William Cavendish and Two Entertainments by Ben Jonson

Ben Jonson Journal

Volumn 5, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 63-80

  Fitzmaurice, James ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 61949337516     PISSN: 10793453     EISSN: 1755165X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3366/bjj.1998.5.1.4     Document Type: Article

References (53)

1. Anne Barton believes that William's comedy The Variety has "social implications more complex than Everyman in His Humour." Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 301. Barton's essay, which first appeared in ELH in 1981, has not done much to alter the general view. For an essay that deals generally with the influence of Cavendish on Jonson and specifically with the appearance of Cavendish as a character in The New Inn, see Nick Rowe, '"My Best Patron': William Cavendish and Jonson's Caroline Dramas," The Seventeenth Century (Autumn 1994): 197-212.
2. Cedric C. Brown is probably right to suggest that the whole of the cost of each royal visit and not just each entertainment was involved. Brown sees in the entertainments political and artistic competence neatly joined together. "Courtesies of Place and Arts of Diplomacy in Ben Jonson's Last Two Entertainments for Royalty," The Seventeenth Century (Autumn 1994): 151.
3. "Such excess of Feasting, as had scarce ever before been known in England, and would be still thought very prodigious, if the same Noble Person, had not, within a year or two afterwards, made the King and Queen a more stupendous Entertainment." Quoted from A. S. Turberville, A History of Welbeck Abbey and Its Owners, vol. 1 (London: Faber and Faber, 1928), 49. L u c y Hutchinson, wife to a military adversary, later remarked, "A foolish ambition of glorious slavery carried h im to court, where he ran himself much into debt, to purchase neglects of the king and queen, and scorns of the proud courtiers." Quoted from Douglas Grant, Margaret the First: A Biography of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957), 60.
4. The Autumn 1994 number of The Seventeenth Century is devoted entirely to William, but more as an important patron than as an author in his own right.
5. "Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for." Woolf goes on to create an unpleasant image for women like Margaret: "the lonely aristocrat shut up in her country house among her folios and her flatterers." A Room of One's Own (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, n.d. [originally published 1929]), 68.
6. One thinks of the role of learner often assigned by scholars to the young John Fletcher in the plays he coauthored with Shakespeare.
7. Jonson was not well enough to travel to either Welbeck or Bolsover on the dates of the performances and would have had to have relied on written or spoken reports to derive his satisfaction. It appears that William's chaplain, Dr. Payne, who functioned as courier carrying back and forth successive drafts of the scripts, would have delivered the good news. Brown, 166.
8. A look at three manuscript volumes of William's poetry at the University of Nottingham Library will confirm that he frequently revised his poetry and then had new fair copies produced by Rolleston. Manuscripts Pw V24, 25, and 26.
9. Gifford's 1816 edition.
10. Ben Jotison, vol. 7, eds. C. H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), 794.
11. In Sociable Letters (1664) she writes, "But in truth I never heard any man Read Well but my Husband, and have heard him say, he never heard any man Read Well but B.J. " Letter 173.
12. Brown, 168.
13. William's correspondence from Christiana Cavendish, countess of Devonshire, on a variety of topics including the governorship of Prince Charles is to be found at Nottingham University Library. See in particular Pw 1, pp. 56-66.
14. Portrait of a Cavalier, William Cavendish, First Duke of Newcastle (London: Macmillan, 1979), 54.
15. Trease, 55.
16. Trease, 70.
17. Trease, 58.
18. Trease, 55.
19. Trease, 59.
20. There w a s a long family history of acquisition of tapestries and embroideries that went back to Bess of Hardwick. See Mark Girouard, Hardwick Hall (London: the National Trust, 1989).
21. "Location and Meaning in Masque, Morality and Royal Entertainment," in The Court Masque, ed. David Lindley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 137. Dale B.J. Randall reproduces two views of the Derbyshire cavern, the Devil's Arse, in jonson's Gypsies Unmasked (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1975). The plates are found between pages 176 and 177.
