Jonson Shakespeare Lacan

 

Introduction: the problem of Volpone

Volpone is a puzzle. It is full of contradictions, conundrums, riddles. It is supposed to be a morality play about the folly of greed and the wickedness of deceit, but all the play's energy goes into the description, the glorification even, of greed and deceit, and the good characters have no life at all, nor any reward for their goodness. It is an attack on falsity, scheming, pretence, play-acting, and is at the same time a triumph of play-acting, and a matchless drama. The characters are flat: they have none of the inner life of almost any Shakespeare character, however minor; in Twelfth Night, for instance, Sir Andrew Aguecheek says one line, 'I was adored once too', and immediately we feel we know more about him than we know from the hundreds of lines spoken by Volpone. And yet the vivid immediacy of the play Volpone, the incredible theatricality, is undeniable, overwhelming. Why?

I want to offer a solution to some of those paradoxes. I want to say that Jonson drew deeply upon his own personal resources in writing this play, and dramatised the contradictions he found there. The play's self-praise and self-hatred, its deep conflicts, are Jonson's own; that what Jonson does in it is to depict, in pitiless and lurid detail, the neurotic ego. In doing so, in exercising extraordinary control over these monsters, he made a successful play. And a successful life.

Lacan: poetry will save us

I will analyse the play using the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan, a French follower of Freud. So first I will give you a brief summary of the strange and powerful ideas of Lacan.

If someone goes to a Lacanian therapist for treatment, this is what happens. He would go because his is suffering from neurosis, a painful illness that has driven him to despair, and to pay the large sums of money that psychoanalysts charge. Perhaps he is full of self doubt; perhaps he is depressed; perhaps he feels unable to love. Psychoanalysis is known as the talking cure, because all of its therapy is done by negotiation with the deceitful flow of language. The patient goes in, and sits down, and after a while he begins to talk. But it is not him talking: the talk that comes out is what Lacan calls false speech. The reason he is there is neurosis, and neurosis is an ego disease, a distortion of the self. So what the patient presents is the false speech of the neurotic ego, self serving, self flattering, conflicted and contradictory, at times puffed up and proud, at times tormented, jagged with self-loathing. A neurotic ego is no place to be. The neurotic ego is skilful, too; able to pass for normal, to present beautiful as well as ugly stories, the seductions of false speech, telling fictions that disguise the pain, dreams that are not true dreams. And all the time the analyst is waiting, silently, waiting. Sooner or later, the patient will make a mistake: the ego will slip. This slip is in language: a slip of the tongue. For instance: instead of saying 'cat', which is what the sense demands, what the false surface narrative requires, he will say, let us say, 'bat'. And at that point the analyst will wake up, because that is precisely what she has been waiting for. And she will probe that word, gently, asking for its hidden meanings, and a little piece of the real nature of the suffering self will be revealed.

Do these revealing slips of the tongue really happen? Oh yes. In writing this lecture at one point I intended the write the words 'the seduction of Celia'. Instead, absolutely without intending to, I put an extra 'a' into the word 'seduction': 'the seducation of Celia'. Analyse that.

Slips of the tongue are what Lacan calls true speech. The voice of the unconscious, breaking through. Now, if this is true, that then it means that there is another discourse, unconscious, just beneath the surface of our normal ego speech, our conscious discourse. Think what that speech must be like. What is the connection between 'cat' and 'bat'? On the logical, commonsense level there is no connection at all; the connection is in the sound. They rhyme. And this, says Lacan, is the difference between conscious and unconscious speech. Conscious speech makes sense, has logic; it has its components connected by meaning and the rules of syntax. Conscious speech operates at the level of the signified: the sense of the words is what counts, and what connects the discourse. But unconscious speech is quite different. Unconscious speech uses puns, rhymes, nonsense connections: it operates at the level of the sound of the word: at the level of the signifier.

