The Use of Names in Ben Jonson's Plays

The astute choice of a character’s name is something we, as readers, cherish in literature. We only have to recall Dickens’s villains to see how important a name can be in the depiction of a certain personality – the name Ebenezer Scrooge (A Christmas Carol), for example, with its harsh consonants, immediately hints at unkindness and cruelty, whilst the name Verneering (Our Mutual Friend) at once reveals a sense of superficiality and an obsession with ostentation. When dwelling on the importance of names in literature, we may also recall Virginia Woolf’s feminist novel A Room of One’s Own, the heroine of which is never fully identified apart from as ‘Mary’. Given that this name was, at the time, the most common female name, this naming sets her forth as a universal figure of feminine life. This tradition of the precise selecting of names partly stems back to Medieval morality plays, in which the characters each represent a particular virtue or vice and are named accordingly: in the anonymously-written, archetypal morality play, Everyman, the protagonist is surrounded by characters like ‘Good-Deeds’, ‘Beauty’, ‘Knowledge’ and ‘Strength’. Arguably, it was this tradition that Ben Jonson drew on in the skilled naming of his characters: though their names can be easily overlooked, his specific choices often emphasise particular aspects of his satirical writing. In his three most famous comedies, Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, Jonson uses names to exemplify the idiosyncrasies of his characters before we have even met them, and it is often the naming of his characters that drives his satire or elucidates his plots.

The naming of characters in Volpone is the simplest manifestation of this phenomenon. In the play, Jonson draws directly on the medieval fabliaux tradition and, as Michael Jamieson points out, ‘The people of the play are, through their names, invested with animal symbolism…’ The play is set in Venice, a city which was, to the Elizabethans, seen as a hub of corruption – many audience members would recall the usury of Shylock in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. The name Volpone, in Italian, literally means ‘sly fox’, and thus the protagonist comes to represent this corruption – his manipulative scheming (evident in his comic asides), like that of Subtle, Face, and Doll in The Alchemist, comes straight out of the cony-catching pamphlets of the Early Modern period. The other characters are likewise elucidated by their names: Corbaccio (‘the raven’), Voltore (‘the vulture’) and Corvino (‘the crow’) are all carrion-eating fowl, hungry not for flesh but for the wealth of the play’s protagonist. This animalism is so extreme that Corvino, for instance, commits to disinheriting his son and prostituting his wife. But this is Jonson’s name choosing at its most simple. More interesting are characters like Sir Politic Would-Be, whose name gives away his role as the ridiculous Englishman abroad, vainly attempting to be politic and sensible, an endeavour in which he fails miserably. Indeed, he is so absurd that he notes in his diary every single action he performs (including urination) during each day, and he characteristically ends the play hiding in a tortoise shell, the victim of one of Peregrine’s clever pranks. Thus, we can see how his name goes towards a satire of the ignorant English traveller, his mind filled with extravagant and bizarre business ideas with which he bores characters and audience alike. Likewise, the name ‘Littlewit’ is ironically telling, making the opening scene of Bartholomew Fair all the more humorous. This garrulous amateur dramatist is infatuated with his own negligible intelligence, constantly endeavouring to present himself as a witty and clever orator. For example, when Winwife employs some relatively clichéd metaphors (‘strawberry-breath, cherry-lips, apricot-cheeks, and a soft velvet head’), Littlewit ironically cannot restrain his admiration: ‘that I had not that before him, that I should not light on’t as well as he! Velvet head!’ Justice Overdo’s name is similarly revealing of his character, predicting the exaggeration and self-satisfied nature of his speeches: ‘Now to my enormities: look upon me, O London! and see me, O Smithfield! The example of justice, and mirror of magistrates, the true top of formality, and scourge of enormity. Hearken unto my labours…!’ He, along with the Puritan Rabbi Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, is just one of the many bourgeois characters of this carnivalesque play whose pretensions to honour, authority and religiosity are mocked by Jonson (who, of course, loathed the Puritans for their critique of the theatre), and it is the naming of these characters that contributes to Jonson’s mockery.

Similar naming techniques are used in one of Jonson’s other satirical comedies, The Alchemist. Sir Epicure Mammon is one of the ‘gulls’ hoping to get rich from Subtle’s feigned magical skill. The name Epicure refers to the Ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, famed for an emphasis on sensual pleasure (though this depiction of his philosophy is somewhat inaccurate and exaggerated). The name Mammon is also suggestive, meaning ‘wealth regarded as an evil influence or false object of worship or devotion’. To an extent, then, the name Epicure Mammon is oxymoronic – though his forename implies an emphasis on material and physical existence, his surname seems to refute that, again showing how Jonson uses names to mock certain characters. So it’s no wonder that a character with such a name is so obsessed with the wealth and material riches that he hopes to acquire, which he boasts about to Doll: he shall have ‘glasses / Cut in more subtle angles, to disperse / And multiply the figures, as I walk / Naked between my succubæ.’

