Classical Translation and the Location of Cultural Authority.pdf

Ben Jonson’s Poetaster :

Classical Translation and the

Location of Cultural Authority

Victoria Moul

Tom Cain concludes his essay on the satiric force of Poetaster by

remarking that it ‘emerges as a play that demands a more prominent

place in the Jonson canon than it is normally given’. 1 This essay is in part

an attempt to attend to Poetaster as he suggests, and this attention takes

two forms. First I think it is worth focusing upon the play as a work both

composed of and in some sense about the act of translation; a work in

which translations, as well as the translator, continually challenge us

to consider their place in the ofﬁce of the ‘poet’. 2 Poetaster is, quite

explicitly, about the negotiation of the social and aesthetic distinctions

between ‘poet’ and ‘poetaster’, but it frames this debate within the

broader allusive context of the similar negotiation in Horace’s Satires .

As an authorial strategy this is both aggressively self-conﬁdent (because

it associates Jonson with Horace himself) and strikingly submissive

(where is Jonson if so much of this is Horace?). Second, I want to use a

fuller understanding of the allusive strategies of the play to put some

pressure upon the prevailing critical consensus regarding its close.

Although several critics have stressed the powerful role of the poets

themselves in magnifying and shaping Augustus’ authority, the view that

the ﬁnal scenes present an idyllic and equally balanced relationship

1 Tom Cain, ‘“Satyres, That Girde and Fart at the Time”: Poetaster and the Essex

Rebellion’, in Refashioning Ben Jonson: Gender, Politics and the Jonsonian Canon , edited

by Julie Sanders, Kate Chedgzoy, and Susan Wiseman (Basingstoke, 1998), pp. 48–70

(p. 66). For support with this paper thanks are due to Colin Burrow and the AHRC.

2 On this topic see Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Scenes of Translation in Jonson and

Shakespeare: Poetaster , Hamlet , and A Midsummer Night’s Dream ’, Translation and Literature ,

11 (2002), 1–23, and Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, Jonson, Shakespeare and Early Modern Virgil

(Cambridge, 1998). Although in the course of this essay I wish to take issue with her

conclusions about the perception and deployment of translation in Jonson’s play, many

of her observations are acute and her attention to the theme of translation itself is

important.

Victoria Moul/Jonson’s Poetaster

between Horace, Virgil, and Augustus is very widespread. 3 In this paper

I argue that the many ‘translations’ and allusions of the play help to put

Augustus’ taste and judgement in question, and ﬁnally subordinate

even his majesty to the organizing – and immortalizing – power of

Horatian verse. The real cultural authority of the play is invested not

in him, nor even in Virgil, but rather in Horace, whose Satires structure

the play as a whole, and inside whose authorial framework even the

fragment of the Aeneid is held.

For all Virgil’s acknowledged virtue and excellence, it is the adaptive

and absorbent satiric mode, incorporating alike epic and lyric, Roman

and Elizabethan material, which allows us to ‘see’ most clearly the

dangers of absolute power, and the proper role of the poet as counsellor

to the great. These political implications are moreover rooted in the

details of the textual transactions around and through which the play is

carried out, and which have been under-read by critics – in terms both

of the extent to which Poetaster is indebted to other texts, and the extent

to which these debts and borrowings structure the action.

Poetaster: A Translated Play

Virgil’s eventual resounding endorsement of Horace’s art and life alike

refers speciﬁcally to his ‘translating’:

And for his use of translating men,

It still hath been a work of as much palm

In clearest judgements, as t’ invent or make.

(V.3.359–61) 4

Virgil is answering one after another the terms of the accusations

against Horace, and he begins with that of ‘translation’. The phrase

‘translating men’ is grammatically elusive; ‘men who translate’ could

refer to the characters of Horace’s Satires , although it is Jonson’s

versions of these characters in Poetaster who are noticeable for their

‘translation’ of material. We might also read ‘men’ as the object of

‘translating’, perhaps referring (again, to Poetaster rather than the

historical Horace) to the wealth of imported material and characters in

3 ‘[Virgil] stands at the absolute centre (with Augustus) of a circle of being/truth’

(Tudeau-Clayton, Jonson, Shakespeare and Early Modern Virgil , p. 158). See also Lindsay

M. Kaplan, The Culture of Slander in Early Modern England , edited by Stephen Orgel

(Cambridge, 1997), p. 72. An instructive exception to this consensus is Alan Sinﬁeld,

‘ Poetaster , the Author, and the Perils of Cultural Production’, Renaissance Drama , 27

(1996), 3–18. My phrase ‘cultural authority’ is derived from this essay.