So according to Lacan underneath the narrative of consciousness, the voice that speaks if we relax and listen to the chatter of our mind, is another speech, full of puns and jokes and tricks and strangeness; and this, for Lacan, is true speech, undermining the falsity of the ego. The cure for neurosis is to get in touch with this true speech. It is a strange idea: what will cure us, he seems to say, is poetry.

Lacan: making the self

But how did we get into this state in the first place? Where does the neurotic ego come from? In the beginning, says Lacan, there is no ego. The child at the mother's breast, before the entry into language, is wholly at one with the world; there is no inside or outside, no separation, no sense of the self as a separate entity, distinct from the world. The child is the world. Then, gradually, the child begins to see itself as a separate individual: I am not the world, it says; sometimes the world will not give me what I want. That wanting 'I' which the world will not satisfy is the basis for the ego. And so the child cries, and the ego finds its voice, in the scream of desire.

That desire can only be satisfied temporarily; it always wants more than it can get, says Lacan, because what it actually wants cannot be supplied: the original, blissful, union with the universe.

The child constructs the ego out of desire: its own desires, which cannot be satisfied, but also the desires of others-at this stage, the desire of the mother. It tries to become what the mother wants of it. It makes itself out of things that are not it. This, says Lacan, is why life is so unsatisfactory. All of the ways the child constructs itself are partial, incomplete: it sees a hand, and realises, that's my hand; but it can never see the whole of itself, either physically or mentally, so the self it puts together, bit by bit, is fragmented, fantastic, incomplete, uncompletable. This stage is what Lacan calls the imaginaire, and it is characterised as dreamy, fantastic, sexual, shape-shifting, contradictory. Illogical. Unreal.

What comes next is the father. According to Lacan the child comes to realise that there are three people in this set-up, not two: enter Daddy. What the father does is to lay down the law, to say no, and this is associated with the growth of language in the child. Language is about boundaries, limits, everything is either this or that: naming is limitation, completely alien to the uncertain bliss of the imaginaire. So now the child starts to construct itself out of language: I am this, it thinks, I am not that. The language of the father, the language of law, will not allow the paradoxes and contradictions of the imaginaire, so this becomes unconscious, repressed. Instead we move into the clear logical world of this and that, where a chair is a chair and definitely not a banana; though there remains an uneasy and regretting sense that it need not be like that, that the world could, perhaps, maybe, be somehow more poetic. So that adds another level of desire: an incompleteness, that we seek to fill with food and drink and sex and music, with dreams and stories, and, in this society, as in Jonson's Venice, with material goods.

We all have egos. We are all cut off from the unconscious mind, says Lacan. We all want more than we can have. That is all normal. But when this natural state gets out of hand, and causes real suffering--so much so that the patient will spend hours, and large sums of money, in therapy, will do anything in order to make the pain go away: that is neurosis. The forms the neurotic ego can take are very various: neurosis is extremely inventive, but its inventions are all exaggerations of normal feelings: parodies, you might say. Nightmares.

The neurotic ego

The neurotic ego may lurch between self love and self loathing. The Latin poet Catullus, whom Jonson admired and translated, put it like this: 'I hate and I love; you might want to know why. I don't know, but I feel it happening, and I am in hell.' Or else the ego may suffer from the pain of being unable to love: so that other people are disposable, usable, discardable. It may attempt to control and manipulate the world in a fantastic variety of disguises and strategies, rejoicing in its own unstoppable power and ingenuity, at the same time despising itself for its deceit. It may be a hoarder, a miser, a monster of greed, always trying to fill up the emptiness of desire with money or sex or self glorification. Self making. It may be sadistic, taking pleasure in the suffering of others, even, in the pursuit of pleasure, inflicting that suffering. We can maybe each of us see hints of some of those in ourselves. In the neurotic ego they are huge, overpowering, tormenting. All of them are to be found in Volpone, and in Jonson's own life. What he did in the play was to dramatise, with great courage and pitiless accuracy, his own contradictions, in order to control them.