Even more witty a choice of name is the name adopted by Jeremy the Butler, who refers to himself as Captain Face whilst he is operating as a member of London’s criminal underworld. The name alone suggests the adoption of a mask, though we don’t find out until Act V that his real name is Jeremy. As Jonathan Haynes points out, ‘All traces of origin are effaced’ by Face’s ‘constant and impeccable role-playing.’ Thus, Face is an ‘impostor’, one of many corrupt characters lurking in London’s underworld: as the Prologue explains, ‘No clime breeds better matter, for your whore, / Bawd, squire, impostor, many persons more.’ (lines 7-8) At the end of the play, though, Face is unmasked. And yet, he is, to some extent, the victor of the play. He is so manipulative and skilful that Lovewit’s neighbours think ‘Jeremie / Is a very honest fellow…’ Moreover, as the name Lovewit would imply, Face’s master appreciates his wit and scheming intellect, and thus Face can use his wit to gain his master’s pardon:

‘Give me but leave to make the best of my fortune,

And only pardon me thi' abuse of your house:

It's all I beg. I'll help you to a widow,

In recompense, that you shall give me thanks for…’

Hence, at the end of the play, Lovewit pays tribute to his servant’s ingenuity: he is ‘very grateful’ to have ‘received such happiness by a servant.’ It’s no surprise that a character called Lovewit would feel obliged to be ‘A little indulgent to that servant’s wit,’ and thus again we can see how Jonson’s use of naming helps not only to illustrate his characters, but to develop and almost foreshadow the plot. And though Lovewit is the eventual winner of the play (gaining a wife and augmented wealth), Face certainly ends up better off than his two scheming companions Subtle and Doll, who are forced to flee once the master of the house arrives unexpectedly. Face is what was known in the Renaissance period as a ‘taker-up’:

‘The taker-up seemeth a skilful man in all things, who hath by long travail learned without book a thousand policies to insinuate himself into a man’s acquaintance. Talk of matters in law, he hath plenty of cases at his fingers’ ends, and he hath seen, and tried, and ruled in the King’s courts. Speak of grazing and husbandry, no more knowether more shires than he, nor better way to raise a gainful commodity, and how the abuses and overture of prices might be redressed.’ – Greene, Notable Discovery

Face can use his wit to adopt multiple different personalities (hence the name ‘Face’, establishing his use of masks) – as Haynes explains, ‘Everyone is spoken to in his own language.’ He can talk to Drugger about tobacco, he can talk to Dapper about his milieu, all the while ready to transform back into Jeremy the Butler. Thus, the barrier between the criminal underworld and straight society becomes permeable for him, whilst it is not for Subtle and Doll. In this sense, Face can be seen as a warning to Elizabethan theatre-goers, his character demonstrating the Trump-like deceptions and manipulations not only of the criminal underworld, but of society in general.

We must remember, though, how aware Jonson was of the dangers of satire – he was, after all, arrested and imprisoned more than once for his satirical work. One of his most interesting satirical works, Poetaster, works completely differently in terms of naming. Jonson’s play sets out, amongst other things, to revenge the criticism he had received from Marston, Dekker and others during the so-called ‘War of the Theatres’ or Poetomachia. But, as he explains in his Apologetical Dialogue, he aims to ‘spare the persons and to speak the vices’. By setting his play in Augustan Rome rather than in London, Jonson champions his own style of Horatian satire (or, at least, the style of poetry to which he aspires), while criticising the Juvenalian satire of Marston and Dekker (though, in bitterly attacking these two playwrights as ‘vile ibids’ in the Apologetical Dialogue, Jonson was hypocritically sinking to the Juvenalian level) – thus, the play can be seen as a general satire of the poetaster figure whilst also criticising Jonson’s rivals. The loathsome Crispinus is often read as a representation of Marston – towards the end of the play, Crispinus vomits up what Tom Cain refers to as a series of ‘Marstonisms’, a pretentious and bombastic lexical flood including words like ‘retrograde’, ‘incubus’, ‘glibbery’, ‘magnificate’ and more. Moreover, the two poems that Crispinus and Demetrius read are undeniable parodies of Marston and Dekker’s work. But still, by choosing not to name Marston in the play, Jonson arguably escapes accusations of Juvenalian, bitter satire.

By (uncharacteristically) avoiding the use of illuminating names, Jonson is also able to compare himself to the great Augustan poet Horace, ‘a self-projection of Jonson’ according to Tom Cain. After all, the two poets were indeed very similar – Horace was often taunted because his father was a freed slave, and Jonson was acutely self-conscious of his step-father’s profession as a brick-layer; Horace had fought in Philippi, Jonson fought in the Low Countries. To an extent, then, Jonson seems to be modelling himself on Horace: in fact, in his Discoveries Jonson advocated exactly that: the ability ‘to bee able to convert the substance, or Riches of an other Poet, to his owne use.’ Thomas Smith even praised Jonson as ‘the elaborate English Horace,’ and like Horace, Jonson often chose to write in a realist style, ‘out of use and experience’ (Discoveries). Thus, Jonson could implicitly compare himself to the great Augustan satirist in an attempt to elevate his style.

