Epithet and Esteem: The Reception of Momus in Early Modern English Culture
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Epithet and Esteem: The Reception of Momus in Early Modern English Culture Joseph Navitsky1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2019
In a pivotal scene in Ben Jonson’s Poetaster (1601), a play set in ‘Augustus Caesar’s times, / When wit and arts were at their height in Rome,’ but concerned with (amongst other things) the appropriate role of the writer in early modern English society, the character Ovid hosts a feast at which visitors assume the identities of the gods.1 Amongst the deities seated at the banquet table when the scene opens is Momus, played by the courtier and singer Hermogenes.2 In an early hint at the disaster that awaits the participants, the celebration opens with a petty conflict: OVID: Gods and goddesses, take your several seats. Now Mercury, move your caduceus and in Jupiter’s name command silence. CRISPINUS: In the name of Jupiter, silence. HERMOGENES: The crier of the court hath too clarified a voice. GALLUS: Peace, Momus. OVID: O, he is the god of reprehension, let him alone; ‘tis his office.3 1 B. Jonson, Poetaster, ed. T. Cain, Manchester and New York, 1995, ll. 88–9 of ‘The Apologetical Dialogue’, p. 266. I would like to thank the anonymous IJCT reviewers for their invaluable assistance with the manuscript and the organizers of the Renaissance Conference of Southern California, where I first presented an early version of this essay. 2 The personalities invited to Ovid’s feast include both recognizable historical figures – such as Ovid himself and Cornelius Gallus – and the men about town and fools who populate Horace’s satires. Several male characters have allegorical equivalents in the London of 1601–1602, when the play was first performed at Blackfriars Theatre by the Children of the Chapel. As a result, Jonson is able to poke fun at his rivals and place his own historical moment in a compelling relationship with the distant past of Augustan Rome. T. Cain presents a convincing argument for the identification of Hermogenes as the composer and singer John Dowland, citing Dowland’s irascibility and, in an ironic twist given Momus’s traditional role as a fault-finder, famously petulant responses to criticism, p. 66. 3 B. Jonson, Poetaster, 4.5.1-8. When Hermogenes upbraids Crispinus by saying, ‘The crier of the court hath too clarified a voice,’ he probably glances at the uneven voice of the child actor playing Mercury. For the source of Jonson’s depiction of the banquet of the gods, see pp. 16–17 and 185. See also G. B. Jackson’s note in her edition of Poetaster for the Cambridge edition of Jonson’s works, ed. D. Bevington et al., 6 vols, Cambridge, 2012, II, p. 111.
* Joseph Navitsky [email protected] 1
English Department, West Chester University, 700 S. High St, West Chester, PA 19380, USA
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J. Navitsky
This exchange, trivial as it may first appear, neatly captures the divergent attitudes harboured by early modern English culture towards the little-known Greek deity Momus, first identified by Hesiod as the child of Night but commonly thought of in the early mod
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