TEXTS A N D D O C U M E N T S

Donne's Latin Poem on Jonson's Volpone: Some Observations and a Textual Conjecture I

DAVID KOVACS

A mong the congra tu la tory poems that preface the 1607 first edi t ion of Ben Jonson's Volpone is a sixteen-line Latin p o e m by John Donne that bears the head ing "Amicis-

simo, et meri t iss imo BEN: IONSON." My at tent ion was d r awn to it by a recent article in Literary Imagination by Dennis Flynn and Marcia Karp. 2 I add here some observat ions that I hope will throw light pr incipal ly on the Latinity of the poem, including a conjec- ture on the last line. A fur ther conjecture about the mean ing of a textual note in the Oxford edi t ion of Jonson's works a t tempts to vindicate the reputa t ion of a d is t inguished German refugee classicist of the twent ie th century, Paul Maas, w h o purif ied the p o e m of one blemish but is c red i ted- -mis takenly , I a r g u e - - w i t h a conjecture that makes the poem worse. 3

Donne 's English poe t ry is notable for the pleasures of wit, paradox, and syntactic complexity, and Marcia Karp, who in her preface prints Donne ' s Latin p o e m with Brian Parker ' s English translation, 4 is surpr ised not to find these in the English rendering, which she considers faithful. But Parker has failed to unders t and the Latin in two places, and there is more wit and paradox than his render ing suggests, wi th syntactic complexi ty provid ing much of it. The easiest way to show this is to p rov ide a more accurate prose translation and a commenta ry that focuses on linguistic matters.

1. I express here my gratitude to Leofranc Holford-Strevens of Oxford University Press, who generously gave of his time and learning in answering my queries about Paul Maas.

2. Dennis Flynn and Marcia Karp, "Donne's 'Amicissimo, et Meritissimo Ben: Jonson' and the Daring of Volpone," Literary Imagination 6 (2004) 368-89.

3. I cite this poem below from C. H. Herford et al. (edd.), Ben Jonson (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1925-52), 11.318, rejecting, however, the alteration of quod to quos in line 7, as later ex- plained (below, p. 566f.). A full account of all the variants in early printed editions may be read in G. A. Stringer (ed.), The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1995), 8:217-22.

4. Ben Jonson, Volpone, or The Fox, ed. Brian Parker (rev. ed., Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 72.

David Kovacs, Department of Classics, University of Virginia, PO Box 400788, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4788.

International Journal of the Classical Tradition, Vol. 12, No. 4, Spring 2006, pp. 563-568.

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Qvod arte ausus es hic tua, POETA, Si auderent hominum Deique iuris Consulti sequi ~emularierque, 0 omnes saperemus ad salutem. His sed sunt veteres araneosi; Tam nemo veterum est sequutor, vt tu Illos quOd sequeris novator audis. Fac tamen quod agis; tufque prima Libri canitie induantur hora: Nam cartis pueritia est neganda, Nascant~rque senes, oportet, illi Libri, queis dare vis perennitatem. Priscis, ingenium facit, labdrque Te parem; hos superes, vt et futuros, Ex nostra vitiositate sumas, Qua priscos superamus, et futuros.

10

15

If those who are learned in h u m a n and divine law dared to follow and to emu- late wha t you have dared in your art here, ah, then we all would be wise unto salvation. But to these men [our contemporar ies] the ancients are cobweb- strewn, so far are they from fol lowing the ancients, in the way that you follow them and thereby win the name of innovator. Well, then, go on doing as you are doing: let your books have white hair f rom the hour of their birth, for paper [i.e. literature] must be denied a chi ldhood, and any books for which you intend immortal i ty must be born old. Your genius and your hard work make you the equal of the ancients. May you surpass these, even as you will also surpass those who will come after us; may you take from our wickedness a way for us to sur- pass the ancients and those who will come after us.

Commentary

1-4: First, there is no chance whatever that Donne wro te line 3 as Consulti veteres sequi aemularierque (the text of the earliest editions, which is pr in ted by Flynn and Karp and also by Stringer), and there is every reason to adopt the text of Her fo rd et al. and Parker, who both omit veteres. The rules of the classical Latin meters are strict and strictly ob- served by all ( including Renaissance Latin writers) who used them. A p o e m in hendeca- syl labics--our poem's m e t e r - - m a y consist of any n u m b e r of lines, but each has exactly eleven syllables (not count ing any word-final vowel or vowel -p lus -m elided before word-init ial vowel or h-plus-vowel), and each has the pat tern

where initial - - - - is in Catullus replaced frequent ly by - - ~ and occasionally by ~__.s All the other lines in the poem contain exactly eleven syllables each. As Her fo rd et al. and

5. The rules for quantity of syllables are given in D. S. Raven, Latin Metre, BCP advanced lan- guage series (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1965), 23-25. Hendecasyllables are discussed on 139-40.