There are other comparisons in Poetaster that also ought not to be ignored. The play opens with Ovid composing a poem which turns out to be one of Marlowe’s own translations of Ovid, lines from a banned edition published with Sir John Davies’s epigrams. Marlowe was one of the most loved poets of the day, and Jonson clearly respected him, though Marlowe does not completely escape criticism – compared to the virtues of Virgil and Horace, Ovid is seen as sensuous and arguably blasphemous in his organisation of the Divine Banquet (this, again, would link the Ovid character to Marlowe, who was often accused of blasphemy and atheism, and whose play Dr Faustus presents us with a similarly blasphemous banquet scene in Rome). So by presenting Ovid in such a way that we can’t help thinking of Marlowe, Jonson was able to express his opinions without fear of danger – Thomas More arguably used a similar technique in Utopia, hiding his own beliefs from the reader. Thus, the banishment of Ovid could be compared to the death of Marlowe, and as Tom Cain writes, ‘The Ovid being rejected is as much the Ovid of the 1590s in England [i.e. Marlowe and poets who wrote in a similar vein] as the historical Ovid of Augustan Rome.’ Finally, by setting the play in Rome, Jonson could make a subtle contrast and criticism between the high regard poets were held in under Augustus’s rule, and their relatively harsh treatment in Elizabethan England. It is poets that guide the Emperor Augustus in Jonson’s play, whilst it was libel and informers (like Tucca) that drove the Essex Rebellion of 1601, the year Jonson’s play was first performed.

So it’s clear that names played a huge role in Ben Jonson’s dramatic work. In his later comedies, he used names to elucidate and expound the personalities of certain characters whilst also satirising or ironizing them, whilst in the earlier Poetaster he deliberately avoids the direct naming of his subjects (if we can go so far as to say for sure that Jonson was attempting to satirise Marston and Dekker, amongst others). It is Histrio’s plays that directly mock and bitterly attack individuals: Ben Jonson, posing as the virtuous Horace, suggests he will not wrong ‘men’s fames’ (Trebatius’s words) in his verse. The implication is that Jonson (as Horace), along with Virgil (whom some critics have claimed resembles Chapman), is aloof from that, though it is doubtful whether he really is. Whatever the answer, it’s clear that Jonson thought very carefully about the choice of names in his plays, and through those names he makes his comedies and satires all the more powerful. As Haynes argues, Jonson used his art ‘in society as a weapon, or tool, or organ.’ Whether it was mocking the folly of naïve bourgeois figures like Cokes or Littlewit; whether it was revealing and revelling in the dark scheming of the criminal underworld; whether it was critiquing Early Modern nascent capitalism; or whether it was responding to the attacks of other poets, Jonson made the naming of characters an expressive tool in his work, carrying on and expanding earlier traditions, and influencing the work of writers who came after him.

Masks and Poses in Donne's Holy Sonnets

In his poem ‘Jordan’, George Herbert criticises the convoluted nature of Renaissance poetry and urges poets towards straightforward expressions of emotion, particularly religious emotion. He questions ‘Is there in truth no beauty?’ and opens the poem’s third stanza with the memorable line: ‘Shepherds are honest people; let them sing…’ With the pastoral reference and the use of the word ‘honest’, Herbert also seems to be condemning the insincerity of 17^th Century courtly life contrasted with a sense of rustic innocence. John Donne himself was acutely aware of this artificiality, evident in his sonnet ‘Oh, to vex me…’ (often printed as the last sonnet in the sequence) in which he reveals the variety of masks he adopts in his poetry. He questions whether he can really demonstrate the real truth of his soul ‘By circumstances, and by signes that be / Apparent in us…’ He looks back at his past and sees only a succession of skilfully-adopted poses: ‘to day / In prayers, and flattering speaches I court God: / To morrow I quake with true feare of his rod.’ He showed a similar awareness in his sermons, as when he discussed the dangers of rhetoric and the power of words ‘to shape that beliefe’ and ‘to powre it into new molds… to stamp and imprint new formes, new images, new opinions in it.’ In his Holy Sonnets, Donne does exactly that: he uses his poetic skill to shape various different identities for himself.

