4
Introduction
This thesis considers the issue of Renaissance self-fashioning through
one of Ben Jonson’s satirical play called Epicoene which was first
performed at the Blackfriars theatre in London in 1609. This early
seventeenth century playwright is almost unknown in Italy and his
plays are rarely performed in England. Such an analysis leads us to
discuss the fundamental question of why an early sixteenth century
play should be revived or performed on the stage today.
It is not mere opinion that each of us is the result of many constructs
and our cultural roots reach back far into the past. Renaissance self-
fashioning has been chosen as the subject of my dissertation because
this period is widely considered as a turning point for our Western
culture and mainly because it is well known that it is always the
individual that should be scrutinized in the annals of history to gain a
satisfactory answer for those basic deeper questions which have
always baffled mankind within European literature; where the truth
lies behind appearances, who we really are, where we come from and
how man has evolved into what he is today.
.
We now know that literature functions within the systems of meaning
which constitute our culture in interlocking ways that allow us to
investigate in language both the social presence to the world of the
literary text and the social presence of the world in the literary text
1
1
Stephen Greenblatt, “Introduction” Renaissance Self-Fashioning( Chicago & London:
The University of Chicago Press, 2005)
5
By drawing on Greenblatt’s observation that there was in the
sixteenth-century an increased self-consciousness about the
fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process
2
, I will
attempt to throw light upon the following issues :
In the first place, what self-fashioning effectively meant in the
Renaissance with a brief overview of its humanistic roots and what it
means today. I then wish to go on to analyze the City of London itself
in Early Jacobean times and its influence on playwrights and society.
Afterwards, I propose to discuss as an example a broad range of
individual male and female characters and social groups in Ben
Jonson’s satirical play Epicoene together with the influences that
played upon him and the choices he made in fashioning his characters.
By analyzing Ben Jonson’s use of self-fashioning in Epicene I will
then discuss why and how Ben Jonson attempted to fashion himself as
a playwright and poet for that Jacobean society and his audiences.
I then wish to reflect upon how much of the satirical, Renaissance
legacy of Ben Jonson’s world is left in today’s global market-society
and the unpredictable, long-term consequences Renaissance self-
fashioning has had on our world.
Finally, I would like to comment on the evolutionary nature of self-
fashioning in our modern times in order to gain a deeper awareness
not only of myself and my personal environment but also to hopefully
provide my reader with such a similar realization which he or she
might wish to apply to his or her personal inner needs.
It is well known that any effort made in exploring, analyzing and
understanding the world around us can be compared to looking
2
Ibidem,
6
insistently at the sun; it cannot be done without the serious risk of
becoming blind.
However, as human beings, we repeatedly do so as it reflects our
curiosity, our natural tendency to gain knowledge to sustain our
innermost needs for certainties and a controllable order.
To sum up, in Greenblatt’s words , to abandon self-fashioning - and
the power over our life it implies as an important element in the
sense of ourselves – is to abandon the craving for freedom, and to let
go of one’s stubborn hold upon selfhood, even selfhood conceived as
a fiction , is to die
3
.
3
Greenblatt, op. cit., p. 257
7
RENAISSANCE SELF-FASHIONING,
ITS ROOTS AND ITS MEANING IN TODAY’S WORLD.
Nosce te ipsum
4
What is self-fashioning? Why do we need to look back at the
Renaissance? It can be fairly stated that the term self-fashioning today
is commonly and widely accepted as a way of designating the forming
of the self but it is in the Renaissance that it seems to come into wide
currency in this way.
Such forming is now mostly perceived as referring to our appearance
together with our ability of choosing what is appropriate for it. In
brief, it is often said that the term fashion is essentially associated with
the external realm of all things, human beings included. However, it
must also be underlined that this outer appearance is not as superficial
as it seems as it is assumed it arises from and contributes to man’s and
woman’s distinctive personality in a swift interplay between the outer
and the inner world.
This façade is considered a reflection of any person and of any given
time socially, politically, economically and artistically. That is to say,
it is made up of what people think, what they value and how they live.
Fashion is a statement, a way of speaking, a way of living and it is
also an instrument which can be used both to construct our identity
and to influence other people’s ideas and opinions.
4
A Greek aphorism which means “know yourself” and is generally given in Latin.
8
This way of conceiving ourselves, i.e. this self-consciousness about
the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process
5
actually seems to come into a wider use in the Renaissance which is
considered a turning point in our Western culture.
