlier, that Aristotle is a restrictive rule-maker and Shakespeare a free-spirited rule-breaker.

8 Introduction

While Aristotle is too important a critic of drama simply to ignore, these beliefs nevertheless lead modern Shakespeare critics to relegate discus-sion of his theory to general introductions, whether these be to editions of the plays or to scholarly studies. There, Aristotle tends to receive po-lite mention, but only in order to be dismissed, often with the erroneous belief that various pseudo-Aristotelian Renaissance notions are genu-inely his. David Kastan’s essay on tragedy in the Blackwell Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, for example, concludes that “Aristotle is largely a red herring in regard to Shakespeare.”26 Yet he bases this judgment on the belief that unlike Shakespeare, Aristotle saw tragedy as possess-ing a “culturally stabilizing, even reforming, capacity,” a notion derived from Cinquecento accounts of catharsis, not the Poetics itself.27 Thomas Rist does discuss catharsis in Shakespeare’s drama, but seems to assume that Aristotle meant the term to mean “purgation” – here, an erroneous reading taken of nineteenth-century Poetics interpreters.28 Sometimes in their very dismissals, critics unwittingly invoke central principles of Shakespeare’s drama that recent accounts of Aristotle’s theory actually share: after hastily summarizing Aristotle’s definition of tragedy, Kastan goes on to claim that, in contrast, Shakespeare did not think that the term connoted a complex literary theory but “simply named a particular plot structure.”29 Yet this is exactly Aristotle’s claim, that plot structure defines tragedy, and it is one more sophisticated than Kastan allows. Stephen Greenblatt’s introduction to The Norton Shakespeare gives Aristotle’s claims a somewhat more sustained hearing, perceiving that “the elegantly chiseled structural design in which Aristotle was most interested is powerfully present in Shakespeare.”30 Nevertheless, he concludes that in the plays,

this design is often overshadowed by the sheer magnitude of the events and passions directly represented onstage;…the form of trag-edy, the element central to the Poetics, is only a slender, fragile bark, bobbing on a chaotic, destructive and ecstatic sea of suffering.

Yet Aristotle argues that the “events” and “suffering,” along with the “passions” that lead to them are not independent of the dramatic “form” but integral components of it. For both Kastan and Greenblatt, Shakespeare remains the impassioned visionary whose work variously transcends or subverts structure, form, and principle, while Aristotle’s ideas about drama are dogmatically formal, and thus, restrictive. Romanticism, it would seem, lingers on in Shakespeare studies. As Halliwell ruefully observes, “The Poetics’ canonization in sixteenth- century Italy has bur-dened the treatise with a history—first as a neoclassical gospel, later as the target of Romantic and post-Romantic iconoclasm.”31

Ironically, recent accounts of Aristotle help elucidate precisely those aspects of Shakespeare typically invoked to refute Aristotle’s rele-vance. These accounts make the philosopher’s ideas look much more

Introduction 9

like exploratory observations and hypothetical musings than scholas-tic dogmas. This fact merits investigation, and the best way to do so, I would suggest, is by taking the primarily literary-theoretical approach of this book. As such, it is not a historical study of Shakespeare’s and Jonson’s use of classical comedic precedent or the influence of classical literary theory. It does not seek primarily to identify what Shakespeare and Jonson knew about Aristotle’s theory, nor to prove that they read and interpreted what they knew of it in a manner similar to current classicists. Its argument is simply that there is remarkable consonance between the drama and the theory recently elaborated, and only inciden-tally that a handful of Renaissance Poetics readers perceived this. Most critics would agree that psychoanalytic or feminist literary theory, for example, reveals important components of Renaissance drama; so too, then, might the recently identified ideas of one of the world’s most astute philosophers, regardless of whether those ideas were initially expressed yesterday or in the fourth century BCE.

