Collaborating on Credit: Ben Jonson’s Authorship in Eastward Ho!

Abstract

Although the importance of Ben Jonson’s 1616 folio to the emergence of the author is already well established, the significance of collaboration to his early career has been somewhat overlooked. This essay argues that when considering Jonson’s authorship through early modern credit culture, his participation in the collaborative mechanisms of the playhouses becomes clearer. This is particularly the case with the play Eastward Ho! (1605), written alongside George Chapman and John Marston. Jonson’s early experiences of social credit in the playhouses is examined, especially his relationship with the impresario Philip Henslowe and the Admiral’s Men, as well as his later partnership with the Children of the Queen’s Revels. Close reading of Eastward Ho! reveals how Jonson, Chapman and Marston wrote the kinds of debt and credit relationships they experienced in the companies into the play’s plot. In a play deeply interested in the social effects of performance, the characters constantly enact collaborative devices to add to their credit. The play’s comic ending, dependent on performing collaborative credit, mirrors Jonson’s own immersion in the economy of obligation in the theatres. His eventual literary singularity, and his commensurate sociality, were not separate parts of his career but central to his playwriting practice. [G.E.]