The dyer’s hand

doi:10.1017/CCO9780511994524.006

4 - The dyer’s hand

Shakespeare and Jonson

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2012

Warren Chernaik

Edited by

Ton Hoenselaars

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Ton Hoenselaars: Affiliation:
Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands

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Summary

The tradition of contrasting Shakespeare and Jonson as exemplifying nature and art, usually to Jonson’s disadvantage, began in the seventeenth century and remained critical orthodoxy throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To Milton in ‘L’Allegro’, Jonson is ‘learned’, where ‘sweetest Shakespeare fancy’s child’ can spontaneously ‘warble his native woodnotes wild’. Dryden includes an extensive comparison of these two ‘Rivalls in Poesie’ in his ‘Essay Of Dramatic Poesy’ (1667): Jonson is ‘the most learned and judicious Writer which any Theater ever had’, ‘deeply conversant in the Ancients, both Greek and Latine’, and ‘a most severe Judge of himself as well as others’, while Shakespeare, in contrast, ‘needed not the spectacles of Books to read Nature; he look’d inwards, and found her there’. Dryden continues:

If I would compare him with Shakespeare, I must acknowledge him the more correct Poet, but Shakespeare the greater wit. Shakespeare was the Homer, or Father of our Dramatick Poets; Johnson was the Virgil, the pattern of elaborate writing; I admire him, but I love Shakespeare.

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists , pp. 54 - 69

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9780511994524.006 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2012

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References

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4 - The dyer’s hand

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