At the same time, this book does not share the cultural materialist assumptions of most current theoretical treatments of Shakespeare and Jonson. Aristotle’s theory insists that the action of a good play goes be-yond the credible portrayal of plausible, particular events and charac-ters to represent “universals” of human experience (1451b); this is what makes drama a mode of philosophical inquiry, not merely an art of rep-lication. To apply this theory thus requires the contemplation of what in human experience might justly be called universal, however difficult and nuanced a task that might be. For the purposes of this study, the uni-versal includes primarily ethical categories of behaviour and emotional responses to such behaviours. As a result, this book takes seriously the repeated claims of Jonson and other writers of the Renaissance, that they write with moral-affective interest and intent, and it refuses to reduce such claims to either an unexamined medieval hangover or felt social ob-ligation. Shakespeare is not, of course, as overtly didactic as Jonson can be, but this book assumes that both believed in the existence of good and evil in the abstract; that human action had the unique ability to mani-fest such principles as virtues and vices; and that both were interested in understanding, through their plays, how this might be so. The comic concepts of error, trickery, indignation, and catharsis uniquely structure the plays’ moral inquiries, but without ever reducing them to mere moral object lessons.

The choice of plays studied here is governed by the desire to demon-strate the potential breadth and reach of Aristotle’s comic theory. I have avoided the comedies of each dramatist that owe the clearest debts to classical precedents (The Comedy of Errors or Every Man In His Humour, for example) in order to prevent inadvertent lapses from a literary-theoretical mode into a historical one of influence or source study. Instead, I have chosen four plays that represent a spectrum of these authors’ work – from satire through new and romantic comedy to

10 Introduction

problem or tragi-comedy. Every Man Out of His Humour is the first of Jonson’s three “comical satires,” and is throughout explicitly concerned with comic theory. It is in many ways a study (not always successful) of what separates dramatic comedy from the invective or lampoon that Aristotle argues it evolved from. Epicoene, or The Silent Woman pro-vides a later example of Jonson’s most deft comic writing. Its new co-medic mode appears to eschew comical satire’s indignant exposure of folly, making Epicoene a more challenging test case for the categories of nemesan and catharsis than more obvious choices like Volpone or The Alchemist would be. Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing is also a comedy of manners, but equally, a central example of his romantic com-edy. Moreover, it puts forward a preliminary understanding of the hoax, indignation, and catharsis that Shakespeare later refines and compli-cates in Measure for Measure, the final play considered here. This play’s central interest in identifying and testing the generic limits of comedy uniquely exposes central aspects of Shakespeare’s comic practice that are strikingly illuminated by Aristotelian ideas.

This small number of plays is deliberate. On the one hand, greater breadth of coverage might better prove my claim that Jonson’s and Shakespeare’s drama is regularly consonant with Aristotelian principles. Indeed, there is a great deal that might be said here about more major plays like Volpone, The Alchemist, The Merchant of Venice, and Twelfth Night. Yet the perennial danger of theoretical approaches to literature is that the eager search for consonance between theory and practice can blind the seeker to points of dissonance. I thus try to mitigate this risk by exploring a few plays fully and in significant detail, rather than many plays in a broad overview, while nonetheless selecting four very disparate plays containing central elements of each dramatist’s oeuvre. The result, I think, is a demonstration of just how comprehensive these Aristotelian concepts can be. A further difficulty is implicit particularly in theoretical studies of dramatic affect like this: namely, that of universalizing audi-ence response. Critics have never been more conscious of the diversity of emotional responses that a play might evoke, both in its own time and in contemporary stagings or readings. Part of my claim, though, is that Jonson and Shakespeare evince an interest in examining particular emotions in their characters and in producing corresponding emotions in their audiences. If this argument holds, it should be possible to discuss the ideal emotional responses that the plays aim at without denying that the same moments might also produce other effects. I have thus tried to be judicious in describing what and how “we” feel during these plays, but without going into contortions with the subjunctive mood to avoid giving offense or contradicting my argument about the primacy of cer-tain affective responses over others.

