Exactly four hundred years ago, dramatist, poet, scholar and writer, Ben Jonson (1572/3-1637), contributed to one of the most important volumes in history, The First Folio of Shakespeare. In the introduction to Shakespeare’s plays, in Jonson’s ‘To the memory of my beloved, the author, Mr. William Shakespeare’, is the famous line …
He was not of an age, but for all time!
High praise, indeed. And all the more sincere because Jonson was not a sycophantic follower but, rather, a critical friend. He criticized Shakespeare for not writing according to the rules of the time, and he felt that …
he flowed with that facility that sometime it was necessary he should be stopped.
There’s what I consider to be a brilliant attempt to capture the relationship that Shakespeare and Jonson enjoyed. It’s a short story titled Proofs of Holy Writ by Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), published in 1934 in the Strand Magazine.
We’re in the reign of King James because the story title (created by Shakespeare in Othello as mentioned later) and plot are related to James’s project to produce a new version of the Bible, some time after Shakespeare (1564-1616) has completed his writings and retired back to New Place in Stratford-upon-Avon. Shakespeare and Jonson are in the garden. It is a summer’s day. There is fruit and wine. And they are enjoying what might now be referred to, I suppose, as banter.
‘To come to your works, Will -’
’I am a sinner on all sides. The drink’s at your elbow.’
’Confession shall not save ye - nor bribery.’ Ben filled his glass. ‘Sooner than labour the right cold heat to devise your own plots you filch, botch, and clap ‘em together out o’ ballads, broadsheets, old wives’ tales, chap-books -’
Will nodded with complete satisfaction. ‘Say on,’ quoth he.
’’Tis so with nigh all yours. I’ve known honester jackdaws. And whom among the learned do ye deceive? Reckoning up those - forty is it? - your plays you’ve misbegot, there’s not six which have not plots common as Shoreditch.’
’Ye’re out, Ben. There’s not one. My Love’s Labour (how I came to write it, I know not) is nearest to lawful issue. My Tempest (how I came to write that, I know) is, in some part, my own stuff. Of the rest, I stand guilty. Bastards all.!"
’And no shame?’
’None! … to hatch new plots is to waste God’s unreturning time like a -’ He chuckled, ‘like a hen.’
Glorious!
Back to the story title for a moment. It appears in Othello, when the villain, Iago, makes the point that Desdemona’s handkerchief will be seen by Othello “as proofs of holy writ”. And, to bring it all back to Jonson’s point about stealing plots, Othello is based upon a novella in a 1565 work, Hecatommithi, by Italian novelist and poet Giraldo Cinthio (1504-1573).
If it’s not too sacrilegious to suggest it, it seems to me that a modern text captures the sense of what’s going on here: the words of jazz musicians Sy Oliver and Trummy Young, recorded with Ella Fitzgerald in 1939:
‘T ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.
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