Indeed, Donne’s whole life seems to have been divided into a dual identity. A clear split has been forged between the young and lustful Donne of the Songs and Sonnets and the old and devout Donne of the Divine Poems. This division was partly driven by the mature Donne’s desire to distance himself from the sensuousness of his early poetry, a distance reinforced by Izaak Walton’s biography of Donne, in which he compared the poet to a latter-day Augustine, the saint whose conversion at the hands of St. Ambrose became an influential Christian paradigm. But this division is unhelpful in a number of ways, not least because it is based on the false assumption that the religious poems were written much later than the Songs and Sonnets, an assumption with very little evidence to support it. Moreover, the poems themselves undermine the so-called ‘myth of two Donnes’ in that, throughout the Holy Sonnets, we see the same wit and performance for which the Songs and Sonnets are renowned. As P.M. Oliver points out, ‘Donne’s religious writing… demonstrates a striking continuity with the amatory and satirical verse he had already written.’ True, the matter of the religious poems may be different, but their manner and style are very similar. Like the love poems, the divine poems are often ‘witty, individualistic performances.’ This does, however, leave us with some problems: the idiosyncratic wit and rhetorical skill of the poet often undermines the masks he is attempting to adopt, and to that extent the authenticity of emotion in the Holy Sonnets must be called into question.

Donne adopts two major poses in theHoly Sonnets: the first is that of the submissive and despairing sinner, terrified that his transgressions will lead to his damnation. The second mask he adopts is that of a man assured of his own election, unafraid and almost swaggering. The first mask, that of fear, despair, and melancholy, is typical of devotional verse: Gerard Manley Hopkins adopted a similar personality in his ‘Terrible Sonnets’. The melancholy pose was also typical of the Renaissance man, hence the abundance of young men painted as forlorn youths tortured by unrequited love. Donne himself had one of these portraits commissioned in which he is depicted in darkness with his arms folded – a standard symbol of melancholy – and a large-brimmed hat shading his face. Just as he adopted this pose as a pitiful lover, so in the Holy Sonnets he adopts the pose of pitiful sinner. For example, the fourth sonnet opens with the impassioned exclamation: ‘Oh my black Soule!’ and ends with the embracing of a mournful pose: ‘Oh make thy selfe with holy mourning blacke, / And red with blushing, as thou art with sinne…’ His repentance, then, seems to be a mask in itself, and thus we can infer that the poem’s opening exclamation is no more than an artificiality. Indeed, a number of the poems seem to come across as theatrical and dramatic representations rather than sincere expressions of despair. In her introduction to the divine poems, Helen Gardner notes this ‘almost histrionic note’ and attributes it to ‘the meditation’s deliberate stimulation of emotion.’ The emotions of the poems seem almost fabricated at points, as is suggested by the repetition of ‘oh’ and ‘alas’ in the sequence. These exclamations seem particularly out of context when they follow relatively collected and rational meditations, as in ‘Father, part of his double interest…’ After meditating on the doctrine of the Bible and the various commandments God has given, Donne exclaims: ‘thy last command / Is all but love; Oh let this last Will stand!’ The ‘oh’ makes it seem like the speaker is emotionally involved, but as Oliver points out, ‘the level rationality of the preceding lines’ makes it hard to see the speaker as ‘desperate or hysterical.’

There are similarly histrionic notes in the Songs and Sonnets, again showing why the amatory-religious divide is unhelpful. For example, in ‘The Flea’, when his mistress has crushed the flea with her nail, Donne melodramatically exclaims: ‘Cruel and sudden, hast thou since / Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence?’ Here, Donne is adopting a tone of sadness in order to inspire the pity of his mistress. Arguably, the Holy Sonnets use a similar tactic, attempting to inspire the pity of God through a pose of despair which often comes across as melodramatic. ‘This is my play’s last scene’ opens very sensationally, with the word ‘last’ repeated four times in the first four lines alone. It’s no wonder, then, that Gardner pointed out the ‘note of exaggeration’ which, ‘in stimulating feeling… may falsify it, and overdramatize the spiritual life.’ But this melodrama is not the only aspect of the Songs and Sonnets which has crept into the religious verse. Throughout the divine poems there are idiosyncratic paradoxes, conceits and puns which, though typical of Donne, seem somewhat out of place in devout religious poetry. For example, in ‘A Hymne to God the Father’, Donne mourns his sinfulness with an authentic voice of fear and despair: ‘Wilt thou forgive that sinne where I begunne, / Which was my sin, though it were done before?’ And yet, the first two stanzas end with a paradoxical pun on his name, jarring with the serious tone of the previous lines: ‘When thou hast done, thou hast not done, / For, I have more.’ This mixture of wit and gloom is something that Wilbur Sanders criticised in the Holy Sonnets as a flaw, though perhaps it shows the tension in Donne between a yearning towards seriousness and an inability to completely escape his jocular self. Hence, in the words of Sanders, ‘the personality becomes the prey of inner division.’

