Ben Jonson in the
Romantic Age
TOM LOCKWOOD
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T. E. Lockwood, 2005
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This book developed out of a suggestion made by Ian Donaldson; in the Ph.D. thesis he then supervised at Cambridge and subsequently my indebtedness to him has been as great as such a thing ever should be. My examiners, Jonathan Bate and Simon Jarvis, helped me to see how that thesis might become a book; both at earlier and later stages, my teachers at Girton College, Juliet Dusinberre, Anne Fernihough, and James Simpson, read parts of my work and showed me how it might be undertaken. As Jonson writes finely inDiscoveries: ‘I thanke those, that have taught me, and will ever.’
At Leeds, David Fairer, Robert Jones, and John Whale have all com-mented on at least one chapter; I am grateful for conversations with Michael Brennan, Martin Butler, and David Lindley; and Paul Ham-mond, besides other kindnesses, helped me to think through the shape and purpose of the book. The comments of David Bevington and my two other (anonymous) readers at Oxford University Press have enabled me to improve my final text; Sophie Goldsworthy and Andrew McNeillie have encouraged me through the process of that improvement. Jacqueline Baker, Tom Perridge, and Jean van Altena have expertly guided the book into print. Any errors that have survived are mine.
I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Arts and Hu-manities Research Board, who funded my doctoral work, and latterly the British Academy, whose award of a Postdoctoral Fellowship has allowed me to complete work on the book. I am grateful also to the Beinecke Lib-rary, Yale University, and the Folger Shakespeare LibLib-rary, Washington, DC, for the award of visiting fellowships that enabled me to work with their collections; the School of English at the University of Leeds has also supported my research.
Marino, California; the John Murray Archive, London, and Mrs Virginia Murray (Archivist); the Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library; the Leeds Library; the National Art Library, London; the National Lib-rary of Scotland, Edinburgh; the Theatre Museum, London; the West Yorkshire Archive Service, Leeds, for the Earl and Countess of Harewood and Trustees of the Harewood House Trust; and York Minster Library. It is a pleasure to thank severally the staff of these and other libraries for the courtesy extended to me during the course of my research.
An earlier version of material presented in Chapters2and6was pub-lished inThe Library; I am grateful to the Council of the Bibliographical Society and the journal’s editor, Oliver Pickering, for permission to use this material.
Without the support of my parents, Chris and Roy, my sister, Rosie, and my brother, Joe, this research would not have been possible; without Beck, though, it would have been miserable; and Daniel has provided a very strong incentive to bring it now to a close.
TomLockwood
Abbreviations and A Note on Texts x
Introduction: Romantic Jonson, Marginal Jonson 1
I THEATRE, CRITICISM, EDITING 13
1. Francis Godolphin Waldron andThe Sad Shepherd, I 15
2. Theatrical Jonson 27
3. Critical Jonson 63
4. Editorial Jonson 95
II ALLUSION AND IMITATION 133
5. Francis Godolphin Waldron andThe Sad Shepherd, II 135
6. Allusive Jonson, I: Coleridge 146
7. Allusive Jonson, II: Coleridge, Southey, and Hartley
Coleridge 178
Conclusion 219
Bibliography 224
1756 The Works of Ben. Jonson, ed. Peter Whalley,7vols. (London: D. Midwinteret al.,1756)
1811 The Dramatic Works of Ben Jonson, ed. Peter Whalley and
Alexander Chalmers (London: John Stockdale,1811)
1816 The Works of Ben Jonson, ed. William Gifford,9vols.
(London: G. and W. Nicolet al.,1816)
BL British Library
Disc. Discoveries
DNB Dictionary of National Biography
F Folio
H&S Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson,
11vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1925–52); u/v and i/j regularized in all quotations
JMA John Murray Archive,50Albermarle Street, London, W1X
4BD
NAL National Art Library
NLS National Library of Scotland
OED Oxford English Dictionary
Q Quarto
Und. The Underwood
UV Ungathered Verse
WYAS West Yorkshire Archives Service, Leeds
Quotations from Jonson’s texts vary their source chapter by chapter, as indicated, in order to give a better sense of Jonson’s changing shapes through the years of my study; if quotation is from an earlier edition, an additional reference to H&S is supplied.
All quotations from Shakespeare follow the text of The Complete
Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1988), unless a particular reading is under discussion, when reference is given according to the Through Line Numbering (TLN) established by Charlton Hinman,The Norton Facsimile: The First Folio of Shakespeare,
With a single exception, discussed below, transcriptions from manu-script sources and from manumanu-script annotations to printed books are givenliteratim, and employ the following conventions:
[-deletion] A reading deleted in the manuscript
\interlineation/ A reading interlined in the manuscript [supplied], sup[plied] Words or letters supplied due to paper loss in
the manuscript
[...] Material omitted in transcription
‘Ben Jonson is surely an exception.’ The assertion is John Thelwall’s, one of many written in the margins of his heavily annotated copy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literariain the years following its publication in 1817.1 It is a comment made within a very specific
set of contexts, by no means all of them Jonsonian: contexts that are social, political, and personal, as well as historical and bibliographical. As the annotation needs to be understood in a given time and a given location, the moment of its inscription in the margins of Thelwall’s copy of theBiographia, it needs also to be located within the contexts of Thelwall’s difficult, changed relations with Coleridge over some twenty years.2 But Thelwall’s contention, ‘Ben Jonson is surely an
exception’, has broader and still largely unexamined force. By locating Jonson in the margin of the Biographia, one of the central texts of the Romantic age but one from which he is otherwise excluded, the marginal interjection is emblematic of a larger truth: that for too long, Jonson has been thought different from his contemporaries and successors in having no influence upon the literary culture of the Romantic age. His presence, when allowed at all, is assumed apparently to be precisely exceptional.
Is a Romantic Jonson merely, as here literally, a marginal Jonson? Where Shakespeare’s influence is everywhere, part of the very constitution of Romantic life (and its political and social texts), Jonson has been thought absent;3where Donne, his exact contemporary, was recovered by Romantic readers, Lamb and Coleridge among them, Jonson has
1 Burton R. Pollin and Redmond Burke, ‘John Thelwall’s Marginalia in a Copy of
Coleridge’sBiographia Literaria’,Bulletin of the New York Public Library,74(1970),73–94.
2 Nicholas Roe, ‘Coleridge and John Thelwall: The Road to Nether Stowey’, in Richard
Gravil and Molly Lefebure, eds.,The Coleridge Connection: Essays for Thomas Macfarland (Basingstoke: Macmillan,1990),60–80; Thelwall as an annotator is further discussed in David Fairer, ‘ ‘‘A little sparring about Poetry’’: Coleridge and Thelwall, 1796–8’,The Coleridge Bulletin,ns 21(2003),20–33.