22. Jonson's Gypsies Unmasked, 78.
23. "The Rusticity of Ben Jonson," in Jonson and Shakespeare, ed. Ian Donaldson (London: Macmillan [in association with the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, Canberra], 1983), 143.
24. In addition to such characters in The Merry Humour are the bumpkins in narrative poems found printed in his wife's Natures Pictures (1656). Hobbes caters to the the interest of the Derbyshire branch of the extended Cavendish family in a ramble through Peak District geography contained in a Latin poem, De Mirabilius Pecci, later translated and published as Wonders of the Peak (1678). Internal evidence places the composition of the poem in 1628.
25. Herford and Simpson, vol. 7, p. 795.
26. Herford and Simpson, vol. 7, p. 796.
27. Leah Marcus connects the Welbeck entertainment with the Somerset skirmishes of the year before, conflicts involving the selling of church ales. Puritans opposed the "drunkenness and disorder" that they felt accompanied such sales. The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 129-31. If there is an allusion, William and Jonson are unequivocal in their support of tradition and ale and in their opposition to the Puritans.
28. Turberville, 47.
29. Brown believes that William, himself, took the part of Stub but the shorter Sir Charles is a better candidate.
30. Christiana enjoyed a good tease based on sexual innuendo. She writes to William: "I hop it is for your secret sins and not your declarde sickness that you undergoe soe great a penance since you cane so easily submit to a volantary martyrdome I wish I could translate my faults to haue them comprehended within \ y o u r / sufferings." University of Nottingham MS Pw 1, p. 56. Christiana is praised together with Bess of Hardwick in Hobbes' Wonders of the Peak, 12. Women were far more than passive observers within the family: Caesarian Piles built by a woman's hand— Piles fit for Kings to build, and Monarchs rear, In Cavendistian Lordships do appear The petty products of a Female Care.
31. Trease, 50.
32. Brown, 154.
33. Herford and Simpson, vol. 7, p. 800.
34. Herford and Simpson, vol. 7, p. 801. Brown takes this approach but may overvalue the theatrical effect of the line that brings together the French lily and the English rose.
35. Herford and Simpson, vol. 7, p. 807.
36. Brown, 158.
37. Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 337.
38. "Donne, Jonson, Richard Andrews and the Newcastle Manuscript," English Manuscript Studies 4 (1993): 158.
39. Herford and Simpson, vol. 8, p. 417.
40. Thomas Hobbes' Wonders of the Peak is not especially bawdy but does not fail to allude to the sexual associations popularly connected with the cavern Eldon's Hole. P. 42.
41. Herford and Simpson, vol. 7, p. 812.
42. Herford and Simpson, vol. 7, p. 811.
43. Herford and Simpson, vol. 7, p. 812.
44. While I disagree about the nature of the "surprise," I agree with Brown about the importance of surprise itself. Brown, 62.
45. Herford and Simpson, vol. 7, p. 813. Brown glosses the name "lover of truth," but I favor an etymology derived from the River Lethe for a character who seems to be a dullard. Brown, 164.
46. Riggs, 336 and 337.
47. William in like manner was able to tease the much loved and recently deceased Jonson in an elegy that brings up the subject's physical bulk: I write of Thee, Ben; not to approve My witt or Learneing; but my Judgement, Love. But when I think or this or that, to chuse; Each part of Thee, is too big for my Muse. Should I compare Thee to Rome's dust, that's dead? Their witt, to Thine's as heavy as thy lead. Quoted from Ben Jonson: The Critical Heritage, ed. E. H. Craig (London: Routlege, 1990), 181.
48. Trease, 75. See also [Thomas Longuville] The First Duke and Duchess of Newcastle (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1910), 32. The source is Welbeck MSS Hist. Comm. Reports, 13th Report, Appendix, Part II, p. 127.
49. See Longuville for William's letter to his wife on the subject of these rivals, 3 2 - 3 3.
50. Herford and Simpson, vol. 7, pp. 772-73.
51. Herford and Simpson, vol. 10, p. 699.
52. British Library Add. MS 45,865. Cathryn Anne Nelson, A Critical Edition of Wit's Triumvirate, or the Philosopher, 2 vols. [Salzburg Studies in English Literature; Jacobean Drama Studies] (Salzburg: Institut fur Englische Sprache), 1975. Hilton Kelliher, 150-52.
53. Nelson, vol. 2, p. 242.