Three Comedies [antikvár]

introduction Then to the well-trod stage anon. If Jonson's leamed sock be on. Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child. Warble his native wood-notes wild. This, I suppose, is the context in which many of us as schoolchildren first came upon the mere name of Ben Jonson. It occurs in John Milton's L'Allegro, in that passage where the poet, talking of the nocturnal pleasures of city life, enthuses over the comic theatre. It is ironic that the second line, which contains Milton's tribute to the master of English comedy, should have become a puzzling allusion which young minds are required to explain at O-level. Yet Jonson belongs with those writers whom one is often expected to know about rather than to have read. I was fortunate in that I next came upon Jonson in the theatre, when Donald Wolfit was playing Volpone and relishing that arch-predator's sardonic villainies. That Jonson could still be a great entertainer came as a revelation. He belongs on the boards, as Milton indeed was suggesting in the expression 'well-trod stage', but the doubly allusive lines from L'Allegro seem, from tlie way in which they demand foot-noting, sadly symbolic of Jonson's reputation among readers today. The 'learned socks' are the slippers Greek and Roman aaors wore in comedies; in these lines Jonson, the classically erudite writer of comedy, is epitomized in an allusion from the theatre of the Ancients by a poet of even greater classical erudition. But Milton expected his readers to recognize also a graceful compliment to Ben Jonson, for in this author's own poem in Shakespeare's memory prefaced to the First Folio, 'sock' is similarly used: And though thou hadst small Latin and less Gredc, From thence to honour thee I would not seek For names; but call forth thund'ring Aeschylus. Euripides, and Sophocles to us