ABSTRACT
Ben Jonson saw his world quite dearly, but he liked almost nothing in what he saw. He was aware of his obligation as a poet to portray that world without idealizing or sentimentalizing it and without turn ing away from it toward the exotic or the romantic for his material. Yet he held that poetry is never merely an account of history; it is Fable :
Poet never credit gain'd By writing truths, but things (like truths) well faign 'd. 1
The true poet's fable embodies both nature as local reality (such lan guage as men use) and as natural law (enduring patterns of causality)2 so that the second may expose the defects of the first and reform the age. Nearly everything in society needed reformation; to Jonson's eyes the commonwealth had degenerated into "the publicke riot. " 3
Yet it is not easy to discover from the plays what Jonson would have regarded as an ideal, or even an acceptable, mode of life. Volpone, Epicoene, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, the plays I will be discussing, depict little behavior to admire and much to castigate. To find Jonson's ideal social world described fully and without corrosive irony, we might try the non-dramatic poetry. His poem about the Sidney estate, "To Penshurst, " is especially useful for its social inclu siveness ; the related subjects of economics, family life, social hierarchy, and moral duty are all treated. In treating them Jonson could write with more candor than he could for either the public theater with its crowds to please or the private audiences of his masques with their demands for courtly tact. The Sidneys may have received a draft of the poem before it was printed in The Forest, but this is not certain since there is no manuscript copy at Penshurst, in fact none extant (Herford
Jonson values the house itself, not because it presents a striking show, but for the opposite reason-it coalesces with nature so completely that the nature gods and sprites think it their home too. Of special worth is its antiquity and congruence with time-honored traditions. The workmen who built the house gave their work freely and did not groan as slaves in forced labor would. The fish and game know their place in the chain of being and willingly give themselves to nourish man because it is the order of things. The harmony between the family's way of life and the order of nature means that nature's own abundance is available for hospitality, and the generosity of the family means that plenty will be offered to the prince and the poor poet alike. For children who grow up at Penshurst lessons in civilization are taught daily by the life that is lived daily.
