ABSTRACT
To call Ben Jonson a deliberately disgusting writer is neither an insult nor an overstatement. Throughout his long career, in lyric poems and dramatic works, Jonson analyzes the complex dynamics of revulsion, aversion, and abhorrence. In two of his best-known plays, for example, Jonson calls attention to the border between delicious and disgusting foodstuffs, in speeches linking materialistic greed to physical appetite, and both to an expansive, enumerative poetic mode.1 The Alchemist’s (1610) Epicure Mammon dreams of “the tongues of carps, dormice and camels’ heels” (2.2.75) and “the beards of barbels, served, instead of salads” (2.2.82), while the title character of Volpone (1606) imagines a meal concocted entirely of birds’ brains and tongues (3.7.201-2).2