3 The sentiment is that of Austen’s complacent Henry Crawford (Mansfield Park,
been thought to languish abandoned.4 Spenser and Milton, to take a
different pair of poets, have also been felt to be at the established centre of Romantic writing’s relations to its literary past.5Not only is Jonson unlike his contemporaries and near-contemporaries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (so we have been told), but he differs from them further in remaining bounded by his times into the past, not part of the ongoing process whereby later writers fashion their own voices from and against those of their predecessors. Anne Barton’s tightly localized account of ‘The Road from Penshurst: Wordsworth, Ben Jonson and Coleridge in 1802’ is itself exceptional in allowing that Jonson was available to Romantic writers as a precursor from whom to learn and depart.6This study moves on from Barton’s article to argue that Jonson’s
impact in the Romantic age stands in need of reconsideration: I seek to show that Jonson, far from being ignored, was widely and variously performed, read, edited, and rewritten in the Romantic age; and that, far from keeping Jonson to one side of our accounts of that age, we should allow that his apparent marginalization obscures a variety of mode, location, and response that, once recovered, refocuses our understanding both of Jonson and of those who later engaged with him. Jonson is a point across which dramatic, critical, editorial, and literary energies pass in this period; those energies are often politically inflected; and Jonson himself is refigured in their passing.
Coleridge wrote in theBiographiathat ‘the Ancients’ and ‘the elder dramatists of England and France’ did not seek merely ‘to make us laugh’ in comedy, ‘much less to make us laugh by wry faces, accidents of jargon, slang phrases for the day, or the clothing of common-place morals in metaphors drawn from the shops or mechanic occupations of their characters’. This, the remark that prompted Thelwall to inscribe
4 Compare John T. Shawcross, ‘Opulence and Iron Pokers: Coleridge and Donne’,
John Donne Journal,4(1985),201–24; and Anthony John Harding, ‘ ‘‘Against the stream upwards’’: Coleridge’s Recovery of John Donne’, in Lisa Low and Anthony John Harding, eds.,Milton, the Metaphysicals, and Romanticism(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994),204–20.
5 On Spenser, compare Greg Kucich,Keats, Shelley, and Romantic Spenserianism
(Uni-versity Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State Uni(Uni-versity Press,1991), and Jack Lynch,The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2003),122–42; on Milton, a much wider field, compare J. A. Wittreich, jun.,The Romantics on Milton: Formal Essays and Critical Asides(Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press,1970), and Lucy Newlyn,Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader(Oxford: Oxford University Press,1993).
6 Anne Barton, ‘The Road from Penshurst: Wordsworth, Ben Jonson and Coleridge in
Jonson’s exceptionality in the margins of his copy, had first been printed (by sheer oversight) once already earlier in the Biographia, and before that eight years previously in the pages ofThe Friend.7 But Coleridge’s
repeated statement and Thelwall’s awkward annotation are themselves located in a longer pattern of responses to Jonson. In the Epilogue to the second part ofThe Conquest of Granada, acted in1671and printed a year later, John Dryden recalled an earlier, pre-Restoration standard of theatrical achievement:
They who have best succeeded on the stage Have still conformed their genius to their age. Thus Jonson did mechanic humour show, When men were dull, and conversation low. When comedy was faultless, but ’twas coarse: Cob’s tankard was a jest, and Otter’s horse.8
Cob, the waterbearer of Jonson’sEvery Man In his Humour, and Tom Otter, the wife-pecked admirer of drinking vessels fromEpicœne, here stand as exemplars of Jonson’s faultless but coarse achievements; but as they demonstrate the conformity of Jonson’s ‘genius’ to his age, so they also serve to confine him to it. The ‘mechanic humour’ of Cob and Otter is a matter not only of occupation but of dramatic form; so too do they stand emblematically for the social worlds presented in Jonson’s comedies: the emergent and increasingly crowded London of the revisedEvery Man InandEpicœne. Dryden had three years earlier given the weighted adjectivemechanicto Neander inAn Essay of Dramatic
Poesywhereby to describe Jonson’s dramatic writings: ‘Humour was his
proper Sphere, and in that he delighted most to represent Mechanick people.’9To take the measure of Neander’s usage, think, contrastively,
of the city and its inhabitants in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the ‘crew of patches, rude mechanicals | That work for bread upon Athenian stalls’ (iii. ii.9–10). Unlike the Shakespearean example, which describes and locates only a group of characters, Dryden’smechanicslides between describing a character’s employment within the play world and
7 Samuel Taylor Coleridge,Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate,
2vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,1983), ii.186and46;idem, The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke,2vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,1969), ii.217(7Dec.1809).
8 John Dryden, ‘Epilogue to the Second Part’, ll.1–6, fromThe Conquest of Granada,
inThe Poems of John Dryden, ed. Paul Hammond and David Hopkins, 4vols. (Har-low: Longman,1995– ), i.243.
9 John Dryden, An Essay of Dramatic Poesy, in The Works of John Dryden, ed.
describing the dramatist’s construction of that play world on the stage; the adjective oscillates between qualifying the society staged by the drama and the construction of the characters and the drama itself. Jonson’s ‘mechanic humour’ and ‘mechanic people’ are conformably suited: a local observation becomes, by analogy, a measure by which to disparage Jonson’s larger achievement.10The connection made by Thelwall in1817
in the margins of Coleridge’s Biographia therefore reunites Dryden’s adjective with its subject; and when, as I discuss in Chapter5, William Hazlitt in the following year takes upmechanicalto engage with Jonson and his editor, William Gifford, we see merely the continuation of a longer pattern of attention. Repetitions of this kind, not merely fortuitous, signal instead the connections between Romantic responses to Jonson and those of the periods that preceded them. My study emphasizes, that is, not a break or fissure between earlier and Romantic Jonsons but the continuities between them and his re-creations in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century.
Moreover, such a pattern, itself not previously recognized, has also its own ironic Jonsonian beginnings. In ‘An Expostulation with Inigo Jones’, written in1631in the fall-out occasioned by the printed text of
Love’s Triumph through Callipolis, Jonson had banished his one-time
collaborator from the exalted confines of the court masque to the less exclusive world of the public theatre: ‘Pack wth your pedling Poetry to the
Stage,|This is yemoney-gett, Mechanick Age!’11Jones, as Jonson attacks him, is emblematic of everything from which he dissociates himself: not a poet but a peddler of texts as small goods, drawing them, like Shakespeare’s Autolycus or the ‘Mountebank’ of Jonson’s own poem, from his pack to hawk around; a participant not in the elegant economies of the court masque but in those, less genteel, of the stage and the public theatre. That Jonson himself would write only one further masque, Chloridia, for the court in London, before himself returning to the public stage withThe Magnetic Ladyin1632only emphasizes the characteristic reverse that attends on themechanicalJonson: that from which he sought to keep himself separate and by which he sought to distinguish his own writing from that of his contemporaries returns to limit and to mock his own ambitions.Mechanic, on one reading, serves narrowly to measure his achievement in later years.
10 A habit that Ian Donaldson has observed elsewhere: ‘Damned by Analogies; or, How
to Get Rid of Ben Jonson’,Gambit,6(1972),38–46.