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Parker print line 3 it too has eleven, the final syllable of sequi not being el ided bu t short- ened so that sequi oemularierque scans . . . . . . . . . 6 The probabil i ty that Donne wrote fifteen lines wi th eleven syllables each and one line with thir teen or four teen is not easily distinguishable from zero. The deletion of veteres was first p roposed by Paul Maas, 7 a dis t inguished classicist who fled Nazi Ge rm an y and took up residence in Oxford, where he took employmen t as advisor to the Clarendon Press. On Maas 's career and his acumen as a textual critic see H. Lloyd-Jones, "Paul Maas," in Blood for the Ghosts: Classi- cal Influences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer- sity Press, 1982), 215-18, originally publ ished in Gnomon 36 (1965).

If the word veteres is not there, is the thought? The whole p o e m is buil t a round the conceit that (to bor row a phrase of G. K. Chesterton) s Jonson is "the m an w h o wi th the u tmost dar ing discovered what had been discovered before," that is, his novel ty is to es- chew novelty and go back to the sound good sense of the ancients. That is the idea in line 5 (our contemporar ies find the ancients outdated) , 6-7 (you win the n am e of innovator be- cause you return to the ancients), and 8-12 (new books must s o m e h o w be old f rom their inception if they are to be perennial classics). Lines 1-4 appear to say only that if the doc- tors of divine and h u m a n laws dared to follow and emulate wha t Jonson dares in his art, we would be wise unto salvation: the ancients do not yet come into it. The text and trans- lation pr inted above are possible: doing wha t Jonson has dared to do is def ined later in the poem, and perhaps that is all we require.

But the idea of following and emulating not Jonson bu t the ancients wou ld be wel- come here. Aemulatio, emulat ion or vying, is wha t you do vis-h-vis y o u r great predeces- sors. It is what the Romans did consciously wi th the masterpieces of Greek literature, and it was a recognized activity in the Renaissance to try to equal or surpass the Greek and Latin classics while writ ing in ei ther Latin or the vernacular. Without " the ancients" as the unders tood object of sequi aemularierque the two infinitives mean no more than "fol- low," and they seem to make fol lowing Jonson an aim in its o w n right. Further, Donne has chosen the most archaic form of the infinitive, one that wou ld have sounded old- fashioned in Catullus ' day, aemularier for aemulari. In choosing it he is fol lowing ancient models with a vengeance, imitating the ancients ' ancients. W h y is this thought not expli- cit in the opening four lines?

There are two ways to make it so. Perhaps Donne wrote Quos for Quod as the first word of the poem. The meaning wou ld be "If those w h o are learned in h u m a n and divine law dared to follow and emulate those men whom you have dared to follow and emula te in your art here, ah, then we all would be wise unto salvation." This wou ld also fix a met- rical anomaly: e lsewhere in this poem, as in the vast majori ty of ancient hendecasyllabics, the first syllable is long, as quos is and quod is not. Quod could be an uncorrec ted pr in ter ' s error, as is the unmetr ical insert ion of veteres in line 3.

Another way, however, wou ld be to unders t and sequi aemularierque with ausus es, so that the whole means "If those w h o are learned in h u m a n and divine law dared to follow and emulate wha t you have dared [to follow and emulate, i.e. the ancients] here in y o u r art," etc. In favor of this is that it involves no alteration of the text. Against it is that it is

6. This is the well-attested metrical license of correption, where a final long vowel before an ini- tial vowel may be shortened. An ancient example in hendecasyllables, doubtless known to Donne, is Catullus 10.27-28: " . . . 'mane," inquii puellae, / "istud quod modo dixeram me habere".

7. See Herford et al., 11.318. 8. See G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image, 1959; reprt, of New York:

John Lane Publishing, 1909) 11.

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more natural to interpret Quod arte ausus es hic tua as "wha t you have dared here in you r art," i.e. " the dar ing you have exhibi ted." As noted above, nei ther of these expedients is strictly necessary as it is quite possible for the reader to wai t a bit before learning exactly what constitutes Jonson's daring.

