Ben Johnson as a neoclassic critic

1. Ben Jonson

5. Black Bile - Melancholy;
Phlegm - Apathy;
Yellow Bile – Anger
Blood - Confidence.

6. His Classicism
• No regular treatise
• Discoveries
• Free reign of English – native tradition
• No divine gift nor training – abuse
• Write not by chance but knowingly
• Follows his precpts
• Drama - Latin Models : Seneca (traedy) Plauts and Terrence (Comedy)
• Criticism: (Greek) Aristotle, Horace, Seneca, Quintilian, Petronius(Latin)
• One of the first significant neo-classic critics
• Neo classic: develop, practise Greek & Latin writers – set model for
modern writers

7. • Discoveries – 1641 – collection of notes
• Translations & adaptations – 137 sections
• Incompleteness & contrary conclusion
• Ills of English Lit : ‘Excess’ – passion,imagination,expression
• Due to ungoverned impulse
• Plot or unity of action or fable – imitation of one entire action – a
beginning, a midst and an end
• Subject – neither too vast nor minute
• What we behold happens in the memory
• every bound – the best and the largest till it can increase no more
• I - it exceeds not the compass of one day
II – there be place left for digression and art
Wholeness of plot : one (separate one by itself)and entire (composed
of many parts wrought together)

8. Qualifications of a Poet
• Poem – the thing feigned -Differ by the doer, the doing and the thing done
• Outcome of natural endowment(Horace)or training(Aristotle)??
• “Poesy – Queen of Arts.. from Heaven, received from Hebrews, estimated by
the Greeks..transmitted to the Latins”
• Five Requirements : by nature, by exercise, by imitation, by study, and by art
• Arts and precepts avail nothing except Nature be beneficial and aiding
• Nature an instinct to pour out the treasure of his mind (barren soil)
• Exercise upon Cogitation with labour; extempore rhymers and laborious poets
(bear and licking)
• Imitate an excellent poet (bee – best flower-sweet honey)
• Multiplicity of reading maketh a full man - to master the matter and style
• For perfection learnt from Horace and Aristotle – Art of writing

9. Qualifications of a Poet
nature •Arts and precepts avail nothing except Nature be beneficial and
aiding
•Nature an instinct to pour out the treasure of his mind (barren soil)
exercise Exercise upon Cogitation with labour; extempore rhymers and laborious
poets (bear and licking)
imitation Imitate an excellent poet (bee – best flower-sweet honey)
study Multiplicity of reading maketh a full man - to master the matter and style
art For perfection learnt from Horace and Aristotle – Art of writing

10. Observations on Style
•Against extravagant expression of Elizabethan and
Jacobean writings
•Body : Soul :: Language : Thoughts
•Three necessities :
•To read the best authors
•To observe the best speakers
•To do much exercise of his own style
•Never be content; revise repeatedly to arrive at the best

11. •“Ready writing makes not good writing; but good
writing brings on ready writing”
•Imitate best authors
•Custom – choice of words
•Horace –”Custom is the most certain mistress of
language”
•Quintilian – “the agreed practice of educated men”
•Ben Jonson - “chief virtue of style is perspicuity.
Eldest of the present and newest of the past
language”

12. Estimates of Bacon and Shakespeare
• Men interested him – Montaigne, Spenser, Marlowe, Bacon, Shakespeare –
Discoveries
• Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Chapman, Donne – Conversations with
Drummond
• Neo-classical standards of order and restraint
• Bacon: “ No man ever spake more neatly more pressly, more weightily, or
suffered less emptiness, less idleness in what he uttered.”
• 20 things in 10 words
• Preferred to insolent Greece and haughty Rome

13. On Shakespeare
• Excellent phantasy
• Brave notions
• Gentle expressions
• Sufflaminandusrat – he needed restraining
(Augustus said of Haterius)
• “There was ever more in him to be praised than to be
pardoned”
• Unschooled genius, free flow of fancy, imaginative power