It is a well known fact that since the invention of written signs to
communicate with, words themselves have changed their inner
meaning and evolved along with the social and cultural
transformations of human society to satisfy the primary need of
communication. The ideas, attitudes and feelings which are embedded
both in the spoken and written language modify the sense of words
according to the evolution of the context in which we live. As in
Geertz’s statement,
we are all the result of a set of control mechanisms (plans,
rules, instructions) which creates specific individuals by
governing the passage from abstract potential to concrete
historical embodiment
6
.
Even if we cannot forget that others created those plans, rules and
instructions, I intend to adopt this assessment as my starting point to
attempt to justify my argument.
When one considers the hidden realities which exist beyond language
which literature expresses, there are several directions we can move
towards including the psychological and psychoanalytical ones.
Thus any search for an acceptable answer should cover all cultural
fields or systems of signs and literature functions within this system of
meanings in interlocking ways which allows us to investigate in a
5
Greenblatt, “Introduction” op .cit.
6
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973) quoted
by Greenblatt, “Introduction” op. cit.
9
work of art both the social presence to the world of the literary text
and the social presence of the world in the literary text
7
.
Consequently, for a brief overview of the subject, it is appropriate to
begin by tracing our cultural roots back to the Latin word
effingere(fashion), a term primary used for the action or process of
making, while still reminding ourselves that self-consciousness about
the fashioning of human identity was widespread among the elite even
in the classical word with their preoccupation about living in the right
way.
In fact, Nosce te ipsum(know yourself) was the aphorism inscribed in
the pronaos(forecourt) of Apollo’s Temple in Delphi, while Horace
wrote in his Epistles:
Quo teneam vultus mutantem Protea nodo (With what knot
can I hold this Proteus whose face is ever changing?)
8
.
Such philosophers were concerned with cultivating the higher, more
noble and refined potentialities of human beings through disciplines
which were directed towards transforming the coarser energies present
in men into more subtle and pleasing ones in order to live a balanced
life without excess.
However, the advent of Christianity brought a growing suspicion of
man’s power to shape identity
9
and S. Augustine wrote, Try to build
up yourself and you build a ruin
10
.
Since then Christ has become the ultimate model of forming one’s self
not only for the elite but for all levels of society. Indeed the Christian
7
Greenblatt,“Introduction” op. cit.
8
Horace, Epistles (I, 1, 1.90) quoted by Thomas Green, “The Flexibility of the Self in
Renaissance Literature” in The Disciplines of Criticism , ed. Peter Demetz, Thomas Green,
and Lowry Nelson, Jr. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968) p. 247
9
Ibidem
10
Augustine, “sermon 169”, quoted in the Introduction of Renaissance Self-Fashioning by
Stephen Greenblatt
10
message for all of humanity was a revolutionary one as it incapsulated
the true essence of universal feelings such as hope, brotherhood and
freedom. Nevertheless, it also carried within it the complex and
limiting concept that our freedom and our own free will was conceded
only according to the grace of God.
First of all Aristotle and then the Scholastics believed that human
nature was unalterably fixed and the individual was unable to modify
it. The habitus difficile mobilis (i.e. an aquired disposition) was a
conception which set narrow limits to any hypothetical metamorphosis
within the individual
11
. Having said that, it must be underlined that in
stressing the sinner’s incapacity for self-improvement, Christian
doctrines went beyond Aristotle, strongly opposing the freedom of
self-determination. Besides, once Christian doctrines were accepted
by any ruler, they became the justification and the consolidation of
that power at the same time.
Consequently, individuals were defined by a complex of given traits
but mainly by their occupation and estate in the Middle Ages. That is
to say, human personality, if we assume identity and personality as
being equal, depended heavily on the rigid social role a man was
called upon to play.
In addition, sociological factors must be considered such as social
immobility imposed by feudalism and the small extent and prestige of
formal education. These factors, combined with the metaphysically
immovable view of personality, accounted for the almost total rigidity
or inflexibility of medieval society.
In medieval literature, this stasis or “rigidity of persona” , as Green
calls it in his fine essay “The Flexibility of the Self in Renaissance
11
Green, op. cit., p. 244
11
Literature”, was challenged by a few authors , and this remains a
token of their greatness for us but they did not greatly influence other
writers’ thoughts.