This seems to be the underlying flaw of many of the sonnets: though at times they present us with an apparently sincere sense of grief, fear and despair, this is often counteracted by a strange frivolity, as when he plays verbal games with colours at the end of ‘Oh my black Soule!’ Their other major drawback is that they are often dominated by what Sanders calls ‘blatant theological sophistry.’ This is no more evident than in ‘What if this present were the world’s last night?’ In the octet, the speaker focuses on the picture of Christ crucified and wonders whether Christ will ‘adjudge thee unto hell’ even though he ‘pray’d forgivenesse for his foes’. The sestet opens with a direct response: ‘No, no…’ This audacity in itself is odd, and somewhat hard to believe: perhaps Donne used his poetry as a method of self-assurance. He then argues that the beauty of Christ’s image on the cross ‘assumes a pitious mind.’ But Donne, as a Calvinist, knew that this could not be true, since Christ could not be merciful to everybody: the elect would receive God’s pity, whilst the non-elect would feel his wrath and eventually be damned. Indeed, Universalism (the theory that everybody could be saved) was condemned as a heresy in Constantinople in 553 and again at the Protestant Augsburg Confession of 1530, and so it’s incredibly unlikely that Donne could have believed this sophistic argument. Thus, Christ’s image cannot assure pity for everybody. Moreover, Donne’s reference to his idolatrous past is telling since, as Stanley Fish points out, ‘The assertion that he is not now in his idolatry is undermined by the fact that he here says the same things he used to say when he was.’ So it’s clear, then, that as Sanders says, ‘the consolation does not console’ – Donne’s verbal ability to assure himself of his safety seems to undermine itself, revealing his manifest casuistry. Fish goes on: ‘as the poem concludes, he is no more assured of what he assumes than anyone else, neither of the ‘piteous minde’ of his saviour, nor of the spiritual stability he looks to infer from the saviour’s picture.’

The same can be said for Donne’s famous sonnet ‘Death be not proud’. Throughout his life, Donne was obsessed with the idea of death: as a young Catholic in Protestant England, he was taken to see Catholics martyred, an experience that stayed with him into his elderly years. He also wrote tracts on the morality of suicide, and, most famously, is said by Walton to have ‘preached his own Funeral Sermon’ known as ‘Death’s Duel’, a sermon he gave in the final days of his life. He was terrified by the idea that death takes away our individual essence as humans:

‘[T]hat private and retired man, that thought himself his own for ever, and never came forth, must in his dust of the grave be published, and (such are the revolutions of the grave) be mingled with the dust of every highway and of every dunghill, and swallowed in every puddle and pond. This is the most inglorious and contemptible vilification, the most deadly and peremptory nullification of man, that we can consider.’ (‘Death’s Duel’)

In the sermon, he defeats this fear by concluding that every man must ‘lie down in peace in his grave, till he vouchsafe you a resurrection…’ The sonnet ‘Death be not proud…’ follows a similar line, though it is much more bravado in its argument. He addresses personified mortality as ‘poore death’ and bravely says: ‘nor yet canst thou kill mee…’ Death, he says, is ‘slave to Fate’ and asks ‘why swell’st thou then?’ This question in itself, though, supposes that death still assumes a large portion of Donne’s thought, swelling beyond reason into an irrational fear. The poem ends with a theatrical and yet hollow flourish: ‘death shall be no more, death, thou shalt die’. Despite the bravado of this statement, Donne’s declaration is vacuous – as John Stachniewski argues, the fact that it ends with the word ‘die’ ironically demonstrates that death still has power in the poem. Similarly, when Donne says ‘valiantly I hels wide mouth o’rstride’ we see him adopting a peculiarly audacious stance resonating with the precarious assertiveness of ‘Death be not proud’. Thus, whilst these sophistic arguments may have worked in seducing mistresses with wit and humour, they seem incredibly out of place in an eschatological context of salvation or damnation. They may show Donne’s poetic and rhetorical skill, but as Fish notes, ‘The effort of self-persuasion… fails in exactly the measure that his rhetorical effort succeeds.’

In his poem ‘Metempsychosis’ Donne reflects upon the stretching of ‘reasons… to so nice a thinness through a quill / That they themselves break, do themselves spill…’ This stretching of reason is frequently dramatized in the Holy Sonnets, the strength of the sophistic arguments often driven to a ludicrous extent, revealing their weakness. But this is not to say that the poems themselves are weak: this may have been part of Donne’s intention. Perhaps the meaning of the poems is to be found in their note of feigned assurance. As Stachniewski suggests, ‘the argument of Donne’s poems is often so strained that it alerts us to its opposite, the emotion or mental state in defiance of which the argumentative process was set to work. The poem’s meaning lives in the tension between the argument and the emotion.’ Perhaps in ‘This is my playes last scene’ we are not meant to believe with such assurance that Donne’s sins will fall away to Hell whilst he goes up to Heaven. We are, perhaps, urged to question this argument. And so, this self-conscious casuistry is a subtle and effective way of establishing the poetry’s dominant emotions, doubt and fear.

