Ben Jonson’s Parodic Strategy: Literary Imperialism in
the Comedies.
Cambridge,
MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987.
This provocative study provides a radically new perspective
on Ben Jonson's comedies. Robert Watson's theory of the "parodic
strategy" offers a solution to many of the most perplexing cruxes of Jonson
criticism. By betraying the expectations of his characters and his
audience, Jonson subsumes and chastises his rival playwrights, and siezes
territory within the dramatic genre for his special form of satiric city-comedy.
He builds his complex plots out of the wreckage of more conventional works,
in a way that allows him to criticize and combat not only his literary
competitors, but also the histrionic tendencies of Renaissance English
society.
This view of Jonson's notorious borrowings has broad implications
for the staging and editing of the comedies, as well as for scholarly criticism.
It reveals a Jonson who is more coherent, more consistently funny, and
more modernistically aware of the conventions and paradoxes of his medium
than has generally been supposed. Watson's approach allows him to
reorient major comedies such as Volpone, The Alchemist, and
Bartholomew Fair, and to rehabilitate the later works that have
commonly been dismissed as "dotages." Ben Jonson's Parodic Strategy
thus provides fresh and vivid insights into Jonson's changing attitudes
toward popular culture and toward his own censorious critical persona.