1: hic means "in your Volpone."

2-3: One of the unclear points in this poem is w h y Donne singles out "those who are learned in human and divine law," that is (presumably) civil lawyers and canon lawyers, to suggest that they imitate Jonson's use of the ancients. I leave this quest ion to experts in the seventeenth century bu t note that it calls for an answer. Is Donne, w h o was a Catholic for par t of his life, suggest ing that it wou ld behoove his contemporar ies to re turn not only to the old authors but also to the Old Religion?

4 saperernus ad salutem: this seems to be an allusion to 2 Tim 3:15, " the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation." This suggests that the issue of ancients versus moderns is of more than temporal consequence. See m y queries on 2-3.

5 his: "these men" refers to Donne 's and Jonson's contemporar ies .

araneosi: in the eyes of these men the ancients are cobweb-s t rewn, i.e. mus ty and not wor thy reading, and their books are cobweb-s t rewn because never opened. Cf. Catul lus 13.7-8 nam tui Catulli / plenus sacculus est araneorum, "for you r fr iend Catul lus 's money- bag is full of cobwebs," where araneorum occupies the same metrical posi t ion as Donne ' s araneosi.

6 sequutor: this is again an archaic spelling (the usual form is secutor) perhaps designed to suggest a return to (very) ancient models.

7 illos quOd sequeris nouator audis: Parker reads quos for quod and translates "for no one is a follower of the ancients like you [who] hearken as an innovator after those w h o m you will follow." Parker ' s translation lacks wit and paradox here because it is wrong. It is a minor point that the middle syllable of sequeris is guaran teed by meter to be short, and therefore the verb is present, not future. More important , Latin poets and prose writers use audire with a predicate noun or adjective to mean "hear oneself spoken of, be called, be named": see Oxford Latin Dictionary s.v. 5a. The line, wi th the reading quod, means "because you follow those men [the ancients], you hear yourse l f called an innovator ." Correctly construed, therefore, the line requires no alteration. Unal tered it furnishes us with wit and paradox of a kind we might expect from Donne, and to me the slightly recondite construct ion of audire with a predicate noun counts as a "syntact ic pleasure."

The reading quos for quod goes back to Her ford et al., who attr ibute it to Maas, who, it is claimed, p roposed it as a corollary of his omission of veteres. 9 This change, however , produces nonsense: introducing a relative p ronoun here means that illos, instead of being the object of sequeris, must be the object of audis, which h o w e v e r cannot have an object if

9. The note reads "In 1. 3 aemularierque ends a line of 13 syllables; Professor P. Maas corrects it by deleting 'veteres' as an interpolation; it breaks the sense and the meter and seems to have been unintelligently taken up from 'veteres' in line 5. With this elimination the 'qu6d' of line 7 nec- essarily becomes 'quos'. The poem then becomes coherent." I take it that both suggestions are being attributed to Maas, though the continuation of the oratio obliqua after the semi-colon is implicit rather than explicit.

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it is being used wi th novator to mean " thou art called an innovator ," its only natural con- struction. The contrast be tween Maas's dist inction as a textual critic and the balbut ience of the conjecture at t r ibuted to him emboldens me to suggest that Maas was misunder - s tood by the Oxford editors of Jonson. I suspect that he wrote, e.g. "Omit t ing veteres entails wri t ing quos for quod," meaning that the idea of imitating the ancients is needed in the poem's first sentence and could be restored by changing quod to quos in line 1, a sug- gestion I moo ted above. Maas's publ ished wri t ings became a b y w o r d for brevity, and brevity, as Horace no ted (Ars Poetica 25-6), has its dangers. 1~ The Oxford editors, I sus- pect, mistakenly referred his remark to line 7. Why, then, was the error not caught? Maas was not a copy-edi tor or proofreader for the Press but an unofficial adviser on textual matters. 11 1 consider it likely that he did not get a chance beforehand to see wha t the ben- eficiaries of his advice had made of it. 12

8-11: The idea is that since paper exhibits whiteness as soon as it has been made, it is like a child that is born with white hair. Thus proper books show signs of age (i.e. their classical pedigree) as soon as they are born. This seems to me a typical metaphysical conceit.

10 pueritia: This is Donne 's only false quantity, for the third syllable of the word is actu- ally short, not long as the meter here requires.

12 queis: this word is ant ique bo th in its form (instead of quibus) and its spelling (it is more usual ly spelled quis) and thus helps to make Donne 's point about p roper books having a patina of age about them from the beginning.