But on one reading only—and most likely not Jonson’s. In his commonplace book,Discoveries, Jonson showed a faith that the verdicts of posterity would rectify those contemporary judgements that undervalued a writer’s work:
In the meane time perhaps hee is call’d barren, dull, leane, a poore Writer (or by what contumelious word can come in their cheeks) by these men, who without labour, judgement, knowledge, or almost sense, are received, or preferr’d before him. He gratulates them, and their fortune. An other Age, or juster men, will acknowledge the vertues of his studies.12
Jonson’s faith itself has classical sanction: as it offers solace to other, fu-ture poets, so does the passage inDiscoveriesrecall and thus congratulate two passages from Quintilian.13 An ‘other age’ and a ‘juster man’ have
here indeed found in Quintilian precisely ‘vertues’ worth repeating and preserving; they anticipate a like-minded future return to Jonson. This faith in posterity—his own and others’—has appeared typically Jonso-nian and, less expectedly, by anticipation Romantic: Ian Donaldson and Andrew Bennett have both recently explored Jonson’s afterlife and his im-pact on the afterlives of other writers.14Accounts agree, however, on the ironies of Jonson’s faith: too often, unlike the writer imagined in Discov-eries, he found himself praised during his lifetime but increasingly less so thereafter. By1759, in the emblematic account offered by Edward Young in hisConjectures on Original Composition, Jonson’s classicism obscures not only his tragedies but his whole career; he is not covered in classical glory, but entirely covered by it: ‘Blind to the nature of Tragedy, he pulled down all antiquity on his head, and buried himself under it; we see nothing ofJohnson, nor indeed, of his admired (but also murdered) antients.’15
As understanding of Jonson, in the capacious, admiring sense envis-aged in Discoveries, in fact appears to diminish as time passes, so, yet more cruelly, does critical attention to that history of his incorpora-tion and rejecincorpora-tion by later writers.The Jonson Allusion-Bookedited by
12 Disc.,781–7: H&S viii.587.
13 Quintilian,Institutio Oratoria,ii. xii.11,12andii. v.8–10: Loeb Classical Library,
trans. Donald A. Russell,5vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,2001).
14 Ian Donaldson, ‘ ‘‘Not of an Age’’: Jonson, Shakespeare, and the Verdicts of
Pos-terity’, in hisJonson’s Magic Houses: Essays in Interpretation(Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1997),180–97; Andrew Bennett,Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1999),28–9; and, taking a different point of comparison, Ian Donaldson, ‘Perishing and Surviving: The Poetry of Donne and Jonson’,Essays in Criticism,
51(2001),68–85.
15 Conjectures on Original Composition(1759), in D. H. Craig, ed.,Ben Jonson: The
J. F. Bradley and J. Q. Adams (published in1922) covers only the period
1597to 1700, while Robert Gayle Noyes’s account ofBen Jonson on the English Stage(1935) closes its coverage at1776.16Whatever may be its other
failings, G. E. Bentley’sShakespeare and Jonson: Their Reputations in the Seventeenth Century Compared(1945) did not pursue the late eighteenth-century record that Noyes had broached;17and though Herford and the
Simpsons’ account of Jonson’s ‘Literary Record’ assays a broader span, at its close it moves, with a rapidity that does not elsewhere characterize their meticulous work, from Pope (1728) to Swinburne (1882) in a mere five pages.18More recently, although Ejner J. Jensen’sBen Jonson’s Com-edies on the Modern Stage(1985) offered a valuable if partial discussion of Jonson’s nineteenth-century reception,19D. H. Craig’s otherwise
ad-mirableCritical Heritagevolume does not advance beyond1798, a date whose significance I discuss in Chapter4below.
But why should it matter that our existing accounts are so partial? In The Classic, Frank Kermode described, with a fine phrase, ‘the temporal agencies of survival’, the most important of those agencies being, he suggested, ‘a more or less continuous chorus of voices asserting the value of the classic’.20Jonson has had his choristers, certainly—Byron called
him ‘a Scholar & a Classic’—and at more than one dinner party in his old age (if James Howell’s report to Thomas Hawkins is to be believed) seemed all too keen, in singing his own praises, to anticipate the later harmonies.21
But the chorus asserting Jonson’s value has been discontinuous: he was not consistently, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a Romantic classic. Rather, his situation more closely resembles that of Donne, discussed by Kermode inForms of Attention, as an example of
16 J. F. Bradley and J. Q. Adams,The Jonson Allusion-Book: A Collection of Allusions
to Ben Jonson from1597–1700(New Haven: Yale University Press,1922); Robert Gayle Noyes,Ben Jonson on the English Stage,1600–1776(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,1935).
17 G. E. Bentley,Shakespeare and Jonson: Their Reputations in the Seventeenth Century
Compared,2vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1945); Bentley’s methodology and conclusions were challenged by D. L. Frost, ‘Shakespeare in the Seventeenth Century’, Shakespeare Quarterly,16(1965),81–9; further reviews of, and additions to, Bentley’s work are listed by Craig, ed.,Critical Heritage,579.
18 H&S xi.305–569.
19 Ejner J. Jensen,Ben Jonson’s Comedies on the Modern Stage(Ann Arbor: UMI Research
Press,1985),7–25.
20 Frank Kermode,The Classic(London: Faber,1975),117.
21 Byron to John Murray,4Jan.1821:Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand,
a writer who has been lost from and then recovered to the canon.22It
is this doubtful space between the classic and the canonical, so usefully delineated by Kermode, that Jonson occupies in the period I consider, and which I seek here to explore for the first time. It is a period during which the distance between Jonson’s own self-conception and later responses to him play against one another. Scholars have been increasingly less willing to attribute to Jonson the clenched singleness of purpose in life, text, and career that earlier generations emphasized; rather, they have sought to emphasize his regular non-uniformity, the variety, mobility, and change within his career. If this is a contemporary Jonson, in Martin Butler’s phrase ‘genuinely inconsistent in his habits’, the many Romantic Jonsons—varied, contested, mobile—help us further to appreciate the diversity within his work and the diversity within the cultures that responded to him.23
Jonson in the Romantic age is a writer consistent in his inconsistency: responses to him cover the full range of his writings in drama, in poetry, in the masque, and in prose; they do so in ways that, rather than obscure the differences within and between his texts, alert readers to them. From Romantic margins, aspects of Jonson look different; so too, from Jonsonian margins, do aspects of the writing of the Romantic age. With such a changing account of Jonson and Jonson’s presence in mind, I use the terms ‘Jonson’ and ‘Romantic’ with a sense always that they are under taxonomic pressure: I use them as ways to produce knowledge, not with a settled conviction that they already describe a secure, pre-existing state of knowledge. As Jonson is reshaped by the responses of the period, so too is our sense of a ‘Romantic’ Jonson under pressure from others that exist alongside him: a Georgian Jonson, stressing a continuity of response across the period, or a Regency Jonson, allying him with a particular social and political context. Although the consideration of that difficult, retrospective phenomenon, Romanticism, is proper to the study of a particular set of aesthetic, cultural, and political formations, it is not directly my aim here;24rather, I aim to juxtapose many different Jonsons,
22 Frank Kermode,Forms of Attention(Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1985),
70–2.
23 Martin Butler, ‘The Riddle of Jonson’s Chronology Revisited’,The Library,7th ser.,4
(2003),49–63; compare also David L. Gants, ‘The Printing, Proofing and Press-Correction of Ben Jonson’s FolioWorkes’, in Martin Butler, ed.,Re-Presenting Ben Jonson: Text, History, Performance(Basingstoke: Macmillan,1999),39–58.
