Jonsonian Discriminations

At the heart of all Ben Jonsons nondramatic poetry, argues Michael McCanles, lies the concept of true nobility. Jonson sought to transform the inherited aristocracy of England into an aristocracy of humanist virtue in which he could claim a place through his achievement of true nobility by the merits of his own intellectual labours. In this survey of all Jonsons non-dramatic poetry, McCanles identifies a range of dialectical and contrastive forms through which this concern was rendered poetically. He analyses the contrastive forms in discussion of Jonsons prosody, his uses of homonymy and synonymy, and of metaphor. He coins the term contrastivity to encompass the play of semantic choices directed by Jonsons use of suprasegmentals at the local level of poetic technique, and the readers process of reading wherein he or she confirms the validity of a poems statement by recreating the process of selection/rejection that went into its creation. Thematically, McCanles suggests that the vera nobilitas argument is in fact four distinct arguments in various ways mutually contradictory, collectively both supporting and subverting aristocratic and monarchical hierarchies. Thus he finds Jonson constrained to employ this argument in addressing aristocratic friends, patrons, and the monarch himself, with careful diplomacy in order to negate the subversive dimensions of his own advice and praise. Employing the resources generated by the theoretical analysis of contrasivity in the first chapter, McCanles demonstrates the considerable complexity of Jonsons poetry, generally underestimated in current scholarship.