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David Hopkins, Victoria Moul, Jonson, Horace, and the Classical Tradition., Notes and Queries, Volume 58, Issue 2, June 2011, Pages 309–311, https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjr020
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Extract
BEN JONSON’S profound and extensive indebtedness to classical literature has always featured prominently in discussions of his work, and scholarly editions of his poems and plays have recorded many of his numerous local echoes of particular classical authors and works. But, as Jonson himself insisted in Timber, a true poet does not merely imitate ‘the ancients’ ‘servilely’ like ‘a creature that swallows what it takes in crude, raw, or indigested’, ‘resting’ in their ‘sole authority’, and taking ‘all upon trust from them’. Rather, he brings his ‘own experience’ to bear on their ‘observations’, treating them ‘as guides, not commanders’. Victoria Moul’s study of Jonson’s complex relations with one particular classical forebear, Horace, chimes readily with the poet’s own dialogic and interactive conception of classical influence. Through a series of studies of particular poems and plays—some well-known, some less familiar—she explores not only the subtle ways in which Jonson’s reading of Horace informed his own processes of artistic self-discovery, self-presentation, and self-vindication, but also (and equally importantly) the ways in which we might learn ‘to read Horace the better for Jonson’s help’.