4 Quotations from Poetaster are taken throughout from Cain’s edition: Poetaster , edited

by Tom Cain (Manchester, 1995).

Translation and Literature 15 (2006)

the play. 5 Horace does refer on several occasions to the sources of his

work in Greek models (Archilochus at E I.19.24–5, Sappho and Alcaeus

at C I.1.34), but nowhere is this imitation given as a ground for attack

upon him. The accusation of ad hominem invective, by contrast, does

have a textual basis ( S I.4.33–8 and 78–9). 6

The attack upon – and eventual defence of – Horace’s ‘translating’

practice speaks much more directly to the reader of Poetaster than of

the Satires , and the connection to Jonson is augmented by a similar

juxtaposition of ‘translate’ and ‘invent’ towards the end of the Conver-

sations with Drummond: ‘his inventions are smooth and easie, but above

all he excelleth in a translation’. 7 The Virgil of Poetaster , speaking of

Horace, anticipates this assessment of Jonson’s own poetic strengths.

Demetrius Fannius’ comically bad verse invective against Horace, read

aloud by Tibullus earlier in V.3, uses the word in a derogatory fashion:

‘And, but that I would not be thought a prater, / I could tell you he were

a translator’ (V.3.304–5). ‘Translating’ is also a term in Demetrius’

initial attack (IV.3.120–1), and the ﬁnal indictment in V.3, by which

both Demetrius and Crispinus are condemned – in a scene which the

very title of the play urges us to read as climactory – again refers to this

accusation (‘ﬁlching by translation’, V.3.224–5). 8 The tension between

these instances and Virgil’s self-conscious echo of them in his vindi-

cation of Horace highlights the importance of the term to the play as a

whole: by the closing scenes ‘translation’ has been ﬁrmly deﬁned as art

rather than plagiary. 9 Given the multiple correspondences between

characters in the play (Ovid, Marlowe, and Aeneas; Julia and Dido;

even, as we shall see, Ovid and Caesar himself), the phrase draws

our attention to the pervasive presence of ‘translation’ (including

‘imitation’ and ‘appropriation’) in all its forms.

5 Loewenstein is also interested in this phrase and remarks that by it, Virgil ‘not only

keeps alive the ambiguity of “translation,” retaining inter-linguistic translation as a kind

of leading case for a whole range of imitative practises, but … he also speciﬁes the object

of imitation as the emulable poets themselves’. Joseph Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and

Possessive Authorship (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 121–2.

6 References to Horace are to Q. Horati Flacci Opera, edited by Edward C. Wickham

(Oxford, 1901). E refers to the Epistles , C ( Carmina ) to the Odes , S to the Satires , and AP

to the Ars Poetica . Translations are all my own.

7 Conversations with Drummond , 693–4, in Ben Jonson , edited by C. H. Herford and Percy

and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford, 1925–52; hereafter H&S ), I, 151.

8 The Arraignment is the alternative title to the play, and the one referred to by Envy in

the Induction (3).

9 ‘Plagiarism’ is also a term under contention in the play. The ﬁnal indictment refers

to both Crispinus and Demetrius as a ‘plagiary’ (V.3.211–12), presumably a reference to

their apparent ‘plagiarism’ of Horace in IV.3.96–7 (discussed below).

Victoria Moul/Jonson’s Poetaster

At IV.3.120–3 Demetrius frames his grudge against Horace in terms

which are very close to those of the ﬁnal scene, and interestingly

paradoxical: ‘Ay, and tickle him i’ faith for his arrogancy and his

impudence in commending his own things, and for his translating. I

can trace him i’ faith.’ 10 Horace’s ‘translating’ is apparently so obvious

that he can be ‘traced’ – tracked or scented out, as in hunting – with

ease; but he is also guilty of commending his ‘own things’: poems,

presumably, which despite their ‘translation’ are his own. If we read

Horace as Jonson himself, then Demetrius’ critique is in fact rather

accurate: large sections of the play are made up from fragments of

another author’s work, whether strictly translated (that is, between

languages) or directly ‘carried across’ from one author to another, as in

the quotations and misquotations from contemporary dramatists that

litter the play. But Jonson also returns time and again to the creative use

of Jonson/Horace’s ‘own things’ – that is, the Satires themselves.

The passages of Ovid and Virgil read aloud – and both times rudely

interrupted – are, as every commentator concedes, extremely literal

renderings of their Latin models. 11 But that ‘literal’ quality (to which I

shall return) only serves to emphasize, by their very recognizability, that

they are translations. Nor are these the only examples: the ﬁrst three

scenes of the third act of Poetaster derive both plot and dialogue from

Horace’s Satires I.1, and the – probably unperformed – ﬁfth scene of this

act is (another) very ‘literal’ translation of Horace’s key defence of his

genre in Satires II.1. Herford and Simpson also note that Crispinus’ song

at II.2.153–62 is loosely based upon Martial’s Epigram I.57. 12 Ovid’s

burlesque farewell scene draws upon Ovid’s own Tristia as well as

echoing Romeo and Juliet. 13 Many of the details of the divine banquet of

IV.5 are drawn from no less a source than the ﬁrst book of the Iliad . 14

The Ovidian passage is, moreover, something akin to the ‘ﬁlching’ of a

‘translation’: it varies only slightly from Marlowe’s version of these lines

in his edition of the Elegies – one form of ‘translation’ nested within

another. 15

Moving from interlingual ‘translation’ or imitation to the ‘carrying

across’ of literary material, the second half of Poetaster III.4 is a

10 A similar charge is levelled against Crites ( Cynthia’s Revels , III.2.60–2).

11 Poetaster I.1.43–83 (Ovid, Amores I.15) and V.2.56–97 (Virgil, Aeneid IV.160–88).

12 H&S , IX, 548; see also Poetaster , ed. Cain, p. 119.

13 See Poetaster , ed. Cain, p. 204.

14 See H&S , IX, 567–8, and discussion below.

15 The edition in question, published with John Davies’ Epigrams , was one of those

proscribed and burnt following the ‘Bishops’ Ban’ of 1599. For a fuller discussion, see

Poetaster , ed. Cain, p. 53 n. 41.

Translation and Literature 15 (2006)

patchwork of borrowings from other contemporary plays, as the actors

offer a medley of their repetoire. Identiﬁed sources include Kyd’s

Spanish Tragedy , Chapman’s Blind Beggar of Alexandria , and The Battle of

Alcazar , although the exact references of several other passages are now

obscure. 16 The dress and demeanour of the actors would certainly have

helped the audience to recognize the sources in question. Finally, and

most memorably, in V.3 Horace ‘purges’ Crispinus and Demetrius of

vocabulary derived from Marston and Dekker respectively (with traces

of Shakespeare and Hall).

Thus Demetrius himself is hardly exempt from the ‘translation’ of

which he accuses Horace; his own literary style is in some sense

‘translated’. More signiﬁcantly, his complaint in IV.3 (cited above)

forms part of a network of ironies in the surrounding lines which turn

upon the issues of translation and plagiary – and speciﬁcally, ‘trans-

lation’ (in various forms) from Horace himself. It is not only the song

of IV.3.68–79 that is apparently ‘borrowed’ (96) from Horace; its

dedication to ‘Canidia’ is also an (inappropriate) adoption – Canidia

is, as Gallus points out, ‘Horace his witch’ (95). Most strikingly of all,

Tucca’s indignant horror at the suggestion that Crispinus has borrowed

from Horace (98–9) is belied by Tucca himself in his next intervention

(108–18). The greater part of that speech is lifted direct from Horace’s

Satires – Tucca is here playing the part of the satirist’s critic from

S I.4.34–8, a critic in this case who uses Horace’s own portrait of a

critic, and indeed his own words, to attack Horace for, among other

things, copying others.

Nor do the ironies of Tucca’s speech end there; Cain marks the

imitation of S I.4 as extending from lines 109 (‘ﬂy him …’) to 115 (‘not

a bawd or a boy that comes from the bake-house but shall point at him’)

of Poetaster IV.3. In fact, Horace’s carping critic of the Satires claims not

that every slave-boy or old woman (‘et pueros et anus’, 38) will ‘point

at’ the poet, but rather that the poet longs for them all to know of his

work (that is, his attacks upon others). The sense of that clause is

translated by Tucca’s previous remark: ‘What he once drops upon paper

against a man lives eternally to upbraid him in the mouth of every slave

tankard-bearer or water-man’ (111–13).

But the grammar of the passage is unclear; for the most part, ‘he’

refers clearly to Horace himself. According to the logic of the allusion,

the ‘him’ of ‘upbraid him’ in line 112 should refer not to Horace but

to the ‘man’ he attacks in his satire, as should the ﬁnal ‘him’ of the

16 Cain notes lines 227–9 and 233–8 as other instances of allusions to plays which

cannot now be traced.

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