Jonson's self-making

Jonson had a tumultuous personality. He was three times in prison, the first time for murder. His rage, at least if his violent satirical poems are anything to go by, was a sight to see. He loved alcohol - it was, said a friend 'one of the elements in which he liveth'. The same friend said 'He is a great lover and praiser of himself'.

What sort of man was he? He was self made. His father died early in his life; his stepfather was a bricklayer, and Jonson apprenticed and for years earned his living as a bricklayer. His enemies constantly tormented him about his humble background. But when he died he was recognised as the greatest poet of his age, and buried in Westminster Abbey. Throughout his life he sought to define himself, and to make the world accept his own definition of himself. To escape from the bricklayer. He was, you might say, obsessed with himself. One of his best poems is called the Ode to Himself.

He was an actor-a star actor, apparently, since he played the role of Hieronymo in the Spanish Tragedy, the lead role-but he seems to have despised actors. He did, after all, murder one. He was great dramatist, a wonderful dialogue writer, with an instinctive brilliance in pace and energy, but he disliked the theatre. What one has to ask is, how did he manage to hold this vast unstable mass of emotions and urges together to become the most famous, most admired literary figure of his day-greater, they thought, than Shakespeare. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, with half of London at his funeral. How did he do it?

The answer is, he made himself. He did this in two ways. One is, he put himself into his art: his play Volpone is an exercise in self-making, and the rigid control of his verse, his mastery of language, allowed him to let the monsters inside him roam free, and the contradictions to fight it out on stage. The other is, he used print. He made himself in a book. Since I am about to give you a reading of the play Volpone as if it were a book, I need first to talk a little about the difference between plays and books, and how Jonson used this difference.

What is a play?

What is a play? A play is people walking about on a stage making speeches. A play is not a book. Playwrights write for the theatre, not for print. This means that they produce texts that will only be realised when they have been given away, to actors and directors and stage managers and set designers, who will take the bare text and make it into theatre. A play as it leaves the writer is a blueprint, a design, that only becomes architecture, the realised building, by a collaborative process. A play is an ephemeral collaboration, lasting only for the short space of time when the actor, the poor player, as Shakespeare beautifully put it, struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. To write a play is to write on water.

A book is different. The book seems to contain and preserve the text that the author wrote: a book is an extension of the author's ego, his sense of control. When you have written a book, you think, that is mine, that is me, and, many authors think, that is something that will live after I die. When an author watches a play that he has written the feeling is not 'that is me', but 'that is ours'; a play is a collaboration.

Why did Jonson not like the theatre? Because if you write a play, once you pass it to the actors it is outside your control. It becomes theirs, not yours, and they take the credit for the performance. Watching a play that you have written being performed on the stage can be a wonderful experience: it happened to me last summer. It is also agonising. Actors and directors make the play their own. I watched my play five times; each time it was different. Some lines I wrote never got said at all: they simply missed them out. If you think that the play is yours, then you are in for a hard time, sitting in the audience, waiting for the next mistake, that only you will know about, because only you know the play that well. If however you think the play is not yours but belongs to the moment, to the collective, director, stage manager, designer, actors, and to the hour upon the stage, then it is wonderful, especially after all the chaos that is likely to have happened right up to the time of performance. Tom Stoppard said, a play-the play on the stage-- is: a miracle. And he's right. But it's not the author's miracle; the author just does the words.

Jonson disliked the theatre because it took his plays away from him. He could no longer control them. So, he took them back. He had them printed, presented them to the larger and more permanent audience of print, and went to great lengths to control the presentation in print: he even stood over the printers and made sure they punctuated his plays in the way he wanted, which was unheard of at that time or at any time for the next three hundred years. And the punctuation that he insisted on was not the punctuation of speech but written punctuation; not rhetorical, emphasising the spoken flow, but grammatical, emphasising the writtenness of the text. Effectively by controlling print he made himself into a classic in his own lifetime.

