Against Stanley Fish on Ben Jonson and the Community of the Same

In his classic essay “Authors-Readers: Ben Jonson and the Community of the Same,” Stanley Fish argues, primarily on the basis of a series of close readings, that (1) Jonson's poetry of praise hints at a community in which everyone is the same; (2) Jonson's poetry of praise is nonrepresentational, while his poetry of blame is representational; (3) Jonson's poems of praise and the members of the community mentioned in them are largely interchangeable; and (4) Jonson writes nonrepresentational poetry of praise in which everyone is the same in order to maintain his independence in a patronage society. I argue that these four theses are false. Part I argues that Fish's equivocation on the crucial word identity and his misreading of “In Authorem” undermine his claim that there is a Jonson community in which everyone is the same. Part II argues that Fish's reading of Epigrams 63, “To Robert, Earl of Salisbury,” on which reading rests his claim that Jonson's poetry of praise is nonrepresentational, introduces several textual errors, and that, once these errors are corrected, the poem no longer supports that claim. Part III argues that an awareness of Jonson's poetic art, especially his use of puns, shows that his poems of praise are not interchangeable, while an attentiveness to the “signs of specificity” (38) in the poems of praise shows that the people discussed in them are not the same. Since the truth of the fourth thesis depends on the truth of the others, it is largely ignored.