Ñàéò ïîå糿, â³ðø³, ïîçäîðîâëåííÿ ó â³ðøàõ :: Ben Jonson :: Êðèòèêà

Ben Jonson :: Êðèòèêà

A prolific Elizabethan playwright and man of letters, Jonson is among the greatest writers and theorists of English literature. Highly learned in the classics, he profoundly influenced the coming Augustan age through his emphasis on the precepts of Horace, Aristotle, and other early thinkers. In his day, Jonson's professional reputation was often obscured by that of the man himself: bold, independent, aggressive, fashioning himself an image as the sole arbiter of taste, standing for erudition and the supremacy of classical models against what he perceived as the general populace's ignorant preference for the sensational. While he is now remembered primarily for his satirical comedies, he also distinguished himself as a seminal figure in English literary criticism, as a preeminent writer of courtly masques, and as a poet. Among his most enduring contributions to the latter form are the classically influenced lyrics of his Epigrams (1616) and the pastoral poem "To Penshurst" contained in his collection The Forest (1616). Jonson's major poetic works combine the classical forms of lyric, epistle, ode, elegy, and epithalamion with the native English sense of affect or feeling. Many of them are poems of praise and written within the obligatory confines of the patronage system. From Epigrams, the short poems influenced by the verse of the Roman poet Martial, "On My First Daughter" and "On My First Son" are personal lyric consolations. This collection also contains the tender "Epitaph on S. P., a Child of Q. Elizabeth's Chapel." The Forest includes the pastoral "To Penshurst," Jonson's country house poem celebrating the poetic and political largesse of the Sidney family; the work is regarded as a model of the topographical form. In The Forest are two versions of "Song: To Celia," one dramatizing the carpe diem sentiment expressed by Volpone in Jonson's play of the same name, the other known by its first line, "Drink to me only with thine eyes." Underwood contains "A Celebration of Charis in Ten Lyric Pieces," an experiment in voice and the transformative power of language, and the Pindaric Ode dedicated "To the Immortal Memory and Friendship of that Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison." The plays Sejanus His Fall (1603) and Catiline His Conspiracy (1611) established Jonson's reputation as a political tragedian; he is perhaps best known, however, for his satiric comedies Volpone (1606), Epicoene (1609), The Alchemist (1610), and Bartholomew Fayre (1614), which are portraits of the greed and hypocrisy Jonson saw in contemporary London. His Timber; or, Discoveries (1641), is considered the first formulation of applied literary principles in English, and predates the critical works of John Dryden. Jonson's immediate poetic reputation is traceable to the highly imitative works of his literary followers, known as the "Sons" or "Tribe of Ben," which included Robert Herrick, Thomas Carew, and the later Cavalier poets. His works were highly regarded during his lifetime, although his later plays, "dotages" as Dryden called them, were not well received. His controlled lines were models for the eighteenth century verse of writers such as Alexander Pope, who once observed that Jonson "brought critical learning into vogue." The nineteenth century Romantics decried his lack of passion and thought his comedies better than his tragedies. In the twentieth century the New Critical movement overlooked Jonson's poems in favor of the work of the Metaphysicals. His work, including his long neglected poetry, has, however, enjoyed a renaissance of critical attention in the late twentieth century from new historical theorists interested in the material issues of patronage and censorship that inform his poetics.