Compare this with Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote entirely for the theatre; none of his plays or poems was printed with his consent during his lifetime. He had no interest in immortality, he produced only manuscripts that became prompt books that became the spoken word on stage, and then vanished. His reticence was complete. If Shakespeare had had his way, there would be no Shakespeare; we would have nothing to study.

Jonson the playwright

Ben Jonson invented the word playwright. That's appropriate, because he was a brilliant playwright, and his plays work wonderfully in the theatre-still, in spite of the lost nuance of their highly colloquial language. However, being Jonson, he invented the term 'playwright' as a term of abuse. A playwright, like a wheelwright or a shipwright, is a craftsman, a worker with his hands. Fine, you might say: that's exactly why the plays are so wonderful theatrically: they have craftsmanship, they are solid and workmanlike and ring true. But that was precisely the part of himself that Jonson wished to remake: the workman. He spent his life trying to escape from the fact that he had worked for years as a bricklayer. That is why in the prose preface to Volpone he spends some time pouring the most violent abuse on the contemporary theatre.

You might reasonably ask, if Volpone is not a play, what is it? Well, in the preface Jonson refers to himself as a poet, and to his play as poetry. It seems that he was rewriting himself as a poet, and his play therefore as a poem. It seems that if we follow Jonson's evident and stated intention we should read the play, wonderfully actable thought it is, as a dramatic poem, a genre which Jonson therefore invented.

What is the difference? Well, poems don't have characters as such. They have motifs, patterns of thought. And a poem, however vivid and various its narrative patterns, however differentiated, is the work of one person, not, like a play, a collaboration. So I wish to read Volpone, in what follows, as the expression of different aspects of Jonson's mind: all the characters are aspects of one character, the author.

Volpone the play

Jonson controlled and shaped the contradictions of his life by turning them into art, and the art into print. I will now look at Volpone and try to show that in action.

Volpone begins like this. A very rich man has invented a scheme to get richer. He does it by acting. He has no particular reason to get richer, he already has plenty of money. He thinks or pretends the reason is because he loves gold for its own sake, and makes a long brilliant speech about this, but immediately afterwards he contradicts himself:

I glory

More in the cunning purchase of my wealth,

Than in the glad possession

It isn't the gold, after all, it's the showmanship. This is Lacanian desire: the pure thing, desire that cannot be satisfied, that cannot have enough, because it is desire for a self, an imagined wholeness, that you have lost forever. So one way of trying to recover it is to create new selves, maybe they will make you feel better, maybe if you try to control the whole world and bend it to your will you will, finally, own the world. This is Volpone. This is his joy and energy and vigour in deceit. For which he must also be punished, because the deceit is a betrayal of the self, in the attempt to create a self. The neurotic ego is deeply contradictory.

Venice

The scene is set in Venice, which in this poem is a very extraordinary place. It is foreign, an alien landscape; it is a dream, where desire is gratified, where lies prosper, where shapes change. Volpone's bizarre domestic set-up consists entirely of a eunuch, a dwarf, and a hermaphrodite. Mosca comments, caustically,

The dwarf, the fool, the eunuch, are all his;

He's the true father of his family

In other words, they are part of him. As is Mosca, as I will show. This perverted domesticity is the distorted, incomplete, sexual, shapeshifting world of Lacan's imaginaire. The beings that inhabit this world are completely dominated by desire, ridiculously blind to its contradictions and consequences. Their lives are utterly subject to desire; they want, with all the urgency of a child screaming to be fed, all the time. It is a nightmare world. Terrible things are permitted. It is a world full of lust and hatred, the distinction between humans and animals has broken down--the humans are in fact worse than animals, they are monsters. Animals are rarely greedy and never cruel. Jonson in the preface condemned contemporary theatre for ribaldry, profanation, blasphemy, 'where nothing but the filth of the time is uttered'; he called it 'this bold adventure for hell'; in fact that is a wonderful summary of Volpone, and the Venice he inhabits: a bold adventure for hell. It is the only major work of art that I can think of that has no hint of love in it. Apart from self-love, of course: it is full of that.

