Stomaching Satire: Poetaster, Troilus and Cressida, and the Hermeneutics of Hypocrisy

As topical, satirically charged plays proliferated on London stages around the turn of the seventeenth century, playwrights became increasingly concerned about the threat of overactive interpretation distorting the intended meaning of their dramatic fictions. In Poetaster, his third and last “comical satire,” Ben Jonson calls upon Horatian and Erasmian precedents to construct an elaborate system for protecting authoritative interpretations of satire from the envy of libelous and ignorant auditors. The system as constructed revolves around a clear moral distinction between “well digested” literary creation, which Poetaster purports to embody, and undigested “crudities,” which characterize the inferior poetry of hack writers, the excrescences of inaccurate interpretation, and above all, personal attacks against real people. Jonson falls short of his own ideal, however, when he has the poetaster Crispinus vomit up the neologisms of John Marston: an obvious lampoon, and therefore an “envious” reading that compromises the moral authority of his hermeneutic system. In Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare uses metaphors of digestion to interrogate the relationship between Authority and Envy, exploring what happens when hypocrisy makes them indistinguishable. Specifically, the well digested literary tradition of Cressida’s falsehood ends up authorizing the jaundiced view of her undigested, “o’ereaten faith,” corrupting the audience’s judgement and impoverishing theatrical imagination. [M.J.]