The rogue-artists of Jonsonian comedy: public performance and private design in early modern culture

Abstract

ABSTRACT This dissertation explores the emergence of interiorised subjectivity and autonomous selfhood in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England through a study of the figure of the ‘rogue-artist’ in three of Ben Jonson’s selected plays. While the tricksterplaywright’s ability to negotiate between public role performance and private design offers a representation of the split-subjectivity associated with modernity, the rogue’s imaginative license and Machiavellian intrigue also reveal the changing facets and dichotomous trajectory of the privacy discourse. Early modern scholarship has generally been receptive to the relevance of the Renaissance and the Reformation as significant watersheds in the development of isolated contemplation, intimate friendships, familial closeness, and self-interested commercial relations. However privacy’s emerging affirmative value as the guarantor of an invisible, inner space of freedom and authenticity was more than offset by the surveillance concerns surrounding it that saw privacy negatively as an object of unease, of competing priorities, hypocrisies, and treacheries. Although privacy’s ability to create a physical and psychological schism between individual and society was seen desirable for fostering intimate relationships and thoughtful withdrawal, yet it was also perceived as a threat not only to the interests of the community but to the moral and civic virtue of the individual as well. Grounded in secrecy and seclusion, privacy created space for volitional agency and self-reflection that was considered especially dangerous for an age socio-politically and psychologically inclined to cogency, integrity, and transparency as a requirement for social order and stability. Signifying absence or deprivation from the privileges fundamental to the public realm, privacy (derived etymologically from the Latin privatio) served to mark the limits of collective action and the suspension of state power. Given the difficulty of studying the unstructured, fluid quality of private experience of an era separated by time and space, this dissertation adopts a deliberately bipartite and interdisciplinary methodology. The first three chapters use evidential material drawn from diverse areas of early modern culture such as baroque visual arts, popular and canonical literary narratives, scientific discourse, spatial practice, sensory experience, socio-political discourse, body theory, material culture, print history, and theological specificities that focus intrinsically on the anxieties generated by the emerging gap between ‘public performance and private design’ in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to constitute the context for the argument pursued in the latter three chapters. These initial chapters also provide a brief overview of how the messy early modern demarcation, violation, and surveillance of public-private boundaries continue to determine the socio-economic and political parameters of the late modern living condition. The concluding three chapters focus on Ben Jonson’s metaphorical deployment of the liminal figure of the underclass rogue-servant – through the conning schemers Mosca in Volpone (1606), Face in The Alchemist (1610), and the sub-cultural fairground community in Bartholomew Fair (1614) with observations on other Jonsonian texts when relevant – to chart the changing trajectory of early modern subjectivity, especially of the emergence of the so-called private self. The chapters interrogate Jonson’s ethical anxieties regarding privacy as well as the creative use he made of inwardness in three of his representative (in the sense of being most evocative of the tendencies and line of argument that I wish to pursue in the thesis) ‘middle phase’ plays. The selection of these three plays is directed less by the convenience of their chronological contiguity, than by the logic of the marginalised subjectivity (which leaves out characters such as the eponymous trickstervillain in Volpone or Francis Quicksilver in Eastward Ho!, 1605) and the remarkable psychological density (in contrast to classical servant-charlatans such as Brainworm in Every Man in His Humour, 1598; or Prudence and Compass (though technically not rogues) in The New Inn, 1629; and The Magnetic Lady, 1632; respectively) shared by their scheming impostors. The thesis contends that the imaginative freedom and the societal unease associated with privacy in its transitional phase facilitated Jonson’s appropriation of the rogue-artist as a metaphorical trope to articulate new identity positions in a still acutely hierarchical era. It argues that the fictional rogue’s elastic manipulation between public role-playing and concealed intent can be used to conjecture Jonson’s own manoeuvring of roles as court poet and professional playwright in a rapidly changing urban and literary milieu. Jonson’s expedient turn towards the uncertainties of the commercial stage in response to the exigencies of a waning patronage system, resembled the state of radical dispossession and uncertainty of his rogues. Their public performance of obsequiousness to their client-masters while harbouring private intentions of profit offers a heuristic handle for understanding the possible ways in which Jonson may have used his professional persona as a mask to manipulate the audience for his own personal benefit. Such negotiations reached their culmination in the 1616 folio which represented Jonson’s ultimate arbitration between the private realm of inspiration and the public sphere of a burgeoning capitalist economy. Even as the text was published into the wider world, he was cautious of retaining his hold upon it as personal property by appealing to a select audience with judicious taste. The title Workes historicises the nascence of authorial subjectivity, articulating a new autonomous aesthetic, and emphasising on a critical rationality where the sense of material manufacture implicit in theatrical craft is reinterpreted as the scholarly labour associated with the liberal art of dramatic writing. The folio is Jonson’s final attempt at achieving a happy mean between isolated artistic introspection and the camaraderie of a ‘good life’ shared by an imagined community of like-minded readers, through a careful eliding of the selfcentred mercenary concerns that had contributed towards creating that space in the first place.