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Seventeenth-Century Identifications of Jonson's Sources in the Classics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

James A. Riddell
James A. Riddell*
Affiliation:
California State College, Dominguez Hills
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Extract

Jonson himself began the practice of identifying passages in his work which were virtually translations from the classics. In the margins of the quarto edition of Sejanus (1605), for instance, there appeared an elaborate apparatus intended to enlighten the reader who might not recognize the way in which Jonson had employed material from Tacitus, Persius, Juvenal, Seneca, et al. Furthermore, Jonson sought to explain his reason for including such apparatus in his ‘Note to to the Readers’ of Sejanus: ‘Least in some nice nostrill, the Quotations might savour affected, I doe let you know, that I abhor nothing more; and have onely done it to shew my integrity in the Story.’ Although his purpose has in large part been ignored, his practice has not. Commentators and annotators since Jonson's time have striven to augment his efforts, whether, like John Upton in 1749, to show that Jonson was merely piecing together those writings he was pleased to call ‘Poems,’ or for reasons more benign.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , Summer 1975 , pp. 204 - 218
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1975

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References

1 Remarks on Three Plays of Benjamin Jonson (London, 1749).

2 For a description of the volume see Riddell, J., ‘Some Actors in Ben Jonson's Plays,’ Shakespeare Studies, 5 (1969), 296–298, nn. 1, 19.Google Scholar

3 See illustrations. Several years ago Dr. Giles E. Dawson very kindly examined the marginalia and offered the opinion that they were in seventeenth-century hands.

In some instances ascriptions have been made and (subsequently, one would assume) the relevant texts have been written in, examples of which appear in both illustrations (all of the allusions except ‘ficta pellice’ in Illus. 1; the third allusion in Illus. 2).

4 Oxford: Clarendon Press, 11 vols., 1925-52. They do omit certain identifications that had been pointed out earlier and of which they would have been aware (see, for instance, below, Volp., III.iv.15-16), presumably on the grounds that the ascriptions were invalid. No attempt has been made here to determine the validity of ascriptions from the folio.

5 Materials for the Study of the Old English Drama, N.s. 27 (1958), 46.

6 Juvenal here and the passage immediately below is noticed by Gabriele Bernhard Jackson in her edition of EMI, The Yale Ben Jonson (New Haven: Yale Univ. Pr., 1969).

7 Horace is noticed by Gifford, who is cited by H. S. Mallory in his edition of Poet., Yale Studies in English (New Haven: Yale Univ. Pr., 1905).

8 The one example in this collection of ascriptions in which a passage is set off by marks in the margins and is given such a general reference. ‘Cnemon and Damnippus’ is Number 18 in The Dialogues of the Dead in the Loeb edition.

9 Juvenal here and the passage immediately below is also noticed both by Upton (Remarks, pp. 39-40) and by J. D. Rea in his edition of Volp., Yale Studies in English (New Haven: Yale Univ. Pr., 1919).

10 Petronius noticed by L. H. Harris in his edition of Cat, Yale Studies in English (New-Haven: Yale Univ. Pr., 1916), and by W. F. Bolton and Jane P. Gardner in their edition of Cat, Regents Renaissance Drama Series (Lincoln, Neb.: Univ. of Nebraska Pr., 1973).

11 Loeb: ‘Ipse quoque accepto… .’

12 Seneca noticed by Gifford, Harris, and Bolton and Gardner.

13 The last two words in the second verse have been crossed through. The entire verse does not appear in the Loeb edition, which reprints Housman's text. Housman's reasons for rejecting the verse as spurious can be found in his edition of Lucan (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1926), pp. xxiii-xxiv.

14 Porcius Latro, ‘Declamatio Contra Lucium Sergium Catilinam,’ in Sallust, Opera, (Basel, 1564), col. 1117a - b (Sig. 2A4). The attack on Catiline attributed to Porcius Latro commonly appeared in Renaissance editions of Sallust. The edition cited above is the same as that of Jonson's copy of Sallust, now in Clare College, Cambridge. Although Herford and Simpson say that ‘Jonson refrains from using’ such spurious matter as the ‘Declamatio Contra … Catilinam’ (x, 118), this and the passage at iv.118-121 suggest that he may have. Both of these identifications are apparently noticed by Bolton and Gardner; I have not been able to check their references, however, as they cite chapters in Porcius, and there are no chapters in the 1564 edition, the only one that they mention.

15 Loeb: ‘viventibus: quicquid meruerunt, semper exspectant.’

16 Loeb: ‘erit in vestris fixa mentibus.’

17 A mistaken reference to another work of Horace is corrected here. ‘Carm’ was first written, and then ‘Se’ was written over the first two letters in the same hand that added the text to the ascription. I am grateful to Professor Gabriele B.Jackson for calling to my attention that ‘Serniones’ was used for the satires as well as the epistles. See Illus. 2.