‘This was the better way’: The Restoration Afterlives of Ben Jonson’s Comic Designs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The dramatists of the Restoration stage reveal the guiding influence of Ben Jonson, giving his plays a strong comedic afterlife, particularly with respect to his construction of his plots and his sense of comedic design. This article explores that influence by first considering the influences on Jonson’s own concept of comic design, particularly as derived from Aristotle, and the late-antique grammarians Euanthius and Donatus. Jonson follows Aristotle’s distinction of comedy from tragedy on the basis of the ‘laughable’ moral quality of its characters. When paired with Jonson’s own didactic bent, this distinction shaped his ‘humours’-based approach to character, and his plots’ exposure and mockery of those characters. Daniël Heinsius’s commentaries on Aristotle’s Poetics show clear consonance with Jonson’s tight integration of his humorous characters into densely unified plots by way of the trickster characters’ hoaxes. Jonson also finds in Scaliger’s unique concept of catastasis, the penultimate movement of comic plot, a definitive tactic for achieving that integration and exposure. In the light of these claims, we look at three of Jonson’s plays, Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), Volpone (1605) and Epicene, or the Silent Woman (1609), which depict his developing techniques of character, exposure hoaxes and catastasis. This leads to the later seventeenth century and John Dryden’s attentive analysis of Jonson’s comic plots, especially that of Epicene. We then show how the Jonsonian traits singled out by Dryden were used and adapted by William Wycherley in The Country Wife (1675) and William Congreve in The Way of the World (1700).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".