Anachronic Jonson: Intertextual Histories in Sejanus and Catiline"
(2012) “Long Reach of Antiquity” — Location: Columbia University, New York, USA (28.April.2012)
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- In this paper we want to argue that this historiographical reading takes a one-dimensional view Jonson’s use of sources. On the surface allusions to classical authorities do contribute to the seriousness and accuracy of Jonson’s historical drama. But when one follows those allusions to their sources, when one accounts for the original context they bring with them, and when considers the varying distances between those original contexts and how they function as quotations in Jonson’s plays, one finds that Jonson’s authorities produce a wide range of temporal effects. They are caught between the dramatic chronology of Jonson's scripts, the historical chronology of the events which those scripts portray, and the literary chronology of their sources. This paper will pursue these interlocked and conflicting chronologies through Jonson's use of his principal historiographical sources, and into what John Henderson calls his “toolbox” of unacknowledged literary and poetic sources. Ultimately, we aim to show that Jonson's Roman drama is constantly concerned with what it means to write through and with, and to be written by, our historical and literary sources, and that Sejanus and Catiline persistently ask whether history has anything like a “before and after,” or whether the problematics of reception mean that time and text run always in both directions. Ultimately, we hope to reveal a Renaissance playwright keenly interested in the instabilities of his classic texts: not a Jonsonus historicus, but [to adapt a term from Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood] an anachronic Ben Jonson.
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Kachuck, A., Grek Leon, & et al. (2012). Anachronic Jonson: Intertextual Histories in Sejanus and Catiline”. “Long Reach of Antiquity”, Columbia University, New York, USA. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/101112