24 See Seamus Perry, ‘Romanticism: The Brief History of a Concept’, in Duncan Wu,
between the years1776and1850, to study the points of fit between these varying accounts of him and his writing, and to see how the many varied constructions of ‘Jonson’ engage and interact. Accordingly, I employ the adjective ‘Romantic’ pragmatically, and with a consciousness of its provisionality, in the hope that it can serve, as organizing concepts ought, to facilitate our discovery of the more detailed picture to which it must always be false: if it can never itself be fixed, we can use it as a means whereby to work towards an understanding of other, more local, historical effects of writing.25Many of the figures discussed in the later chapters gain entry into accounts of the Romantic only as they are excluded from it, either chronologically or politically: those Georgian writers of the late eighteenth century, like F. G. Waldron, who live on through the first decades of the nineteenth; or the circle of Tory, Regency Jonsonians gathered around William Gifford, editor of The Quarterly Review. My purpose in examining their relations with Jonson in the years between1776and1850is not to claim them, for the first time, as having been as ‘Romantic’ as (say) Coleridge all along; rather, it is to bring their examples, and Jonson’s, up against an understanding of a historical period, and the currents of writing, thought, and politics at work within it, that can give us a new purchase on both the Romantic age and Jonson’s place within it.
In the following pages I offer detailed historicized readings in Jon-son’s reception, readings that are attentive not only to his texts, but equally to his performers, readers, and editors; as I attend to their di-verse roles in the continued construction of his works, so do I also seek to explore the conditions under which they encountered him. In this account of Jonson’s reception I employ, and seek to benefit from, the contextual understandings of literary production developed in the still fresh work of D. F. McKenzie26and Jerome J. McGann.27 Both
McKenzie and McGann advocate a socialized concept of authorship
25 In this I follow Iain McCalman’s lead in his ‘Introduction’ toAn Oxford Companion
to the Romantic Age: British Culture,1776–1832(Oxford: Oxford University Press,1999),
1–11.
26 See particularly D. F. McKenzie, ‘Typography and Meaning: The Case of William
Congreve’, in Giles Barber and Bernhard Fabian, eds.,The Book and the Book Trade in Eighteenth-Century Europe(Hamburg: Hauswedell,1981),81–125;idem, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1999); and the essays collected inidem, Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays, ed. Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez, SJ (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press,2002).
27 See esp. Jerome J. McGann,A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism(Chicago:
and textual authority, whereby the material conditions of a work’s pro-duction and reception—not only its purely bibliographical codes, but the material, social, economic, and ideological networks within which it comes into being—are used to illuminate its meaning within its originary and subsequent horizons.28Jonson, I argue, was located and
constructed within networks of attention and affiliation in the years after
1776that our current accounts do not adequately recognize. These net-works are both the product and the evidence of shared, sociable modes of performance, reading, and printing: properly to understand Jonson’s reception we must read not only the works in which he was received but understand their points of fit with the contexts—institutional, political, and intellectual—in which they were located. To do so is to take up the invitation to reconsider from a fresh historical viewpoint both Jonson and the concept of Romantic sociability articulated by Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite.29
Ben Jonson in the Romantic Age is a two-part exploration. Part I of
my study explores three linked contexts for Jonson’s reception in the Romantic age: his place in the theatre, in criticism, and as he was edited. Part II explores allusive, imaginative responses to Jonson. In both parts I introduce the concerns at issue by analysing in detail the same work, Francis Godolphin Waldron’s edition and continuation of Jonson’sThe
Sad Shepherd (1783), under the complementary aspects that unite my
account. The first of these discussions of Waldron andThe Sad Shepherd in Chapter1takes his work as a point of entry into the three linked chapters of Part I: ‘Theatrical Jonson’, ‘Critical Jonson’, and ‘Editorial Jonson’. As I argue in greater detail in Chapter2, Jonson maintained a presence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century theatre far livelier and more various than has previously been recognized. In my discussion of ‘Theatrical Jonson’ I offer a new account of his place on the English stage, drawing out not only a new history of productions of his plays but also his importance as a figure of theatrical legitimacy in the period. The chapter takes the measure both of a perceived Romantic antitheatricality (and its Jonsonian affinities) and, at the same time, the
Historical Method and Inquiry(Oxford: Clarendon Press,1985); andidem, The Textual Condition(Princeton: Princeton University Press,1991).
28 The differences between McKenzie and McGann, downplayed here, are trenchantly
discussed by G. Thomas Tanselle, ‘Textual Criticism and Literary Sociology’,Studies in Bibliography,44(1991),83–143.
29 Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite, eds.,Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary
real but little recognized place of Jonson on the Romantic stage. In doing so I seek to question the relationship proposed by N. W. Bawcutt between ‘The Revival of Elizabethan Drama and the Crisis of Romantic Drama’, a relation that sees the two in hostility to one another as he argues that a critical engagement with the texts replaced a theatrical engagement with them; I seek also to supplement Donald J. Rulfs’s valuable but partial account of early modern plays on the Romantic stage.30 In Chapter3,
‘Critical Jonson’, I chart responses to Jonson from Warton’sHistoryand Johnson’sLivesthrough until1840. As well as (again) arguing that Jonson was much more frequently engaged with than we have previously realized, I seek to demonstrate that such responses are involved much more in an ongoing debate with one another; at the same time, I seek to emphasize the radical new departure marked in1808by Octavius Gilchrist in his An Examination of the Charges Maintained by Messrs. Malone, Chalmers and Others, of Ben Jonson’s Enmity & c. Towards Shakspeareand Charles Lamb in hisSpecimens of English Dramatic Poets, Who Lived About the Time of Shakspeare. Chapter4, ‘Editorial Jonson’, concerns the making and reception of William Gifford’s nine-volume,1816edition of Jonson’s Works. I offer a detailed historicized account of how Gifford’s edition came into being within its political and social context, drawing on his unpublished correspondence with Gilchrist, Scott, Canning, and others: by relating the edition’s concern with Jonsonian friendship to Gifford’s own friendships, I seek to situate its presentation of Jonson within a historically rich framework. Later in the chapter I discuss William Hazlitt’s responses to Jonson and his editor through Jonson’s tragedy Sejanus: I argue that Hazlitt, far from endorsing the claims for Jonsonian friendship made by the edition, reads it instead politically, finding in Gifford’s Tory associations with George Canning a model of political corruption that he understands through Jonson’s texts.
But as the forms in which writers are received are various, so have I quite positively sought to embrace a variety of methodological approaches in my work. Besides, therefore, inclusive accounts of Jonson’s theatrical, critical, and editorial reception in Part I, I therefore offer in Part II a series of close, contextual readings in allusive and adaptive relationships with Jonson in the Romantic age. This work, whose conceptual underpinnings
30 N. W. Bawcutt, ‘The Revival of Elizabethan Drama and the Crisis of Romantic
Drama’, in R. T. Davies and B. G. Beatty, eds.,Literature of the Romantic Period,1750–1850 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press,1976),96–113; Donald J. Rulfs, ‘Reception of the Elizabethan Playwrights on the London Stage1776–1833’,Studies in Philology,46(1949),
I discuss in Chapter5, with Waldron andThe Sad Shepherdagain my point of entry, seeks a historically serviceable analogy for the understanding of allusion to Jonson in the economic concerns of the early nineteenth century. In Chapter6, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge as my focus, I offer this understanding as a counterpart to Christopher Ricks’s valuable formulation of ‘The Poet as Heir’;31in Chapter7, I continue this enquiry
by discussing the influence of Jonson on Coleridge’s imaginative relations with Robert Southey, and the impact of his Jonsonian criticism on Hartley Coleridge. This methodologically varied work helps to enrich our appreciation of Jonson’s variety in the period: Coleridge’s example is important precisely because he thinks at some distance from those writers discussed in Part I, thereby forcing upon us the necessity of accommodating divergent material to our understanding.
