This course will study two plays in which Shakespeare comes closest to his great contemporary, Ben Jonson. The two dramatists wrote for the same company, the King’s Men, and Jonson has left eloquent if judicious testimony of his personal and professional admiration for Shakespeare. Yet there are also moments in Jonson’s own plays, where he seems to respond consciously to themes already handled by Shakespeare; and the class will be invited to use selected scenes from these as terms of comparison.
Julius Caesar is a political tragedy where the assassins vainly attempt to save the Roman republic but only hasten its demise. Caesar and his murderers alike are self-conscious of what it is to be Roman, and their behaviour and motives are presented as ambivalent. Jonson’s Sejanus, in which Shakespeare reputedly acted, is set in a later Rome, dominated by the sinister emperor Tiberius and his treacherous favourite, where the republican opposition has been reduced to choric commentators upon the main action.
Measure for Measure is a rare excursion by Shakespeare into low-life city comedy. The disguised Duke of Vienna endeavours to bring morality and justice back to a society which has sunk into sexual licence, and barely succeeds because events threaten to slip beyond his control. Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair is a panorama where petty thieves, prostitutes, hypocritical Puritans, the gullible and the deranged mingle freely; and the disguised Justice Overdo fails lamentably to bring law and order to the chaos.
