Rhiannon Lewis: "So Slow an Inventor: Ben Jonson's Labor"

Speaker(s): Rhiannon Lewis

The attached pages are excerpts from my first chapter, "So Slow an Inventor: Ben Jonson's Labor." The chapter begins with a consideration of Jonson's defenses of protracted playwriting in the context of the so-called Poetomachia of 1599-1602.  I progress to an analysis of this temporal aspect of composition with reference to Jonson's shorter poems, which have been discussed in terms of his "plain style," but have not been connected to his reputation for slow writing. Here, I present evidence that Jonson's "temporal poetics" of literary labor is developed in and borne out by his shorter poems, as well as his longer dramatic works. I argue that Jonson's conception of the poet's occupation turned on the relationships between poeta and poema, "labor" and "work," and ultimately, the economic and temporal circumstances of his vocation. Jonson's uncommon maintenance of semantic differences between "work" and "labor" reveals that he invested "labor" with the specific meaning of unfinished or intangible writing, rather than a general connotation of writing that entailed toil or travail. The importance of "labor" in his writing has been largely neglected in favor of "works." In this talk, I will demonstrate how "labor" is an operative word in Jonson's poetics, and as such indicates not only his stylistic departure from earlier sixteenth-century poets, but also his unique investments in a temporal poetics.

 My project as a whole presents a new perspective on early modern lyric poetry: the temporal circumstances of composition. Recent scholarship on the period's conception of literary writing as work has focused on the recognizably professional genres of drama and epic, while overlooking shorter forms like lyric. In the larger project, I argue that a group of non-dramatic, non-aristocratic poets of the period, including Edmund Spenser and George Gascoigne, evaluated the quality of their literary deliverables based on the quantity of time spent composing. Moreover, representations of the temporality of lyric production constituted key fictional strategies that informed a poetics of the genre's social and literary valuation, and contribute to our understanding of early modern ideas of writing as occupation.

Rhiannon Lewis is a PhD candidate in the English Department at Stanford, where she is completing a dissertation on literary labor in the early modern period. The project, titled Writing in Time: Labor and Work in English Poetry, 1557-1640, focuses on poets' self-representations as workers, and investigates conceptions (and temporalities) of writing as labor in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England.