‘This was the Better Way’: The Restoration Afterlives of Ben Jonson’s Comic Designs

Abstract

The dramatists of the Restoration stage reveal the guiding influence of Ben Jonson, giving his plays a strong comedic afterlife, particularly with respect to his construction of his plots and his sense of comedic design. This article explores that influence by first considering the influences on Jonson’s own concept of comic design, particularly as derived from Aristotle, and the late-antique grammarians Euanthius and Donatus. Jonson follows Aristotle’s distinction of comedy from tragedy on the basis of the ‘laughable’ moral quality of its characters. When paired with Jonson’s own didactic bent, this distinction shaped his ‘humours’-based approach to character, and his plots’ exposure and mockery of those characters. Daniël Heinsius’s commentaries on Aristotle’s Poetics show clear consonance with Jonson’s tight integration of his humorous characters into densely unified plots by way of the trickster characters’ hoaxes. Jonson also finds in Scaliger’s unique concept of catastasis, the penultimate movement of comic plot, a definitive tactic for achieving that integration and exposure. In the light of these claims, we look at three of Jonson’s plays, Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), Volpone (1605) and Epicene, or the Silent Woman (1609), which depict his developing techniques of character, exposure hoaxes and catastasis. This leads to the later seventeenth century and John Dryden’s attentive analysis of Jonson’s comic plots, especially that of Epicene. We then show how the Jonsonian traits singled out by Dryden were used and adapted by William Wycherley in The Country Wife (1675) and William Congreve in The Way of the World (1700).