Renaissance Overeating: The Sad Case of Ben Jonson

Abstract

Jonson's relations to the supper table mirror his relations to royal authority. Thus, while his work promotes gastronomic moderation, stoic restraint, temperance, and the plain style, he repeatedly seeks to assimilate those virtues to the social context of the Stuart court, where conspicuous consumption and intemperate behavior reign supreme. In this untenable situation, forced to reconcile contradictory values that typify discrete social circumstances, Jonson generally proceeds by renaming conspicuous consumption temperance and vice versa. This stratagem re-creates him in the image of a court whose abuses he theoretically rejects, and in poems like “Inviting a Friend to Supper” and “To Penshurst,” he emerges as an absolutist figure who sacrifices his stoicism for courtly success. Jonson becomes the embodiment of literary moderation, yet he weighs 280 pounds.