Jonson was available to writers of the Romantic age in more ways than we have previously been willing to grant. Yes, Wordsworth did find in Jonson’s Prologue to the revised folioEvery Man in his Humourthe resonant phrase ‘deeds, and language, such as men do use’, an important precedent for the ‘selection of language really used by men’ described in the Preface toLyrical Ballads(1802).32But so too did William Blake’s
earliest critics look to Jonson as a point of comparison, finding an ‘accord’ between the two poets ‘not in the words nor in the subject...
but in the style of thought, and...the date of the expression’; Frederick
Tatham, in his ‘Life of Blake’, praised Blake’s early lyrics as ‘equal to Ben Johnson’.33And how, if Jonson is to remain marginal to our accounts of the Romantic age, are we to account for moments such as this in Keats’s letter to Fanny Brawne of February1820, where difficulties with his pen coincide delightfully with a practical engagement with Jonson?
The fault is in the Quill: I have mended it and still it is very much inclin’d to make blind es. However these last lines are in a much better style of penmanship thof [sic] a little disfigured by the smear of black currant jelly; which has made a little mark on one of the Pages of Brown’s Ben Jonson, the very best book he has.
31 Christopher Ricks, ‘Dryden and Pope’, in hisAllusion to the Poets(Oxford: Oxford
University Press,2002),9–42, revised from first publication as ‘Allusion: The Poet as Heir’, in R. F. Brissenden and J. C. Eade, eds.,Studies in the Eighteenth Century III, (Canberra: Australian National University Press,1976),209–40.
32 W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, eds.,The Prose Works of William
Wordsworth,3vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1974), i.123.
33 B. H. Malkin,A Father’s Memoirs of his Child(1806), and Tatham, ‘Life of Blake’
I have lick’d it but it remains very purple—I did not know whether to say purple or blue, so in the mixture of the thought wrote purplue[.]34
More is happening in Jonson’s Romantic margins and the Jonsonian margins of the Romantic age than has yet been adequately accounted for. Jonson mixes with the thought and the textuality of the Romantic age, not always as physically or as tastily as in Keats’s example, but often as vitally; if there is no ‘On Sitting Down to ReadCatilineOnce Again’ in the period, there are many less well-remembered readings that are no less energizing. Gifford, Hazlitt, and Coleridge still seem to me, as they have to other scholars, the key readers of Jonson within the period, with whom we must engage.35But the connections between their accounts are
closer and more interesting than previous discussion has allowed: only by attending to the fine individual detail of Jonson’s reception can we hope to comprehend the larger picture that it forms; and it is a smaller figure, Francis Godolphin Waldron, to whom I turn first.
34 The Letters of John Keats,1814–1821, ed. H. E. Rollins,2vols. (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press,1958), ii.262.
35 See, e.g., Robert C. Evans, ‘Jonson’s Critical Heritage’, in Richard Harp and Stanley
I
Francis Godolphin Waldron
and
The Sad Shepherd
, I
Francis Godolphin Waldron’s1783edition and continuation of Jonson’s incomplete, late pastoralThe Sad Shepherdis a rich, if largely unexamined, event in the history of responses to Jonson.1It is founded on, and in turn
reaches towards, longer continuities; these continuities are theatrical, critical, and editorial, as they are also social, having to do with other affinities, among them patterns of friendship. Waldron’s publication anticipates and later participates in a renewal of interest in Jonson’s writings through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; and in discussing it, I consider not only its place within the broad variety of interests returned by Jonson in the period, but equally how its own multiplicity offers a valuable entry point into these larger patterns of attention.2 For only by accounting fully for the range and delicate connectedness of Waldron’s engagement with Jonson can we begin to address the larger questions with which study of a writer’s reception must be concerned: questions of how one literary culture engages with the writings of another. By attending in detail to the surviving copies of Waldron’s Sad Shepherd, particularly those three surviving copies annotated by Waldron in the years after publication, I look to offer a materially aware account of his work. Such an account, drawing on printed books, manuscripts, marginalia, playbills, reviews, and correspondence, offers us the means fully to understand the interests and affiliations shaping Waldron’s work and, consequently, that of his friends and collaborators: the means towards an understanding of Jonson’s reception that is, in D. F. McKenzie’s phrase, aware not only of the ‘technical but the social processes’ by which his texts were
1 F. G. Waldron,The Sad Shepherd; or, A Tale of Robin Hood, a Fragment
(Lon-don: J. Nichols,1783).
2 I take this important term from Frank Kermode,Forms of Attention (Chicago:
transmitted in the Romantic age.3 By allowing that the margins of
Jonson’s texts in the Romantic age, both physically and canonically, are a space not of irrelevance, but of debate and activity, we allow also that he had an impact upon the writings of that age.4
Waldron’sSad Shepherdis a text characterized by addition. After the Dedication and Preface, a sequential reader moves from a text of the three extant acts of Jonson’s play, with annotations at the foot of the page reprinted from Peter Whalley’s edition, through Waldron’s continuation and conclusion, to a series of ‘Supplemental Notes to Mr. Whalley’s Edi-tion’, and, once through these closely printed pages, on to a substantial ‘Appendix’ of miscellaneous additional notes; ‘Additions and Correc-tions’, some in effect new notes altogether, occupy the final three pages. A brisk, quantitative flick through the book indicates that Jonson’s short, incomplete pastoral occupies something amounting to only slightly more than one-fifth of its pages, and that, by contrast, the apparatus by which
The Sad Shepherdis variously annotated, continued, and supplemented
bulks disproportionately large.5 That process of addition did not stop
with print publication, however: Waldron continued to add to copies of the book in manuscript, for a variety of purposes, through the rest of his life. Some of these additions were for copies of the book presented to others: that given to the Shakespeare editor George Steevens, for instance, in which he corrected errata and expanded the volume’s annotation with long manuscript additions.6Presented to Steevens with Waldron’s ‘most
respectful compliments’, this elaborately annotated presentation copy has its place in, and allows us partially to retrieve, a social economy of scholarly exchange, both literal and intellectual: the copy instantiates an interchange among, rather than an opposition between, Jonsonian and Shakespearean editorial traditions. In two other copies ofThe Sad
3 D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press,1999),13.
4 Marginalia ‘constitute’ a developing field of study: see Beth Lau, ‘Keats and the Practice
of Romantic Marginalia’,Romanticism,2(1996),40–53; [Nicolas Barker], ‘The Annotated Book’,The Book Collector,47(1998),161–75; H. J. Jackson,Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books(New Haven: Yale University Press,2001); [Nicolas Barker], ‘Marginalia’,The Book Collector,52(2003),11–30.
