The Social Relations of Jonson's Theater.

Wilson, Luke

Jonathan Haynes' book follows the recent shift in Jonson criticism from moral and formal considerations to the social agency of his theater. Central to this project, for Haynes, is a description of Jonson's realism as "a realism of subject matter" distinct from the Elizabethan realism of character, or word and action, which enables it to assume a new efficacy in the creation of manners and fashions. The features of the plays both depend on and influence recursively the material conditions of their production, specifically the rise of the commercial theaters. This by-now-familiar methodological framework supports some sound and novel readings of the plays.

Haynes' second chapter shows how Jonson's realism evolved out of the late medieval morality play, whose alehouse and tavern scenes developed a realism of social gesture independent of didactic intent. The difference between the treatment of such gesture in the moralities and in Jonson's plays, Haynes argues, is that the latter, by substituting secular for divine causation, and linking social ills horizontally, avoids the ideological impasse of the morality, which closes off rather than opening up a clarifying rearticulation of social conflicts.

Haynes identifies the appearance in 1597 of both Chapman's An Humorous Day's Mirth and Haughtons' Englishmen for My Money as establishing the preconditions enabling Jonson to launch Every Man In the following year. Chapman's play thematizes the critical observation of social behavior, though without the analytic approach to social tensions evident in Jonson, while Haughton's, the first regular comedy set in London, undertakes the unprecedented, "a deeply realized sense of the London setting" (31).

A long central chapter offers readings of Every Man In and Epicoene and useful discussions of such staples of Jonsonian criticism as comical satire, fashion, and the War of the Theaters. Haynes' primary concern is to demonstrate the novelty of Jonson's analytic attention to social gesture, which he usefully explains by reference to Norbert Elias' theory of the "sociogenesis of manners."

Chapter 4, which first appeared in article form in 1989, shows how in The Alchemist Jonson constructs "a new conception of criminality" deriving not from a Foucauldian technology of discipline and punishment but rather from "a new structure of economic and social opportunities" (99); thus Jonson "professionalizes criminality without hypostatizing it" (99). Face's ability to cross the barrier between criminality and orthodox behavior suggests that Jonson's conception of criminality subverts new bourgeois attempts to categorize the criminal as radically Other. Are Jonson's other social interventions correspondingly subversive? One of the strengths of Haynes' book - though some may see it as a weakness - is that he is less interested in answering this question than in showing the novel form the playwright's social agency assumes in Jonson.

This preference is less evident in the final chapter on Bartholomew Fair, which first appeared in ELH in 1984 and reflects critical interests then current. Marking at the outset the difference between the festive marketplace as a Bakhtinian ideal and as an imperfect early modern amalgam of traditional and capitalist modes of exchange, Haynes shows how for Jonson a detached and critical perspective on the fair is to be preferred to direct involvement with all its attendant perils. Jonson creates and then carefully circumscribes the illusion of a festive dissolution of social distinctions.

Though largely lacking from this discussion of Bartholomew Fair, Haynes' more recent interest in social gesture per se is what most distinguishes the book as a whole. Even where he covers familiar ground, as in his discussions of fashions and stage-sitting gallants, Haynes shows strong scholarship and a fine critical sense of the social modalities of early modern theater. This book offers a great deal to those interested in the social dimensions of Jonson's theater, and not a little to anyone interested in the literary history of social gesture.

Luke Wilson OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY