Jonson’s views on Shakespeare, which Carl quotes above, come from Jonson’s Timber: or Discoveries. This is in effect Jonson’s commonplace book, though one in which he draws on his reading to compose what are occasionally almost short essays. It is perhaps of interest that, as a prose writer (and in writing about both prose and verse), Jonson favours clarity and straightforwardness as against the more Ciceronian manner of balanced symmetries favoured by others in his time and before, a manner evident in some of Shakespeare’s dramatic prose. For me, the relevance of this to the present discussion is that it is yet another sign of the historically contingent nature of these matters.
It is perhaps also worthwhile remembering the difference in genre between Timber and the dedicatory poem to the First Folio. The First Folio was a major publishing venture – distinctly up-market, as we might say today. To have been critical of Shakespeare in such a place would have been a breach of literary decorum and fatal to the whole project.
Jonson has two other reported observations about Shakespeare, both recorded by William Drummond during Jonson’s visit (on foot…) to Scotland in 1619: “That Shakespeare wanted art”; and, later, “Shakespeare, in a play, brought in a number of men saying they had suffered a shipwreck in Bohemia, where there is no sea near by some 100 miles”. Interpreting these remarks is not straightforward, partly because they are second-hand., and because the first is so brief.
Clive
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