Our Scene is London
Q and A with James Mardock
What's the book about?
It traces Jonson's career as a poet and a playwright (or a "dramatist," the less-artisanal word he preferred) demonstrating a growing awareness on his part of the particular type of authorship drama allows, that is, the power to shape a reader or audience's experience of space-urban space, page space, and stage space. Lots has been written on Jonson as constructing an innovative new definition of authorship, but there's an old critical view of Jonson as a paradoxically anti-theatrical playwright that dies hard. I'm trying to reinsert dramatic space and its uses into the critical view of Jonson.
Students and future scholars would probably be curious about the whole process. How did you plan this project?
It began as my dissertation, but that project focused on the representation of urban space in the works of several early seventeenth-century playwrights-Dekker, Marston, Middleton, and Chapman, as well as Jonson. As it progressed, I realized that Jonson's chubby, frequently grumpy face kept popping up in every chapter, and the project started clamoring to be made into a Jonson book. I got an offer from Routledge to review a book proposal based on the abstract for my dissertation, but I had to negotiate a bit before contracting to write it, since the revisions were going to be quite extensive. Last summer I cleared some space and arranged to have a friendly writing competition with Chris Coake, which helped me finish the book.
The book's chapters trace several stages in Jonson's career: after establishing the way Jonson conceived of London's space and used his mastery of it as a claim for authorial agency, I look at two early city comedies that produce a sort of dramatic cartography - Eastward Ho and Every Man in his Humor. Then I focus a chapter on two plays written (and set) during the plague of 1607-10, discussing the analogy between quarantine practices in London and Jonson's control of stage space. My last chapter uses a late play, Bartholomew Fair, as a final case study for the idea that Jonson saw his authorship of space as a parallel strategy for the promotion of his brand of authorial agency.
How did working on it impact your view of Jonson?
Having entered the project with a received view of Jonson as a very serious, if occasionally scurrilously satirical personality, almost obsessively concerned with the control of his image and his legacy, I'm struck after having spent so much time with him, at how playfully he can ironize his own arguments at times, and how many of his poetic poses are evidently, winkingly theatrical.
In your view, what's the current state of scholarship re Ben Jonson?
That's almost as large a question (though not quite) as "what's the current state of Shakespeare scholarship?" We're evolving a view of Jonson quite different from the view he attempted to construct for himself, and the new Cambridge Complete Works of Ben Jonson, due out in 2009, should help to do that, as it will base its edition not on the 1616 Workes, which excluded much of Jonson's career, but on his whole output, chronologically arranged. I think most Jonsonians are eagerly awaiting that edition's publication.