Chapter 5 - The Trial of Ovid

Summary

It is a mistake to think that Ben Jonson spent his time and art in a disapproving posture toward Ovid as the boldest of the Augustan love poets. This chapter treats a large body of evidence in what may be viewed as Jonson’s repertoire, all of which testify to his great respect for Ovid and his sense of duty to defend the liberties the Roman poet and his Elizabethan imitators took with the decorums of the early empire. The chapter deals with his marginal notes in his personal copies of classical texts, the commentaries in the humanist texts he consulted, his poems and plays, and his subsequent commentators. Of particular interest are Jonson’s marginal notes on his personal copy of Martial; his poetic sequence The Forest; and especially his play Poetaster, or the Arraignment, both in its dramatic iteration and its textual forms. Jonson’s work on the poetry of Ovid and his successors shows, above all, that he wished to cast himself as Ovid’s public defender, a legal advocate of the Roman poet’s boldness in exercising the liberty of speech.