It’s clear, then, that Donne’s poetic style largely stayed with him throughout his career. The same use of wit and paradox can be seen in the Holy Sonnets as was seen in the Songs and Sonnets. It’s also clear that Donne’s poetry is largely a succession of poses, and this is something he himself seems to have been aware of. The sonnets often begin with a pose of despair and then move onto a pose of self-assured certainty. It’s no wonder, really, that the pose of despairing sinner seems, as Gardner says, ‘exaggerated’ to the modern reader given that we no longer live in a country dominated by Calvinism and the fear of God’s wrath – perhaps, then, we can look past this histrionic note as understandable. Moreover, perhaps this tone of feigned emotion simply demonstrates the impossibility of expressing such strong feeling in words. It’s somewhat harder to excuse the strange use of wit and paradox, which seems to undermine Donne’s apparent despair, revealing it to be just a pose (though that’s not to say he never felt despair, just to say that the despair expressed in the sonnets comes across as somewhat feigned). Similarly, the paradoxical sophistry destabilises any sense of self-assurance and comfort, revealing the mask of boldness adopted by the poet. But, as I argued earlier, perhaps this sense of failed assurance was intentional. Though Donne forces his fierce emotions into the restricted sonnet form, and though he apparently attempts to mitigate his despair with theological sophistry which he surely cannot fail to doubt, other emotions inevitably seep out. Just as the highly-wrought passions of ‘Batter my heart…’ seem almost to break free from the strict rhyme scheme and metre (the initial trochee ‘Batter’ being an obvious example), so the despair of the other Holy Sonnets is never really soothed. Perhaps Donne was partly right when he said: ‘Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce, / For, he tames it, who fetters it in verse.’ But, as we read the sonnets, we get the sense that Donne never truly succeeded in ‘taming’ his grief and his fear completely. Each line is bursting with tension, uncertainty, and doubt, and it is this that gives the sonnets their excitement. 

"The Garden of Love" - A Brief Analysis of Blake's Poem

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And Thou shalt not, writ over the door;
So I turn'd to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore. 

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be:
And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

I can’t quite put my finger on what makes this poem so wonderful. My grandmother, a rebelling ex-Catholic, used to read it to my mother when she was a child, and my mother subsequently read it to me as I was growing up. I suppose that’s why this poem has stuck with me for such a long time – I have a personal connection to it. Hopefully, though, I can try to explain my affection for it in more objective terms.

Clearly, the poem is about Blake’s struggles with religion, particularly the stringent rules of the orthodox Anglican Church. But it’s also about the change he himself has gone through in his movement from “innocence” to “experience” as expressed in the titles of his books (Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience).

Hence, with experience, he sees what he “never had seen” – the harsh rigidity of church authority. Where previously he could “play on the green” (recalling the themes of innocent freedom in his earlier poem “The Echoing Green”), there is now a threatening Chapel with shut gates and with “Thou shalt not, writ over the door…”

Likewise, graves and tombstones now stand “where flowers should be.” In Blake’s mind, the church has destroyed everything good in the world – the freedom of childhood, the freshness of the natural world, and, inevitably, the beauty of love. These are things he could enjoy in his childhood innocence, but now that he has matured, his freedom has been torn from him.

There’s a strong sense of nostalgia that lingers throughout the poem, mostly because of the contrasts between the present and the past – the chapel contrasted with green grass, and graves contrasted with flowers. But this nostalgia is also created, perhaps, by the buoyant anapestic trimiter (“A Chapel was built in the midst,” – “Du-dum du-du-dum du-du-dum”). This metre shares the rapid and somewhat cheerful sound of the dactyl, perhaps signifying Blake’s attempts to recall his past innocence and exuberance.

And yet, the rhyme scheme may imply that Blake’s yearning for his past will never be fulfilled, just as the rhyme scheme is never fully fulfilled: only two lines per stanza rhyme, and the rhyme scheme collapses completely in the final stanza. Likewise, the metre changes in the last two lines, moving to an anapestic tetrameter. This symbolizes two things: the failure to recall past innocence (reflected in the return to a slower, less lighthearted metre), and the change that has taken place in the Garden itself. It’s this metrical variation in the poem that I find so exciting.

Thus, the green of the garden has been replaced by the “black gowns” of the priests. Here we recall Blake’s words in his poem “London” where he says that “Every blackening church appals” (my italics). In his mind, the Church brings decay and sadness to all that we should champion. Therefore, the priests are seen “binding with briars” Blake’s “joys and desires”.

So, in his experience, Blake realizes the austere control placed on people by the Church and, as a non-conformist, he rallies against this. Blake may also be attacking a new chapel that was built in Lambeth near his home at the time. It was built by subscription, meaning that parishioners paid for their pews, and Blake was appalled by this. Like Chaucer, he hated the idea that those who could not pay would be excluded from eternal life with God – “the gates of this Chapel were shut”.

