Liberty and History in Jonson's Invitation to Supper.(Critical Essay)

To night, graue sir, both my poore house, and I Doe equally desire your companie.

In Epigram 101, Ben Jonson invites a friend to supper. [1] The location of the supper is not given, the date is unknown, and the friend is unnamed. Probability favors the place as Jonson's house in St. Anne's, Blackfriars, and a date sometime before 1613. [2] Of more import is the identity of the friend. That the schedule for the evening includes readings from historians makes it plausible, if no more, that the grave guest should have been a historian. Jonson's old master at Westminster, William Camden ("Than thee the Age sees not that thing more graue") or, of an age with Camden, the translator of Tacitus, Sir Henry Savile ("grave, and truly letter'd"), are likely candidates. [3] One is as likely as the other. Both appear elsewhere in the Epigrams in poems which are explicitly celebrations of history, "(t)hat dares not write things false, nor hide things true." [4] They are allowed a public face there and addressed by name--appropriately in a collection where only villains are regularly deprived of their na mes. In Epigram 101, a poem seemingly preoccupied with frankness, the friend remains anonymous and the villains are named. But this is a poem occupied also, and more crucially, with bad faith; and whoever is celebrated here is made secure from it by the poem's reticence.

The poem may indeed be one of Jonson's "masterpieces on generalized situations" and it may be that there is no real dinner; it may even be so that the anonymity of the guest allows readers to suppose themselves the "grave" invited ones. [5] There are, however, oddities of tone in Jonson's invitation which suggest a motive or an occasion, which, even if not properly specifiable at this distance, would have been specifiable by the properly invited guest. The poem's oddities relate most obviously to its conclusion. But the very fact that the poem seems to be constituted by the details of the menu--so matter-of-factly offered, so apparently uninterfered with--is an oddity. The poem's reticence about what is going on, its being overtaken by an accumulation of named foodstuffs, is unprecedented in English. At least it is unprecedented outside satirical fantasy. Its affinities are almost with such more familiar mock menus as Volpone's wooing Celia with "The heads of parrats, tongues of nightingales,/The braines of peacoks, and of estriches," or Sir Epicure Mammon wooing Doll Common with "mullets,/Sous'd in high-countrey wines...phesants egges...cockles, boild in siluer shells." [6] But the specificities of "Inviting a Friend to Supper" suggest something graver. The "(b)ig fatt man, that spake in ryme" and who deplored meatless hospitality might have written a

celebration of eating; but he has not. [7] No one has any difficulty in agreeing with Thomas Greene that the poem's "real subject" has nothing to do with the accumulation of dishes. [8] For a start, it celebrates only an imaginary excess. While no one counts any costs, Jonson is surely not taking on himself the role of the bounteous host. The menu, which half-promises so much, qualifies its own extravagance with labored documentary honesty.

I

Jonson's poem has a gravity appropriate to the "grave sir" he invites. Wesley Trimpi invites us to hear in the poem "the flexible control of a potentially swift movement" and Ian Donaldson has to repunctuate it so as to liberate its "intimate liveliness." It is "swift" and "intimate" as invitations to enjoy oneself might be, "happy, familiar, unmisgiving" as Leigh Hunt judged the passage about wine (lines 30-2) actually to be. [9] But it is these things only potentially. Most readers enjoy the poem's easiness of manner. But why, however flexibly, does Jonson impose the control? The poem's components might be appropriate, though only just so, in an ordinary invitation to supper, but their articulation comes to strike readers as something very much contrived. The invitation begins and ends on the same word, making a circle of prospect ("To night ... I ... desire your companie") and anticipated retrospect ("No simple word...shall make vs sad next morning: or affright / The libertie, that wee'll enioy to night") . [10] Though it seems to conform with the disingenuous awkwardness that Stanley Fish makes typical of Jonson's manner, the confidence of the artifice cancels any imputation of anxiety to the host. [11] It argues serenely for the conditions of desirable company--it is, by implication, "the definition of a friend," says Trimpi, "not of a dinner." [12]

The poem's formality removes it from the immediate arena of social relations. And its conventionality marks it off from the discourse of invitations. It is, like many of Jonson's poems, a cento--a thing, in Camden's phrase, "quilted as it were out of shreds of divers Poets." [13] It affects to be, as it were, a translation. It offers itself to be read through the poems from which it derives, and it invites us to recognize its imposition on reality. The debts are accordingly heavily marked. In this case, as is well known, the shreds are chiefly out of three poems by Martial. [14] Of these, one (10.48) may be germinal for Jonson, but that there is no clear priority among them may suggest that Jonson is quite self-consciously reworking the commonplaces of a genre--the invitation poem--of whose integrity he has a strong sense. [15] The poem's way of proceeding is owing to Martial. The relevant epigrams consist in elaborated lists of foodstuffs--with main courses of varying promise, from sausages and beans (5.78) to "fat birds from the yard or the fens" (11.52), but with the emphasis regularly on salads (lettuce and leeks, olives, peas, fish and eggs, boiled lupins, mallows). The character of Jonson's meal is different; but the idea of the menu--poetically difficult and unusual--is a marker of the particular conventionality of Jonson's poem. It makes the poem read not as a letter to a friend inviting him to supper, a letter such as we ourselves might ideally send but, rather, as a poem like Martial's invitation poems. The food, however Englished it may be, is rendered as something to be remembered from other poems, not something to be eaten.