Chapter 1 provides a general account of the argument of the Poetics and its relevance to comedy. It explains how the Poetics’ fundamental arguments in Chapters 1–5 apply equally to tragedy and comedy. It then

Introduction 11

considers how Chapters 6–19, centred on the principle of unified dra-matic action, can be correlated to comedy, a task accomplished by using, synthesizing, and expanding on the seminal work of Halliwell, Janko, and Golden. Except where otherwise noted, I use Janko’s translation of the Poetics: it finds a middle way between crudely literal renderings of Aristotle’s laconic prose on the one hand and highly polished, overly interpretive versions that efface the text’s genuine ambiguities on the other. In order to make quotations as accessible as possible for readers with other translations, I cite all of Aristotle’s works by Bekker’s page numbers and, where applicable, by book number as well.

After Chapter 1, the book is divided into three parts. Each is headed by a theoretical account of a major Aristotelian tenet that is synthesized from the Poetics itself, other writings of Aristotle, and the reconstruc-tions of contemporary classicists. I also regularly relate these accounts to those of sixteenth-century commentators in order to demonstrate that though not always derived from Aristotle, these ideas were nonetheless frequently current in the Renaissance. Each part then examines the pres-ence and function of these tenets in each of the four plays. Part I begins with Aristotle’s differentiation of comedy and tragedy on the basis of the sorts of persons each represents: those inferior with respect to virtue (phaulos) in contrast to the noble (spoudaios). Comic characters’ vices are not wicked but ridiculous, and, as described in Aristotle’s Ethics, they consist of deviation from the virtuous mean, disharmony between the rational and non-rational faculties of the soul, and self-ignorance, all points on which Jonson and several Cinquecento commentators concur. Unlike tragic hamartia, which is a mistaken choice and hence directly related to plot, comic error is primarily a flaw in character. The Trac-tatus suggests that what integrates comic error into plot is the device of the hoax. There is, furthermore, a parallel between comic error and the hoax which exposes it (often irrespective of the tricksters’ intentions) and tragic hamartia and the pathos in which it results. Pathos and the hoax are both uniquely complex components of plot, interactions that are not merely inflicted on their victims, but actively responded to in ways that are surprising yet logical.

Part II deals with the emotions comedy evokes parallel to the pity and fear aroused by tragedy. This is something Aristotle does not explicitly discuss, yet since he requires a spoudaios tragic protagonist because such a one best elicits pity and fear, comedy must logically arouse the emotion that responds to its phaulos character. Parallel to Aristotle’s opposition of these tragic and comic character types is his opposition in the Rhetoric of the emotion of pity to that of nemesan, or “righteous indignation.”32 He describes the latter as pain felt at another’s undeserved good fortune and as a virtuous mean between the vices of envy and spite or malice. Indignation thus seems exactly the response aroused by the disproportion intrinsic to comic error – something also perceived by Sir Philip Sidney in his Defence and by Jonson in Discoveries. Likewise, nemesan avoids the

12 Introduction

extremes of envy and spite, seeking instead the justice characteristic of what Aristotle identifies as comedy’s double ending: the rewarding of vir-tue and the punishment of vice. Indignation, then, is aroused by the error of the phaulos character and satisfied by the hoax that exposes that error.

Finally, Part III looks at catharsis. As the term has a long history of critical discussion, Chapter 8 first explains the dominant conceptions of it in the Renaissance and in recent times. It then distills an emerging schol-arly consensus, that catharsis involves the clarification and habituation of the emotions aroused by cognition of the complex plot. Plato had used katharsis to describe the “intellectual clarification”33 that results from philosophical dialogue, and Aristotle acknowledges this when he identifies “learning” and “inferring” as the source of the pleasure we derive from literary mimesis (1448b). But unlike Plato, Aristotle (especially in the Pol-itics) insists that the emotions are a part of and contribute to learning, an assertion reinforced by his whole account of the complex plot’s ability to arouse emotion. While most commentators focus on tragic catharsis, the process is equally present in comedy and includes both laughter and the realization of the nature and bounds of indignation. Ultimately, the best ideas for understanding the catharsis of indignation occur in the plays.