Blake takes arms against the authoritarian nature of the Church and the fact that it consumes all goodness in the world. Although he was technically a Christian, he hated the Church for its attempts to suppress sexuality and desire, both of which he saw as central to the human condition. So, in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” he writes: “Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity. / He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.”

“The Garden of Love” is, in many ways, representative of Blake’s rebellious spirit, evident in both his mythological artwork and his more avant-garde poetry. I suppose that is really what I love about this poem, and I guess that’s why it was adored by my mother and my grandmother before her. Blake, as a Romantic poet, was ahead of his time, forever a champion of equality and freedom. For that, at least, he should be remembered.

Is Caryl Churchill’s “Top Girls” a feminist, socialist drama?

What differentiates Caryl Churchill’s “Top Girls” from many other feminist dramas is that, not only does it criticise the cruelties of patriarchy, it also points out the flaws of feminism and the dangers of what is known as intra-sexual oppression. “Top Girls” is a feminist play – Churchill once wrote that “what I feel is quite strongly a feminist position, and that inevitably comes into what I write.” However, it is not unequivocally so, since the play also dwells on the unattractive aspects of modern, radical, and capitalist feminism. “Top Girls” was influenced by Thatcher’s coming to power (a figure who embodies this capitalist feminism) and by Churchill’s trip to America touring her play “Vinegar Tom”. In America, she came across a type of feminism much more associated with business and success within capitalist structures, rather than the more traditional, socialist feminism she was used to. It is this capitalist approach to female emancipation that Churchill criticises, and in this sense it is a feminist, socialist drama.

The first act of the play begins as a celebration of female success and of Marlene’s recent appointment as Managing Director. However, this celebration swiftly transmogrifies into a chaotic scene of female suffering. Although we applaud the feminist attitudes held by these women, seen in Nijo’s questioning of male power (“Priests were often vagrants, so why not a nun?”) and Joan’s expression of female achievement (“I never obeyed anyone. They all obeyed me…”), these attitudes are soon proven to be somewhat ironic. These women, though they have achieved success, are all undeniably conditioned by society. This explains Isabella’s feelings of guilt (“Whenever I came back to England I felt I had so much to atone for,”) and Nijo’s blaming of herself for the flaws and cruelties of society: “The first half of my life was all sin and the second all repentance.” These feelings of guilt demonstrate the fact that these women still believe that male power is a part of the order of nature, thus making their success somewhat sardonic.

This is not to trivialise the success of these women: Joan became Pope and Isabella was asked to join the National Geographical Society. What it does show, however, is how these women have been conditioned. This is also seen in their responses to their own suffering: Joan describes her death with particularly bland language (“They took me by the feet and dragged me out of town and stoned me to death”), perhaps suggesting that she feels she deserved to die. After all, Joan does refer to herself as a “heresy”, reinforcing this idea of self-blame. It is these feelings that make these women ignorant of their own incredible suffering, epitomised by Nijo’s response to Marlene’s questioning her experience of rape: “I belonged to him. It was what I was brought up for from a baby.” It is not until they hear of Griselda’s immense ordeals and they are spurred on by Marlene that they really comprehend the extent to which they suffered, epitomised in Marlene’s words: “O God, why are we all so miserable?”

The chaos of the scene’s end, as all the women describe their singular acts of triumph (even Griselda begins to challenge patriarchy), undercuts the previous sense of celebration In the act, with Joan crying and being sick in the corner. Thus, it is clear that Act 1, rather than simply focusing on the success of these women, demonstrates the ways in which women have been conditioned by society (as seen in Nijo’s obsession with clothes) and the ways in which they have suffered, epitomised by Griselda’s stoic submissiveness. Thus, Act 1 is the act that introduces and develops the theme of feminism through encouraging pity for the plight of women throughout history.

Act 2, on the other hand, presents us with a very different image, emphasising the brutality of modern feminism and so-called “yuppie” culture. It seems that the women of Act 2, particularly Nell and Marlene, have adopted typically negative male stereotypes of drinking and promiscuity in order to gain power. For example, Nell celebrates the fact that she has slept with two men over the weekend (“One Friday, one Saturday”), a story to which Win, in a typically macho-man style, responds, “Aye Aye.” This belligerence is also seen in the women’s reaction to the news about Howard: Marlene calls him a “Poor sod” and Nell brutally remarks: “Lucky he didn’t get the job if that’s what his health’s like.” These ideas of cruelty are also seen in the way in which Nell and Marlene seem to oppress other women. Marlene is brutal in her interview with Jeanine (she tells her that advertisement agencies are “looking for something glossier”), who ends the interview as a feeble wreck with the unconvincing words, “Yes, all right.”