5 This mode was typical of Waldron’s other dramatic writings also:The Virgin Queen
(London: the author,1797), is a sequel toThe Tempest; an unpublished continuation of Massinger’sThe Parliament of Love, presented to William Gifford (dated8July1805), is now bound with the incomplete manuscript of that play, NAL Dyce MS39.
6 The copy is now BL643.g.15.(1); this, and the other annotated copies referred to in this
Shepherd that Waldron retained for his own use, now in the British Library and the Dyce collection of the National Art Library, he employed marginalia not only as a way of personalizing the text, but of keeping it current, transcribing into the margins and interleaves a variety of notes that I explore further in what follows.
This chapter, then, locates Waldron’sSad Shepherdwithin theatrical, critical, and editorial contexts, the three focuses of Part I of this book; I return to Waldron’s example at the start of Part II to think through in greater detail the ways in which Waldron’s continuation provides a point of entry into a broader enquiry about the place of Jonsonian allusion in our understanding of Romantic writing. The very variety of attention that Waldron directs at Jonson and at his own writing serves to emphasize the mobility and the interest of Jonson in the Romantic age.
I
Waldron (1744–1818) was a man of the theatre before he was ever a writer. In a letter to the antiquary Francis Douce of26January1811, Waldron described himself, with a histrionic flourish, as ‘the retired veteran of forty years service, in the battles of old Drury;\part of the time/under the renowned generalGarrick!’7 Stephen Jones’s revision of Baker and
Reed’sBiographia Dramatica(1812) offered a fuller account of Waldron’s long and various employments:
waldron, francis godolphin, an actor of very useful, rather than splendid, talents. He belonged to Drury Lane Theatre in the time of Mr. Garrick, by whom he was appointed to take the management of the theatrical fund. He was for a while manager at Windsor, Richmond, and other provincial theatres; and one time carried on the business of a bookseller; for some years he prompted at Mr. Colman’s theatre; from which post, indeed, we did not miss him till three or four seasons ago. Mr. Waldron is somewhat advanced in years, and has probably thought it time to retire into private life. In the dramatic line, he is possessed of extensive knowledge, and has not been inactive as an author.8
7 Bodleian, MS Douce.d.22, fol.36v.
8 Stephen Jones, ed.,Biographia Dramatica; or, A Companion to the Playhouse,3vols
in4(London: Longmanet al.,1812), Ii,731; a shorter account was given in [Anon.],The Thespian Dictionary; or, Dramatic Biography of the Eighteenth Century(London: T. Hurst,
There is a gentle comedy in Jones’s account—partly a matter of its kindly judiciousness in evaluation, partly of its subject’s slipping so undemonstratively from the prompter’s box and view—that is entirely in keeping with what, speaking of Waldron’sSad Shepherd, Jones later characterized as ‘a modesty oftener praised than imitated’.9
Like many of Garrick’s actors, Waldron regularly took parts in revivals of Jonson’s plays; they were, as I argue in greater detail in the following chapter, an expected part of the repertory. In November1775he played Tribulation Wholesome to Garrick’s Drugger in a performance ofThe Alchemistat Drury Lane;10in May1780he stood in for William Parsons as Justice Clement inEvery Man In his Humour, again at Drury Lane.11In December1785he performed as Master Stephen inEvery Man In; in the following year, December1786, he was again Justice Clement in the same play, a role he performed, apparently for the last time but not, on this occasion, in another actor’s place, in May1788.12This theatrical exposure
to Jonson was evident to George Colman, an earlier (anonymous) reviewer of Waldron’sSad ShepherdforThe Monthly Review, even if the continuation was itself unperformed. In this review, which by twentieth-century accounts was apparently Waldron’s only presence in Jonson’s reception history, Colman preserved the cover of anonymity under which Waldron had published.13But he speculated correctly on the basis of the
volume’s dedication to the actor Thomas King, and what he called ‘some extravagant encomiums on other living performers at our theatres’, that its author was likely ‘to be an humble retainer to the stage’.14 Jonson’s ongoing theatrical presence and Waldron’s part in that form one of the vital contexts within which to read The Sad Shepherd in the late eighteenth century.
For all that he handles them delicately, Colman’s review holds and expresses reservations about Waldron’s work, not least the prevalent good humour of the continuation. ‘The sternness and severity of Old
9 Jones, ed.,Biographia Dramatica(1812), iii.236–7.
10 John Genest,Some Account of the English Stage, from the Restoration in1660to1830,10
vols. (Bath: Thomas Rodd,1832), v.482; William Van Lennepet al., eds.,The London Stage, 1660–1800,5pts. in11vols (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press,1960–8), iv.1933.
11 Van Lennepet al., eds.,London Stage, v.298. 12 Ibid. v.853,942,1068.
13 TheMonthly Reviewdid not, advertising a review of ‘Waldron’s Edit. of Jonson’sSad
Shepherd’ (p.48).
14 The Monthly Review,70(1784),48–51; partially reprinted in D. H. Craig, ed.,Ben
Ben’, Colman writes, ‘accords ill with the overflowing good-nature of the imitator, whose chief wish seems to have been to promote the present and future happiness of all his personages, byreformingevery body, and marryingevery body.’15Waldron seems to have been struck particularly
by Colman’s objection that there was no Jonsonian authority for his having introduced into the close of Act III, as he put it, ‘the scene of Robin Hood’s bower...containing the loves of Amie and Karolin, Lionel
and Mellifleur’. We know this because in one of the two copies of his work that he retained, the heavily annotated Dyce copy ofThe Sad Shepherd now in the National Art Library, Waldron underlined and marked with a marginal cross Jonson’s statement: ‘Amie is gladded with the sight of Karol, &c.’16At the foot of the page, and then vertically into the
right-hand margin, Waldron justifies himself (the two passages are connected by his double dagger; the bracketed interpolation is in the original):
X ‘‘His [Jonson’s]Argument to the third actgives no authority for the scene of Robin Hood’s bower in thecontinuation, containing the loves of Amie & Karolin, Lionel & Mellifleur.’’ Monthly Review, Jany. 1784. Quere. Is not the passage marked above some authority for the scene alluded to, which occurs P.66.‡
‡ It is to be observed thatin the mean timebetween the Shepherds going home triumphing &c, and Amie beinggladded with the sight of Karol, the scene of Lorel, Clarion &c occurs.
The objection clearly rankled, and the pains taken here by Waldron to defend his continuation against Colman’s charge are confirmed by the material evidence of the other copy ofThe Sad Shepherdthat he retained and annotated right into the last years of his life. Tipped into this interleaved copy, now in the British Library, is the central printed section of Colman’s review.17 Though not here marking Colman’s objection,
Waldron again cites authority in Jonson’s text for the progress of his continuation: ‘The authority for ‘‘the scene of Robin Hood’s bower, &c.’’ is ‘‘The shepherds—go home &c.’’ ‘‘Amie is gladded with the sight of Karol, &c.’’ See Jonson’s Argument to Act 3.’ The two responses to Colman show Waldron under two aspects: not only as author, taking pride in and defending his own work, but as a scholar, keen to demonstrate the authenticity of his source, and the use made of it. They demonstrate a sharpness in his reading of Jonson perhaps less evident
15 Ibid.70(1784),51.
in the self-confessed amateurism of his critical writing.18 But they also
allow us to recover the margins of Jonson’s texts in the Romantic age as a space of interest, utility, and mobility.
The personal connection between Waldron and Colman, for all the saltiness it adds to the circumstances and opinions of the review, is of less importance than the clarity with which it resituates Jonson and one strand of Jonsonians in the theatre of the late eighteenth century. The popular success, both in print and on the stage, of Garrick’s adaptations ofThe
AlchemistandEvery Man In his Humouris well known: an astonishing
fifteen editions of the latter between1752and1777are surveyed by the adaptations’ most recent editors, amid glowing accounts of the theatrical vitality of his performances.19 Both plays continued to be popular in
print in the1780s and1790s, through into the nineteenth century. But it has been too long thought that Garrick’s retirement in1776and Colman’s chastening experience as a would-be adapter ofEpicœnein the same year mark the end of the period during which Jonson was last fully alive on the stage. I take Colman’sEpicœneas my theatrical point of departure in the following chapter to offer a revisionary account of Jonson’s vitality on the stage in the years between1776and1832.
As they serve to relocate Jonson in relation to the stage, we ought also to be aware of the extent to which Waldron’s marginalia, additions to a text that was already characterized by addition, should also make us aware of the relations between the stage and the page in the period. Chapter2seeks to draw out the fluidity of those relations across this period, a permeability not only of personnel and interests that Waldron’s work extends and exemplifies, but also a spatial permeability in which Jonson is situated in different locations, each with their own relations to one another. Jonson is present in and mediated by the margins of Waldron’s annotatedSad Shepherds, just as he is present on and mediated by the Romantic stage. This relation of textuality and theatricality is vital in the period: here and elsewhere we see precisely how a position of apparent marginality can inform an understanding of Jonson’s more central position in the theatrical, critical, and editorial currents of the time. Garrick again sets the tone. As well as his willingness to mount revivals, his collection of Jonson quartos was of equal importance from the mid-eighteenth
18 Offence, if any was given by the review, cannot have been long-lasting: Waldron’s
Heigho for a Husband! (London: T. Arrowsmith, 1794) was dedicated to Colman (pp. [v]–vi).
19 The Plays of David Garrick, ed. Harry William Pedicord and Frederick Louis Bergmann,
century: by using Garrick’s copy, the editor Peter Whalley was able to addThe Case is Alteredto the canon of Jonson’s gathered plays in1756.20
Indeed, Whalley’s edition had set itself deliberately theatrical tasks, tasks that Waldron’sSad Shepherdlater takes up:
To enter completely into the humour and propriety of Jonson’s characters, we should as it were drop the intervening period, and image to ourselves the manners and customs of the times wherein he lived, that so we may more perfectly comprehend his various references and allusions to them. But as this is a matter of real difficulty, the representation of many of his comedies must fail to produce the same delight in the spectator, as they naturally did when first acted; and therefore a correct edition, with explanatory notes, will give that satisfaction in the reading, which cannot be so well attained, from their performance on the stage. (1756, i. pp. xxiii–xxiv)
When performance—what Whalley calls Garrick’s ‘living explanation’ (1756, i. p. xxiv)—is not accessible, the resources of his library perform an equivalent service to Jonson.21This ideal, and idealized, mental theatre recognizes the extent to which Garrick provided the means whereby performance and study could meet and energize one another. Waldron, if his is (deservedly) a less famous example of the relations between the theatre and scholarship, none the less participates in and benefits from their confluence. The value of Waldron’s work is that it reveals with particular clarity the interconnectedness of the various audiences it addressed, audiences diversely comprised of theatre practitioners, literary scholars, and antiquarians: his example allows us to see that Jonson was circulating in ways that we have not fully appreciated before.
II
If the margins of Waldron’s annotated copies provide a space within which to justify and defend his work, the annotations made there serve
20 The copy is now BL644.b.54: see George M. Kahrl and Dorothy Anderson,The
Garrick Collection of Old English Plays: A Catalogue with an Historical Introduction(London: British Library,1982),165–8. Kahrl and Anderson do not locate Garrick’s copies of the
1616 and1692folio edition of Jonson’sWorks: they are now respectively University of Delaware Library, Special Collections, Folio PR2600.C16 1616(presented to Garrick on9
Mar.1768, as his inscription records, ‘by my esteemed friend Palmer’); and Cambridge University Library, Brett-Smith.a.9(with ‘Amen’ in a hand, possibly Garrick’s, following theLeges Convivales).
21 Whalley acknowledged the use of Garrick’s copy ofEvery Man In(1601) andThe
also to locate his responses to Jonson within a wider span of critical thought, the focus of Chapter3. In the margins of the Dyce copy ofThe
Sad Shepherd, Waldron situates Jonson’s printed text in a manuscript
frame of contemporary criticism. In the crowded margins of the book, Waldron transcribes against the printed text an extravagant array of critical remarks from Davies’sDramatic Miscellanies, Thomas Warton on Spenser, Reed’s edition of Dodsley’sOld Plays, and Philip Neve’sCursory
Remarks; and adds to them literary parallels from Drayton’s
Polyol-bion, Spenser’sThe Faerie Queeneand minor poems, Fletcher’sFaithful Shepherdess, and Milton’sComus. The critical interest in recording the judgements and opinions of others, and the philological and allusive curiosity behind the literary parallels, make of the book—through its prefatory and Jonsonian sections and on into the continuation—a per-sonal variorum, decorated with allusions and parallels. Moreover, the marginalia lock Waldron’s scholarship into a broader community of like-minded opinion, offering a glimpse of those critics to whom an interested author looked: the volume is evidence of the literary so-ciety in which Waldron moved, and which, in turn, interested itself in his production. I return to Waldron’s literary parallels in Part II, where I take them as a starting-point for a more dynamic understand-ing of Romantic allusion than is allowed by that neutral, comparative term, ‘parallel’.
Waldron’s critical connections in the margins of hisSad Shepherdare linked to the book’s physical form. The Sad Shepherd was printed in London for Waldron by John Nichols: Nichols, here printing Jonson at the beginning of his career, was, some forty years on, to include his own richly contextual editions of Jonson’s Jacobean masques in the compendious gathering of The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities, of King James the Firstprinted posthumously in1828.22 Nor,
while working onThe Sad Shepherdat this early stage of a long work-ing life, was his involvement necessarily merely mechanical: as scholars have recognized, Nichols, who had printed Samuel Johnson’sPrefaces only four years before, has some claim to be considered a collaborator in that undertaking.23Even beyond these early connections, Waldron’s
22 John Nichols, ed.,The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities, of King James
the First,3vols. in4(London: J. B. Nichols,1828).
