Enter Ben, at right, attired in the usual doublet (with ruffs!) and hose, armed with a Latin grammar in his left hand, and bearing his own collected works in his right; crowned with self-appointed laurel. At left the English undergrad, immaculately attired in oxford shirt and jean pantaloons, armed with a .5mm pencil in her right hand, and bearing a mug of coffee in the right. At her feet is a pile of play books and the Yale Ben Jonson’s Collected Masques.
Ben. Callet!* A word with thou!
EngU. What is it now, Ben?
Ben. Now? how mean you “what is it now”?
But what is has been for a pair of years
A woman, handling my works! a piece!*
EngU. Ah, but who else will write “pieces” on you?
Ben. Your modern puns are dull. Thou’rt
A parcel poet*: your parcels* are poor.
EngU. You know, Ben, no one understands a word you’re speaking. Can you help me shorten the glossary of terms and just deliver your complaints in plain modern English? Without all the abuse?
Ben. The article of yours, two Fridays last –
EngU. The one on Thomas Middleton? Everyone loved that! The most comments yet.
Ben. And it was about Thomas Middleton! A fulsome pismire!*
EngU. It was his birthday. Besides, I mentioned you.
Ben. Eight times, merely, and you barely talked about my work. Why are you writing about “Chapter One” anyways? What about your Introduction? You haven’t come near to mentioning my masques!
EngU. To be honest, Ben, they’re pretty dull. Perhaps if we could see some of those ridiculously expensive costumes and your old accomplice Inigo’s ingenious sets[i], or if we could gossip about which ambitious young lord is sitting next to Queen Anne’s ladies (we all know what that means), maybe then some of our readers would be interested. As it is, reading ten pages of set description, with the occasional interluding speech –
Ben. They are the most delightfully wrought poems and lyrics, not speeches!
EngU. Yes, but be realistic, Ben, I mean consider:
Help, help all tongues to celebrate this wonder:
The voice of Fame should be as loud as thunder.
Her house is all of echo made
Where never dies the sound,
And as her brows the clouds invade,
Her feet do strike the ground.
Sing then good Fame that’s out of Virtue born,
For who doth Fame neglect doth Virtue scorn. (The Masque of Queens, 139)
EngU. It’s all allegorical and sing-songy.
Ben. It is a song. Did not you see the title? The one that reads “Song”?
EngU. Fine, it’s a song, but without the music, we’re missing a key part of the masque. Also, we’re supposed to imagine a bunch of courtiers dancing for the next ten minutes? I’m not saying these little dramas weren’t fun to watch or even participate in back when James’s court was in full “swing,” but you’re condensing a two-hour drama into ten pages, and something tells me the scripted parts aren’t the most important bits anyways. Much as you’d like them to be.
Ben. Well, you wrote about my masque poetry in your Introduction. Remember the Masque of Blackness?
That in their black the perfec’st beauty grows,
Since the fixed colour of their curled hair,
Which is the highest grace of dames most fair,
No cares, no age can change, or there display
The fearful tincture of abhorred grey,
Since death herself (herself being pale and blue)
Can never alter their most faithful hue. (52)
Ben. So they must be important. Not that you wrote anything clever about them.
EngU. Dr. Martin is right, Ben doesn’t know what he wants. [Aside]
What I wrote was that you were trying to make a point about essential bodies that exist in spite of changing costumes. Since the Queen herself was disguised in this masque, you excused her theatricality, explaining how the disguise can’t change the virtue beneath her apparent blackness and provocative costume. Of course, you were also trying to fix her in the position of a “virtuous” woman: chaste, silent, and obedient; that was a bit of a personal illusion though, as she commanded you to write this masque in the first place, right?
Ben. Perhaps you are forgetting –
Also, I compared the unmasquing of the dancers here to the de-robing of the boy actor at the end of Epicoene, so illustrating your little trick of revealing the fixed qualities of the body underneath: one of your favourite tactics in defending the idea of essential gender.
Ben. It works most excellently.
EngU. Of course it does, when your plays have no female characters. Your late plays seem to have a lot of them though. I guess it would be too cruel to quote Hamlet’s “ay, there’s the rub” line…
Ben. This is why I don’t like women.
[Exeunt]
Works Cited:
Jonson, Ben. The Complete Masques. Ed. Stephen Orgel. New Haven & London: Yale UP, 1969.
Jonson, Ben. Ben Jonson’s Plays. Ed. Felix Schelling. Vol.1 London: JMDent & Sons, 1953. (Glossary definitions)
End Notes:
Inigo’s ingenious sets. Referring to Inigo Jones, Jonson’s partner in the court masques from 1605-1631, and the designer of the elaborate sets and costumes which were, much to Jonson’s chagrin, more popular with the court audience than his moralising poetry.
29 April 2008 ~ St. Catharines.
Glossary of Terms:
Callet. n. (obs.) Woman of ill repute.
Fulsome. adj. (obs.) Foul, offensive.
Parcel poet. n. (obs.) A poetaster, or hack. Parcels: articles, with a pejorative connotation.
Piece. n. (obs.) Person, used for a woman or girl; a gold coin worth in Jonson’s time 20s or 22s.
Pismire. n. (obs.) An ant.