Nell’s interview with Shona is similarly telling. Nell and Win both celebrate “Tough birds” like them, and Nell warms to Shona because she sees her as driven and successful, particularly when she says: “I never consider people’s feelings.” However, when Nell realises that Shona is lying about her identity and qualifications, she at once holds back any assistance she might be able to give her. This demonstrates the biggest problems with modern feminism and intra-sexual oppression: these women are prepared to help other “Tough birds”, but they will not lend a helping hand to those who need it most, those who, as Marlene says, have not “got what it takes.” This is perhaps most clear in Marlene’s cruel (though somewhat understandable) reaction to Mrs Kidd: rather than helping Mrs Kidd and comforting her in her realisation that her own life relies on the success of her husband, Marlene simply tells her to “Piss off”. Though Win is not quite as cruel as the others (she shows sympathy for Angie and Louise), the overwhelming sense of Act 2 is one of a lack of concern for the plight of other women, and thus Churchill criticises capitalist feminism. This is an idea also glimpsed at in Act 1 in the overlapping dialogue (showing a disinterest, perhaps, in the problems of others) and in the silence of the waitress. This implies that, throughout history, many women have been reluctant to help their female counterparts. Though there are moments of collective triumph in Act 1 (in Nijo and Gret’s stories), the self-obsession of these women demonstrates the need for a more socialist approach to feminism.

By placing the Angie and Kit scene before the office scene, Churchill ensures that Act 2 does not appear to celebrate the structures of capitalism. Moreover, the placement of the scene creates an ironic juxtaposition between Angie’s dismal circumstances (her garden has “a shelter made of junk”) and the cold glamour of the office scenes. This juxtaposition lingers until Marlene’s final words of the Act: “She’s not going to make it.” The futile and dreary depiction of Angie’s life (she is forced to invent tales of ghosts and vampires in order to add excitement to her life), along with the hopeless desire of Angie to escape (“If I don’t get away from here I’m going to die”) makes Marlene’s condemnation of Angie as a “Packer in Tesco” even more poignant and harsh. The inability of Marlene to recognise her daughter (“Have you an appointment?” she asks), along with Angie’s struggle to communicate with Mrs Kidd (Angie answers the wrong question) emphasise the brutality of Marlene’s abandoning of her child. Indeed, Marlene’s decision to abandon her daughter has created an irreversible rift between the two, a rift that is obvious through an analysis of vocabulary in particular. Marlene has had to reject a family life in order to succeed, and the image presented of Angie in Act 2 encourages us to dislike Marlene’s decision. In fact, Churchill commented that she “did want people to feel that Marlene was wrong… in rejecting Angie,” and thus Churchill criticizes the lack of humanity in capitalist feminism, since it necessitates the abandonment of an inherent maternal instinct.

It is in Act 3 that Churchill really drives home this feminist, socialist message. In the denouement, Churchill confronts two completely polarized political beliefs through the two sisters: Marlene believes “in the individual” and Thatcherism, whereas Joyce is a socialist who spits when she sees a Rolls Royce. The dismal circumstances of Angie and Joyce’s lifestyle (Joyce can only offer Marlene an egg) demonstrate once again the cruelty of Marlene’s attitude, an attitude summarized in her rejection of the working class as “lazy and stupid”. Marlene then goes on to defend Angie, telling Joyce “You run her down too much”, even though a year later she tells Win that Angie is “not going to make it”. The overwhelming sense of Act 3 is that it highlights the cruelty of Marlene: she has rejected her sister and her daughter for six years, and she tells Joyce she should not bother visiting her elderly mother. And although Joyce is not a perfect role model (Churchill herself said she was “limited and bad-tempered” as seen in her calling Angie a “fucking rotten little cunt”) she is certainly more humane than Marlene, as when she says: “Or what? Have her put in a home? Have some stranger take her would you rather?” Thus, though Joyce is not perfect, what Act 3 demonstrates is that the loss of humanity necessitated by success in a capitalist world is crippling and uncaring for other women.

What Churchill seems to advocate in this play is a collective, socialist form of feminism: she celebrates Marlene’s ambition, whilst also celebrating Joyce’s humanity and kindness. Likewise, she condemns the cruelties of Nell and Marlene, whilst also condemning Joyce’s inertia (though Joyce does at least go to evening classes and works four jobs). The real sadness of the play is that Marlene is prepared to subject her own daughter to the very life she herself desired to escape. It is this self-centred approach that Churchill condemns. Indeed, Roberts noted: ““Top Girls” states unequivocally that success within a system that ignores humanity must necessitate an analysis of motive and achievement.” If feminism, and indeed society itself, does not change its approach to female emancipation and the female predicament, then the future really will be “Frightening…” A collective, socialist feminism is, for Churchill, the way forward to a brighter, more equal future.