Shakespeare vs. Jonson

I just want to start off by apologizing for my miscalculation of the number of characters within the essay. There are of course four characters, and not three. Neander being the one I missed, or more precisely the one, at the time of my first blog had not yet encountered in the text. Hindering me enough is this tedious tendency of mine to make conclusions before reading a piece of literary work in full. Tssk, tssk! Rrrr, bad habits are hard to quit.

As was brought up briefly in class today Dryden compares and contrasts Shakespeare with Ben Jonson. But I want to go further down the rabbit hole with this comparison. Dryden both acknowledges strengths and weaknesses in the styles of Shakespeare and Jonson. He specifically says that Jonson is “ many times flat, insipid, his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast ”(80). Paradoxically Dryden credits Jonson for his ‘wit’, or rather satire, where he is superior to his contemporaries. Shakespeare on the other hand, is a balanced opposite, for Dryden discredits his use of ‘clenches’ or puns, and praises him for his ability to subordinate satire, and raise imagery through tropes. This imagery was a product that intrinsically came out of Shakespeare’s internal connection with nature “ he looked inwards and found her ” (80). Initially I found it interesting that Jonson according to Dryden was regarded as the model for Classical Poetry. It was perplexing at first, but it makes sense know that because of the external factors (ie. The Restoration), it was Jonson that was more appealing to his colleagues, and not Shakespeare. On an aside, before this course the signifier ‘Ben Jo(h)nson’ elicited an image of a smudge mark in the history of Canadian Track and Field. Thank you John Dryden for alternate signified!

Anyways, although Dryden does not literally declare a love for either of these juxtaposed dichotimies, I feel he sides with Shakespeare. And notably coming back to the idea of mass popularity, progressively over time Shakespeare owns the charts.