In each of the three parts, these ideas are subsequently applied to read-ings of Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour and Epicoene, and Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and Measure for Measure. Mac-ilente, the acerbic satirist in Every Man Out, urges the audience to share his violent indignation toward the play’s humours characters, but after tricking them all, he undergoes a sudden catharsis of the self- interested envy that taints his indignation. In Epicoene, Jonson uses Dauphine’s envy to censure the lack of indignation and cathartic intention in True-wit and Clerimont’s hoaxes. Even though he lacks Jonson’s satirical edge and ever-present designs on his audience, Shakespeare also incorporates indignation, error, and catharsis into his comic structure. In Much Ado, Claudio’s wild indignation at Hero and Friar Francis’s attempt to trick him out of it inadvertently brings Beatrice and Benedick to comprehend the place of genuinely righteous indignation and the limits given it by pity. The Friar-Duke in Measure for Measure arouses Angelo’s and Isabella’s self-righteous indignation toward error in order to clarify to them pity’s necessary relationship to indignation. These plays thus demonstrate a va-riety of ways in which catharsis, the end of drama, results directly from the comic hoax and involves both the audience’s and characters’ experi-ence of the pain of indignation and their comprehension of its relationship to the related emotions of envy and pity.

Indeed, each of the comedic categories that this book examines – error and hoax, indignation, and catharsis – not only contributes to the plea-sure characters and audience feel in and in response to comedy, but para-doxically implies that a degree of emotional pain is a prerequisite for the genre. Clerimont, one of Jonson’s young wits in Epicoene, flippantly de-scribes the hoax he and his comrades play on the sullen old Morose as a

Introduction 13

“comedy of affliction,” but the phrase becomes a remarkable assessment of the means of the genre employed consistently by both Jonson and Shakespeare.34 These comedies, each in a very different way, turn upon moments of affliction, which in turn results in the comic end set out by Aristotle. This book tracks this paradox of comic pain as an important subtheme throughout.

As can be deduced from this synopsis, one of this book’s implicit assertions is that Shakespeare’s and Jonson’s comedies have a surpris-ing amount in common with each other. Both authors not only employ hoaxes to expose comic error, but see those hoaxes as a microcosm of the whole concept of plot, using them metadramatically to investigate this parallel. Both locate indignation in their characters and evoke it in their audience; both are keenly interested in the emotion’s moral nature and use, and its relationship to the related emotions of envy and pity. Finally, both aim to combine emotion and cognition to bring about ca-tharsis: Jonson especially in his audience; Shakespeare, in his characters. Aristotle’s essential categories of comedy, then, prove equally relevant to dramatists that are most often opposed to each other on precisely such matters of form and affect, a fact that suggests the breadth, flexibility, and ultimately, the veracity, of that newly recovered theory.

Notes 1 Jonson, Discoveries, 584. All subsequent quotations will be cited paren-

thetically in the text. 2 For fuller accounts of the Poetics’ history, see Cave, “The Afterlife of the

Poetics” and Halliwell, Aristotle’s “Poetics,” Chapter 10, on which my summary draws.

3 Halliwell, Aristotle’s “Poetics,” 296. These remarks form part of Halliwell’s brief survey of the Cinquecento’s rhetorical emphasis in the study of poetics. For more exhaustive accounts, see especially Bernard Weinberg, Italian Re-naissance, Chapters 3, 4, and 9, and also Marvin T. Herrick, Fusion.

