“Swell, swell, my joys”: Ben Jonson, Quotation, and A Help to Memory and Discourse

Abstract

Sejanus His Fall has always been a succès d'estime rather than a popular triumph. Neverthless, there was an odd and pervasive valency for the speech that opens the play's fifth act, a speech that starts, “Swell, swell, my joys,” and which includes the boast, “I feel my advancèd head/Knock out a star in heav'n.” The soliloquy has an afterlife in printed miscellanies; it was blended with lines from Volpone's first speech; the phrase “knock out a star in heav'n” was turned to by preachers warning of the sin of pride; John Trapp's use of the speech for his biblical commentary was plundered by John Price, Citizen, for the polemic of 1654, Tyrants and Protectors Set Forth in their Colours; and in the year between the Jonson Folio of 1616 and the playwright's journey to Scotland, William Drummond of Hawthornden borrowed directly from the speech for his verse tribute to King James. For all Jonson's punctilious itemising of his tragedy's classical sources, his lines were themselves shaped by a contemporary model: John Marston's Antonio and Mellida. What are we undertaking when we examine an intertextual journey such as this? Is it a case study in Jonson's influence? Is it a meditation upon the fortunes of a single textual item? Alternatively, is it a study of appropriation? The resting place for this essay is the speech's appearance in the third and final edition of Leonard Becket's publication, A Help to Memory and Discourse (1630), an appearance seemingly unique within the Becket canon and one that suggests that Jonson's verse gained an afterlife as a poem.