23 Harriet Kirkley, ‘John Nichols, Johnson’s Prefaces, and the History of Letters’,Review
personal association with Nichols proved long-lasting: when, in 1809, Waldron wished to offer Peter Whalley’s copy of Wood’sAthenæ
Ox-oniensesto the Oxford antiquary Philip Bliss, the volume was conveyed
through Nichols’s print-shop at Red Lion Passage.24 On the basis of
a manuscript note in Whalley’s copy, Bliss printed a poetic exchange between Jonson and George Wither in the additions to Wood’s ac-count of Jonson.25 We see here again both McKenzie’s ‘technical’ and
‘social’ processes of transmission: the mechanical work of Nichols’s print-shop in producingThe Sad Shepherdis complemented by his later facilitating the transmission of other Jonsonian texts among a com-munity of interested scholars; a seventeenth-century textual exchange is here recovered and made available through an equivalent eighteenth-century manuscript exchange. I take up such connections more largely in Chapter3.
III
Nichols’s involvement also serves to lock Waldron’sSad Shepherdinto a rich but unexplored editorial context. When, in1818, Waldron died, Nichols described him inThe Gentleman’s Magazineas ‘one of the kindest men that ever existed. Nothing could gratify him more’, he wrote, ‘than the opportunity to render services of any description, but particularly of a literary nature, and he was indefatigable in his researches for that pur-pose.’ Among other instances of these researches, Nichols recalled that Waldron had ‘obtained the materials which Mr. Whalley had collected for an edition of Ben Jonson’s Works’.26 Long-standing readers ofThe
Gentleman’s Magazinewould have recalled that when Peter Whalley died
in June1791, a short notice of his death had been followed by a longer ob-ituary that recorded his having ‘long since revised and prepared for a new edition’ his seven-volumeJonson(1756), the manuscript (it was reported) then being ‘in the hands of Mr. Waldron, the ingenious continuator of
24 Waldron to Bliss, and Nichols to Bliss,29Dec.1809(one letter written on another):
BL Add. MS34567, fols.102r,104r; on22Feb.1813, Waldron referred to ‘my worthy friend
Mr. Nichols’ (fol.359r).
25 Anthony Wood,Athenæ Oxonienses, ed. Philip Bliss,4vols. (London: F. C. and
J. Rivington et al.,1813–20), ii [1815]. 16–17(the poem is printed, and the attribution discussed, in H&S viii.439–43; Gifford dismissed it more bluntly at1816, i. p. cxlix n.); Bliss acknowledged Waldron’s ‘prompt and friendly communication’ in a catalogue of the manuscript sources drawn upon (i.14).
‘‘The Sad Shepherd,1783’’ ’.27The circumstances in which this transfer
took place were described only briefly by Nichols, but were elaborated on by William Gifford in the first volume of his edition of Jonson’sWorks (1816). Allowing that he was ‘but imperfectly acquainted’ with the events, Gifford noted that Whalley’s ‘literary pursuits’ had been interrupted by an enforced removal from London to Ostend, the place of his death:
It is said that the extravagance of a young wife involved him in pecuniary difficulties of a serious kind, and obliged him to leave his home. In this distress he was received into the house of Mr. Waldron, where he lay concealed for some time; when the place of his retreat was at length discovered, he took refuge in Flanders, where he died after a few months residence, in the summer of1791.
As Gifford’s account makes clear, it was not only under Waldron’s ‘hospitable roof’, but under his influence, that Whalley ‘resumed the care of Jonson’ (1816, i. p. ccxxxvii).
In1802Waldron publishedThe Shakspearean Miscellany, a collection that, true to its name, mixed poetry with theatrical anecdote, stage history with biography. A short life of Jonson is included in the fifty-page history of ‘The English Stage’, its text derived from Whalley’s published biographical essay of 1756, and partly from the more recent account in Robert Anderson’sA Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain (1793–1807). Waldron’s is here avowedly derivative work, his only additions to his material being short inserted questions and a characteristically overblown introduction: ‘Benjamin Jonson, rare Ben Jonson! as he was emphatically stiled, was the contemporary, the co-adjutor, the friend of Shakspeare! away then with all invidious reflections on rough Ben! be he spoken of with candour, for his deserts were great!’.28 Jonson, ‘the friend of Shakspeare’, was not an automatic description in this period; indeed, Jonson and friendship come to play a vitally important role in the reshaping of Jonson’s character and the understandings of his work in this period. As I argue in greater detail in Chapters3and4, this is partly, at least, because Jonson came to be written about critically and edited from within the patterns of late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century friendship. One index of this is the off-balance couplet from Cowley inscribed by Waldron on the verso of the front flyleaf of his interleaved, British Library copy ofThe Sad Shepherd:
27 The Gentleman’s Magazine,61(June1791),588;61(Aug.1791),773, reprinted, with
revisions, in John Nichols, ed.,Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century,9vols. (London: the author,1812–25), ii.108–9.
‘ ‘‘He lov’d my worthless rhymes; and, like a friend, |Would find out something to commend.’’ Cowley.’29 The friend here was Gifford, to
whom Waldron had earlier lent the book in friendship; Waldron’s note stands as an epigraph to his transcription of Gifford’s account of the1783
Sad Shepherdin the notes to his1816edition of Jonson’sWorks.
The associative gathering of Whalley, Waldron, Nichols, and Gifford forms one of the longer continuities on which Waldron’sSad Shepherd was founded. Printed and published in1783by Nichols, Waldron’s work stands midway between the collected editions of Jonson published in
1756by Whalley and in 1816by Gifford. But its mediation between the two editions and their editors is, as Waldron’s manuscript epigraph from Cowley suggests, more than a simple matter of chronology. By either purchase or bequest, Waldron came into possession of books from Whalley’s library along with his Jonsonian papers in1791; a further portion of Whalley’s library was disposed of by sale in the following year.30 In the same year, Waldron reissued among the exhibits in his
Literary Museum; or, Ancient and Modern Repository, a specimen section of Whalley’s re-edited and more heavily annotated Jonson, comprising the preliminaries and first act ofEvery Man In his Humour, that had first been published as a pamphlet in May 1789.31 In theLiterary Museum,
Waldron announced that the completed edition would shortly be printed; but, as Gifford later observed, the success of Waldron’s plan, apparently to publish ‘in Numbers’, ‘fell short of the expectations of the editor’, and was discontinued (1816, i. p. ccxxxviii). In private correspondence, Gifford had been more forthright, writing to Octavius Gilchrist on25
October1802:
Whalley’s first edition of Ben was sold off, and he had \been/ employed a considerable time before his death, in collecting materials for a second edition—these he left in a very crude state, in the hands of Mr Waldron (an actor at Drury Lane). Mr Waldron attempted to bring the work out in numbers, but
29 Abraham Cowley, ‘On the Death of Mr. William Hervey’, ll.59–60, inPoems, ed.
A. R. Waller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1905),34.
30 Peter Whalley, ed.,A Catalogue of Books, consisting of, Several Libraries lately purchased,
including those of, the Reverend Peter Whalley, M.A., Editor of Ben Jonson’s Works; and of Michael Morris, M.D. F.R.S., Late Physician to the Westminster Infirmary(London: Thomas and John Egerton,1792); on the perils of such mixed catalogues see Michael F. Suarez, SJ, ‘English Book Sale Catalogues as Bibliographical Evidence: Methodological Considerations Illustrated by a Case Study in the Provenance and Distribution of Dodsley’sCollection of Poems,1750–1795’,The Library,6th ser.,21(1999),321–60.
31 F. G. Waldron,The Literary Museum; or, Ancient and Modern Repository: Comprising