4 Halliwell, Aristotle’s “Poetics,” 297. This result is similarly lamented by Weinberg.

5 Ibid. 6 Janko, “Aristotelian Mean,” 343. 7 Halliwell, Aristotle’s “Poetics,” 196. 8 Ibid., 300. Something similar occurred with understandings of Aristotle’s

term ēthos. It both identifies characters in the drama and refers to the choices that each makes; character for Aristotle is thus inextricably re-lated to action. Italian commentators, however, consistently translated the term with the Latin mores – “manners” or “morals.” The result, explains Daniel Javitch, is that the category “thereby acquires the sense of ‘character traits’…and becomes associated with the delineation of exemplary moral types” (“Assimilation,” 57).

9 See Bernays, “Aristotle on the Effect of Tragedy.” 10 Aristotle, Poetics, 1450b. The translation is Richard Janko’s; unless other-

wise noted, subsequent quotations are from this translation and are cited parenthetically in the text (and as here) by Bekker numbers.

11 Halliwell, Translation and Commentary, 107.

14 Introduction

12 Whalley, “On Translating Aristotle’s Poetics,” 25. 13 Weinberg, “Pseudo-Aristotle,” 100–101. 14 Halliwell, Aristotle’s “Poetics,” 298. 15 For example, Richard Hardin (“Encountering Plautus,” 812ff) has recently

claimed that verisimilitude was a principle “carried over from Aristotle’s statements on tragedy” to the criticism of comedy in the Renaissance.

16 Castelvetro, “Poetics,” 354. 17 The unity of time is derived from Poetics 1449b, where, contrasting epic

with tragedy, Aristotle simply observes that “tragedy attempts as far as possible to keep within one revolution of the sun.” Though Greek tragedy often kept loosely to a unity of place, the principle is never mentioned in the Poetics. For a survey of the development of the “Three Unities” doctrine, see Butcher, Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry, 289–301.

18 Weinberg, “Pseudo-Aristotle,” 101. 19 It is now generally assumed that Shakespeare would have been capable of

reading the Italian and Latin commentaries available in his time (though there is no direct evidence that he did). See Shaheen, “Shakespeare’s Knowledge of Italian,” for an opinion on the topic described by his title. Baldwin’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke remains the standard analysis of Shakespeare’s facility with classical languages.

20 With the exception of Much Ado About Nothing and Measure for Mea-sure, all quotations of Shakespeare’s plays are taken from The Norton Shakespeare and are cited parenthetically in the text by act, scene, and line number.

21 Halliwell, Aristotle’s “Poetics,” 303. 22 In the prologue to Volpone Jonson claims that the play “presents quick

comedy refined / As best critics have designed,” and then explicitly de-fines this “refined” comedy as that which observes “the laws of time, place, and person” (29–30). Indeed, along with Volpone, all of Jonson’s major comedies adhere to the unities of time and place. Elsewhere, he jeers at Shakespeare’s failure to do the same: in Every Man in His Humour, he avers that there will be no “chorus” that “wafts you o’er the seas” to violate the unity of place as does Henry V (Pro. 15).

23 Halliwell, “Introduction,” 20. 24 Classicist Malcolm Heath keeps a running bibliography of Poetics scholar-

ship online at www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~cla6mh/poetics/poetbib.htm. 25 Redwine, Jonson’s Literary Criticism, xxxii. 26 Kastan, “Idea of Tragedy,” 7. 27 Ibid., 13. 28 Rist, “Catharsis as ‘Purgation’,” 138–39. 29 Kastan, “Idea of Tragedy,” 13. 30 Greenblatt, “General Introduction,” 104. 31 Halliwell, Between Ecstasy and Truth, 219–20. 32 Aristotle, Rhetoric, 2.1386b. Subsequent quotations are cited by book and

Bekker numbers parenthetically in the text, and except where noted other-wise, in George Kennedy’s translation.

33 The term is Leon Golden’s (Mimesis 26) and will be discussed below. 34 Jonson, Epicoene, 2.6.36.

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