13-14: Jonson's talent and hard work have made him the equal of the ancients.

14-16: The poem concludes with two wishes expressed with subjunctives of wish, superes and sumas. The meaning of the first wish is clear, while the second requires some clarification:

(1) The first is that Jonson shall surpass hos (these men), just as he will surpass future generations. In view of the previous sentence, hos must mean the ancients, and it is so taken by Parker. Donne 's wish is that Jonson, who has a l ready been called the equal of the ancients (13-14), may surpass them just as he will surpass future generations. This is a vault ing wish, bu t one in keeping wi th the hyperbol ic tone of the p o e m as a whole. The alternative would be to interpret hos as "you r contemporar ies ," as in line 5. But since Donne has already made it clear that Jonson has surpassed them and that he is the equal of the ancients in genius and hard work, this wou ld be anticlimactic.

(2) The second wish is that Jonson shall "get, take up, win (sumas)" something f rom our vitiositas, which could mean either "wickedness" or (in an artistic sense) "fault iness." Parker translates "excel them, so that you may raise a new race from our wickedness, in

10. On the spareness of Maas's style see Lloyd-Jones, "Maas," pp. 216-17. Horace's words are: brevis esse laboro, obscurusfio: "if I strive for brevity, I become unclear."

11. In a letter of 13 May 1945, cited in Eckard Mensching, Uber einen verfolgten Altphilologen" Paul Maas (1880-1964) (Berlin, 1987), p. 83, Maas writes "Ich bin hier seit Ende 1939 inoffizieller Berater der Oxford University Press fiir Textkritik (einschl. Shakespeare und Book of Common Prayer), Edi- tions-technik, und Griechische Lexikographie." I owe this quotation to Leofranc Holford-Strevens. I have not actually seen the book.

12. Leofranc Holford-Strevens put me further in his debt by checking the OUP archives for re- mains of correspondence regarding the Jonson volume. None was to be found, alas.

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which we surpass both past and future ages." This is a lmost cer tainly wrong. First, the ut in line 14 must mean "as" and must compare the way Jonson surpasses two different generations: "as (you) also (will surpass) coming generat ions." The et ("also") on this showing makes sense, whereas if we take ut with sumas, as Parker does, the et makes no sense and has to be ignored, as it is by Parker. Second, sumere cannot mean "raise up" but only "take up (for oneself)." Thirdly "raise a new race from our wickedness" is dubious sense since our wickedness would not be the source from which the race is raised. The last line of the poem on Parker 's reading also causes puzzlement : w h y should Donne say that his generat ion will certainly be more wicked than the next?

We must begin with the grammatical facts, that superes and sumas are both subjunc- tives of wish joined wi thout benefit of connective (asyndeton), and that the second of them calls insistently for an object. Jonson is to surpass these men, just as he will surpass generations to come, and he is to take, gain, or win from our wickedness or (literary) faul t iness--what? The answer can only be in the last line, and that line mus t be const rued to provide it. As construed by Parker, with qua taking vitiositate as its antecedent , there can be no object for sumas exceptfuturos, which as we have seen is a var iously problem- atic idea. But there is another possibility: qua could have an unders tood antecedent , "la way] by which," a quite common use of the feminine ablative singular relative as a quasi-adverb. What Jonson is to win from "our wickedness" is "[a way] by which we may surpass both the ancients and future generat ions." All that is needed is to change a single letter and write superemus, again perhaps an uncorrected pr in ter ' s error. Donne is writing about Jonson as the author of Volpone, a satirical play which, while d rawing on the ancients for its form and style, is very much about mode rn wickedness. Here is Donne 's final conceit: Jonson is to win from [his depict ion of] our wickedness a way to surpass both the Greek and Latin classics and whatever authors the future will produce. Our very vices provide him (and us as Jonson's contemporar ies , who share in his glory) with the means not only to equal but even to excel the ancients, and tomorrow ' s mod- erns, he implies, will be only epigones of Jonson. The paradox is piquant: Jonson takes our moral inferiority and by means of it lifts us to a posit ion of artistic superiority. He has emulated the ancients and surpassed them. And the last two words of line 16 repeat the last two of line 14, dr iving the point forcibly home.

This is perhaps not one of Donne 's very greatest poems. But it is wittier, more para- doxical, and more syntactically complex - - in a word, more me taphys ica l - - than recent discussion has allowed.