Volpone the actor

Volpone believes he is interested in physical pleasure:

Prepare

Me music, dances, banquets, all delights;

The Turk is not more sensual in his pleasures,

Than will Volpone.

But, like the gold, that's not really it: what he is really interested in is being someone else. Outwitting the Avocatori, 'our master-piece' as he calls it, is, he says, better than sex: he loves it

more than if I had enjoy'd the wench:

The pleasure of all woman-kind's not like it

His acting ability is an essential part of his self love:

As when, in that so celebrated scene,

At recitation of our comedy,

For entertainment of the great Valois,

I acted young Antinous; and attracted

The eyes and ears of all the ladies present,

To admire each graceful gesture, note, and footing.

So in order to seduce Celia, he first pretends to be a mountebank Doctor. In precisely the same way, it happens, Jonson himself seduced a woman by pretending to be an alchemist:

He, with the consent of a friend, cozened a lady with whom he had made an appointment to meet an old astrologer in the suburbs, which she kept; and it was himself dressed up in a long gown and a white beard at the light of a dim-burning candle, up in a little cabinet reached unto by a ladder.

In the act of seduction Volpone offers Celia bizarre fantasies: he will make love to her in a wilderness of disguises:

my dwarf shall dance,

My eunuch sing, my fool make up the antie,

Whilst we, in changed shapes, act Ovid's tales,

Thou, like Europa now, and I like Jove,

…

till we have quite run through,

And wearied all the fables of the gods.

It is not sex, but acting, self-making, that excites his imagination.

Jonson's identification with Volpone is very strong, and a lot of it centres round the issue of acting. Both of them were actors; Jonson's ambivalence about acting is expressed in his ambivalence about his character. Volpone embodies the vitality and self-delight of the play, but must be punished severely for it, by a sentence of lifelong torture, in which he is forced to suffer in real life the pain that he had acted. The reality principle cannot be denied. Or can it? Just when we thought that Volpone was irretrievably doomed, he reappears, like the hero of a melodrama, and asks for our approval. Ambivalence followed by ambivalence. Another example: Volpone's seduction of Celia is fiercely condemned, but only by the vapid posturing of Bonario, that convinces no-one. Volpone himself evades punishment for the attempted rape by acting, and Jonson himself took the seduction poem that Volpone uses and printed it without context as his own work in his collected poems.

Mosca

But Jonson also saw himself, quite rightly, as a playwright, and was ambivalent about that too; and that, too, he depicted in the play.

If Volpone, like Jonson, is an actor, a mountebank, then Mosca is Jonson the scriptwriter, in a symbiotic relationship with the actor. They cannot do without each other, the actor needs the script and the playwright needs the actor to play the script-unless, like Jonson, he writes a book--but Volpone the actor is unaware of how much Mosca the playwright hates him, for getting all the credit for the playwright's beautiful inventions. The actor thinks that the two of them are working together, that they are in fact one: Volpone's love for Mosca, is self-love.

Thou art mine honour, Mosca, and my pride,

My joy, my tickling, my delight!

This becomes at their moment of triumph explicitly sexual

Let me embrace thee. O that I could now

Transform thee to a Venus!

In Lacanian terms this is the narcissism of the child at the breast, where all the world is an expression of his sexual pleasure.

Mosca, however, has another agenda, an exactly parallel narcissism:

I fear, I shall begin to grow in love

With my dear self, and my most prosperous parts,

They do so spring and burgeon; I can feel

A whimsy in my blood: I know not how,

Success hath made me wanton. I could skip

Out of my skin, now, like a subtle snake,

I am so limber.

So, author and actor couple and twist, struggling for possession of the play, and of their various selves, and in doing so they destroy each other.

