Too learned and poetical for our audience: translation, (self-)canonisation and satire in Jonson's Bartholomew Fair 1

• Type: Chapter or Part of a Book
• Date: 2023

Authors

Homem, Rui Carvalho (Author) FLUP

Book

Title: Translation and transposition in the early modern period: knowledge, literature, travel

ISBN: 978-0-367-55216-9 (hbk), 978-0-367-55217-6 (pbk)

Electronic ISBN: 978-1-003-09245-2

Publisher: Routledge

Other information

Abstract (EN): Ben Jonson has long enjoyed a rather uncertain critical reputation. One of the most persistent images to inform his problematic fame is that of the intolerant, pedantic Classicist. This view of Jonson first emerged still in his lifetime, as a response to his recorded observations on some of his contemporaries’ limited familiarity with the Classics; but it was later to be compounded by the tradition (which peaked with the Romantics) of a clichéd and always disadvantageous comparison with Shakespeare. As a consequence, something that Jonson and many of his contemporaries and disciples would have seen as an asset and a source of authority – his solid scholarship – has tended to be construed rather as a liability, or, at best, into a target for what T.S. Eliot famously called “the praise that quenches all desire to read the book”. The purpose of this chapter is not, however, to ensure the continuity of another long-standing, and almost as wearisome, critical topos – that of the complaint about Jonson’s unfair critical reputation. Its aim is rather to point out how in one of Jonson’s best-known and, today, most-valued comedies – Bartholomew Fair – the satirical purpose is guided by an assumption of the Classics as reference and yardstick; and, further, to argue that this play exposes the absurdities of human behaviour, and their manifestations in language, in ways that make Jonson’s Early Modern text an ideal testing ground for postmodern critical concerns – in particular, the set of trans-historical and intercultural perplexities posed by translation. I will be arguing that Jonson’s satirical representation of what happens when a text is transposed from a learned cultural register with Classical antecedents into the language of popular culture can productively be read in light of the role played by translation in canon formation, and in a historically grounded delineation of cultural hierarchies.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific

Notes: Published December 12, 2023 by Routledge. Cop. 2024 . Chapter 8

No. of pages: 16