As Green points out, Petrarch is worth mentioning because of his
personal anguish about his spiritual instability, the varietas mortifera
(fatal complexity), which recalls the voice of the pagan Horace and,
above all, Dante who was the major and notable exception in medieval
literature particularly as far as the representation of human personality
is concerned.
Petrarch’s life was so striking both to his contemporaries and to
posterity because of the variety of books he wrote but also and
essentially because of the multiple roles he improvised. He often
dramatized his weariness in his works and it is his self-yeast of spirit
which renders him so modern. We see the achievement of his freedom
in the lack of continuity of his passions, in his passionate restlessness
and his anguish. We can find something heroically human in living as
fully as he did but we do not share Petrarch’s world-view and this
explains how important the personal cultural context is in the life of
each of us to reach a fuller understanding of ourselves.
On the contrary, what is highly remarkable about the theme of identity
in Dante, is that it is within the characters of his Comedy that the most
powerful representation of the drama of selfhood
12
can be found and
which will be later dramatized in the plays of the Renaissance.
Besides, he makes an uncongenial distinction to our modern mind
between identity and personality which throws light and gives a
different perspective on our way of conceiving ourselves.
12
Thomas Green, “Dramas of Selfhood in the Comedy” in From Time to Eternity, ed.
Thomas Bergin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967).
12
In his Comedy personality tends to pale whereas identity, [considered
as the sum of character, body and soul], is sustained
13
but this only
emerges at the end of the work as a result of a process. In his play this
process is not simply fulfilled but, rather, it is expanded in the
“Paradise”, a place beyond Earth which strongly reminds us of the
new scientific theories about parallel universes.
The modern reader who does not share Dante’s values may at least be
sympathetic towards his own dramatic experience and he/she can
agree with his attitude of man seen as a being full of oppression and
greatness, compulsions and aspirations, of all the complementary
ambiguities which make up our identity.
In the double role of actors and spectators/readers we are
progressively led to understand ourselves through a dramatic journey
which is the journey of each individual. As Jonson would write in one
of his play centuries after, it is as if we were looking at ourselves in a
mirror that someone has placed in front of us, so realizing what we did
not previously know about ourselves. This knowledge is only made
possible by changing the points of view from which we look at
ourselves.
It must be said in fact that, according to several studies, defining
identity may be as complex as developing one’s identity and there has
been no definitive explanation as to the right way to go about it yet. It
may be that a definition includes the unity of all aspects of self, the
conscious and the unconscious; it may even be that it is possible to
define identity through answering questions like who am I, as a result
of the complex relationships between the inner self and the outer
world.
13
Green, “Dramas of Selfhood in the Comedy”, op. cit., p. 132.
13
However, we can agree with Green when he writes that it is towards
the fifteenth century that we find perhaps the initial more extravagant
assertion of human freedom in self-fashioning ever written; the
freedom to select one’s destiny, to transform the self. In Oration on
the dignity of man Pico Della Mirandola wrote:
A man may choose to fashion (effingere)
himself as a plant or a brute or an angel can
make himself one with the Godhead Himself.
14
Green clearly explains that the key-word in this statement is “choose”
but Pico conceived essentially of a vertical scale along which men
might move upward or downward
15
and, what can be called the
horizontal scale , i.e. the horizontal personality and diversity, was
seen as an impediment to the vertical mobility. The lateral flexibility ,
and the deep discontent arising from it we find in Petrarch’s life,
testifies to the depth of rigidity of the self in medieval culture. In fact,
the important scale throughout the fifteenth century remained the
vertical in spite of the Humanist revolution.
The freedom of the will was a fundamental point of Humanist
discourse. Erasmus formula homines non nascuntur sed finguntur
(men are fashioned rather than born) had been the new faith, and
pliability the new belief, and had led to the birth of many “institutes”
16
but it was misunderstood. Humanist writers conceived of individual
development upward to an ideal as a result of education and formation
14
Pico della Mirandola,” Oration on the Dignity of Man”, quoted by Green in The Self in
Renaissance Literature, op. cit., p. 243
15
Green, ibidem, p. 248
16
“The Renaissance institutes were inspired by such works as Plato’s Republic, Cicero’s
De Oratore and Quintilian’s Institutiones Oratoriae, ideal portraits of a society or
institutions or occupation”. Quotation from Green, ibidem, p.250
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