Jonson's poetry

It is important to say something about Jonson's poetry, which is extraordinary. There is no doubt, from its energy, its inventiveness, its incredible resourcefulness, the driving varied rhythms and colloquial vitality, that this is true speech; we have only to compare it with Bonario's absurd posturings when he arrives to defeat Volpone to see the difference.

But if we compare Jonson with Shakespeare a strange fact emerges: Jonson avoids metaphor. For Shakespeare metaphor is as natural as breathing: he cannot avoid it. Jonson uses plain speech, heightened amazingly with rhythmic energy and fantastic variety, but nonetheless plain speech. Listen to this:

Death! I will buy some slave

Whom I will kill, and bind thee to him, alive;

And at my window hang you forth, devising

Some monstrous crime, which I, in capital letters,

Will eat into thy flesh with aquafortis,

And burning corsives, on this stubborn breast.

The words are fantastic, unreal, but they are not metaphors. Corvino means exactly what he says: that is what he intends to do to his wife, if she won't prostitute herself to a diseased geriatric. That is what is so chilling about it.

I only need quote a couple of sentences of Shakespeare's abuse to show the contrast:

Thou whoreson zed! thou unnecessary letter! My lord, if you will give me leave, I will tread this unbolted villain into mortar, and daub the wall of a jakes with him.

It is, of course, all metaphor. It is Shakespeare.

Jonson makes statements, lays down the law; he is in control of his fantastic creations. Shakespeare, in contrast, suggests, creates images, allows us to associate and ponder his meanings: Shakespeare writes like a strange dream, Jonson with pitiless daylight. Jonson controls tightly the meanings of his language; Shakespeare allows, invites, even forces us to invent our own. Jonson uses poetry, as he used print, to close meaning down; Shakespeare uses poetry, as he used theatre, to open meaning up, to give it away.

Malvolio

Shakespeare too depicts the neurotic ego. Malvolio, like Volpone, is a fantasist, a self made man, a forgery. We overhear him daydreaming, creating himself. Interestingly, doesn't use metaphor: he speaks the plain speech of the ego:

Calling my officers about me, in my branched velvet gown; having come from a day-bed, where I have left Olivia sleeping

Like Volpone he is sensual, but the real focus of his desire is to create himself, to glorify himself. 'Oh, you are sick of self-love, Malvolio' says Olivia, with tolerant accuracy.

Malvolio tries to close down the foolery and anarchy of the play's under-life. In his case it is a fragile surface, and the monsters that he attempts to suppress eventually overwhelm him. Because he is a forgery, he can be destroyed by a forgery. Because he lives in a shadowplay of lies, he can with such ridiculous ease be brought down by lies.

His downfall is cruel, and this makes it hard for us, or for the noble characters, the Duke, Viola, Olivia, to understand. Like Volpone, he committed no crime, yet he is tortured. He is cast into a cellar, deprived of light, subjected to nonsense.

It is like a brutal application of Lacanian therapy. Because he attempted to repress the carnivalesque unconscious, the natural poetry that, says Lacan, will save us, he is plunged into the unconscious by force, underground, deprived of the surface falsities that make up his existence, stripped bare, as it were. His lies are replaced by bizarre fantasy, and he is subjected, forcibly, to the strange inconsequential voice of the unconscious: to nonsense poetry. To carnival. This, his tormentors say, is what you were denying: this is what your narrow egotism attempted to suppress. What you suppress returns to torment you, Lacan would say, and that is what happens to Malvolio.

He is certainly not cured. This is Shakespeare: he creates characters whom we believe to be real, deep, complex. There are no easy answers. When Malvolio's pretences are stripped away, when he is deeply humiliated, all his hypocrisy and fantasising exposed, there is nothing left in Malvolio but malevolence.

I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you.

As in Volpone, the ego returns, in fantasy; but here the fantasy is vicious: he will destroy the world. The calm harmonies and resolution in love with which the play ends contain and accommodate this evil; it is not suppressed. Shakespeare, unlike Jonson, allows freedom at all levels: metaphor, fantasy, and even the evil of the world.