Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Suspect Devices – Metadrama and the Narcissism of Small Differences
- 1 Hamlet's ‘lawful espials’: Metadrama, Tainted Authority and the Ubiquitous Informer
- 2 Every Man In and Out: Metadramatic Ideals and Harsh Realities
- 3 Sympathy for the Informer: Iago, Volpone and Other Metadramatic Authors
- 4 ‘Masters both of arts and lies’: Metadrama and the Informer in Poetaster and Sejanus
- 5 Falstaff, Hal, Coriolanus: Metadrama and the Authority of Policy
- 6 ‘Three Cranes, Mitre, and Mermaid men’: Metadramatic Self-Deprecation and Authority in Bartholomew Fair
- 7 ‘Ministers of Fate’: Politic Oversight and Ideal Authorities
- 8 Onstage Overviews: Metadrama and the Information Market
- Conclusion
- Index
2 - Every Man In and Out: Metadramatic Ideals and Harsh Realities
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 May 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Suspect Devices – Metadrama and the Narcissism of Small Differences
- 1 Hamlet's ‘lawful espials’: Metadrama, Tainted Authority and the Ubiquitous Informer
- 2 Every Man In and Out: Metadramatic Ideals and Harsh Realities
- 3 Sympathy for the Informer: Iago, Volpone and Other Metadramatic Authors
- 4 ‘Masters both of arts and lies’: Metadrama and the Informer in Poetaster and Sejanus
- 5 Falstaff, Hal, Coriolanus: Metadrama and the Authority of Policy
- 6 ‘Three Cranes, Mitre, and Mermaid men’: Metadramatic Self-Deprecation and Authority in Bartholomew Fair
- 7 ‘Ministers of Fate’: Politic Oversight and Ideal Authorities
- 8 Onstage Overviews: Metadrama and the Information Market
- Conclusion
- Index
Summary
The two Every Man plays, though separated in their writing and performance by only a short period of time, show a development within Jonson's work towards an increasingly critical depiction of the self-interested interpreter and the corrupting influence of the informer. This growing tendency will form a significant element in many of Jonson's later plays, especially where they deal with issues of social and cultural authority, and this is very often expressed through metadramatic forms.
Every Man In His Humour: ‘a stir of art and devices’
Every Man In His Humour, initially performed in 1598 and Jonson's first big theatrical success, is a play whose metadrama reproduces structures of surveillance and informing while also proposing an explicit ideal of interpretative practice. In its revision of 1616, the subject of this study, the play's relocation in London allows for a fuller sense of local identification with plot and character than the earlier Italianate version. Here the intermingling of informer, audience and authority, though troubled, ultimately produces an interpretative model that recognises the artistic authority of the author, and over-rides the play's tensions between legitimate and illegitimate authorities, creative, personal and civic.
The play describes how an intercepted letter enables the elder Knowell to follow his supposedly studious son, Edward, to London and there spy upon his life of debauchery with the gallants and poetasters of the time. Knowell's servant Brainworm acts as his informer upon Edward. But Jonson is equivocal about the nature of authority this implies. The deliberate breach of the privacy of the letter obviously entails a betrayal, but it is couched within a legitimising patriarchal oversight. The father's wish to curb the son's propensity for poetic licentiousness displays a general antitheatricality but even more so shares Jonson's specific distaste for poetasters. This social critique, which exposes the surveillance inherent in the system of patronage, is not without some equivocation about its devices and motives. The informing servant Brainworm, one of the many misusers of information, secretive note-takers and informers, which Hutson agrees ‘haunt Jonson's writing’, of course, turns out to be troublingly subversive.
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- Metadrama and the Informer in Shakespeare and Jonson , pp. 66 - 91Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016