PREFACE In The Staple of News Jonson pushed his theory of the purpose and method of comedy to its logical extreme. With him the satiric purpose of comedy was always paramount. Indeed it sometimes seems, as in the formless Cynthia's Revels, as if he deliberately neglected the principles of stage-success in order that his satire might be the sole claimant for attention. Again, with Jonson satiric purpose was usually synonymous with moral purpose. Though his characters sometimes represent real persons, and more often 'humours,' in the plays which are most consistent with his fundamental conception of the purpose and method of comedy the majority of the characters are generalized types, and are designed to satirize neither individuals nor superficial 'humours,' but vices and abuses. With his long practice of this theory, with his reverence for ancient models, and with the impulse in that direction gained from his own masks, it was easy for him to go one step further, and attempt a comedy containing characters which are not individuals, nor 'humours,' nor generalized types, but abstractions or allegories: this he had done tentatively, in Cynthia's Revels, before he began to write masks; and this, with a clearer consciousness of what he was about, and with a bolder faith, he did again, a quarter of a century later, in The Staple of News. Its The Staple of News is not a great stage-piece. remarkable organization and the skill with which its threads are brought together in the project of the news-staple; the interest of the motifs; the vivacity and lifelikeness of the characterization-especially that of the Peniboys and that of the gossips in the Induction and Intermeans; the force and pungency of the satire-all these are more or less dulled and clouded by the abstract and shadowy quality of the central group of characters, Pecunia and her train. Even had the satire been less unpalatable to the audience for whom it was intended, this allegorical element would probably have condemned The Staple of News as a stage-piece in Jonson's day; just as it offers some discouragement to those who would read it as literature in this day. Still I am not one of those who see in The Staple of News manifest signs that the decay of Jonson's powers had begun. The real wane began soon after its production, but it began suddenly, with a stroke of paralysis. We miss in this play the exuberant creativeness and the wonderful dramatic nerve and energy of Volpone and the Alchemist, but we feel in their stead a power of another and higher kind. We feel in it the presence of a mind of broader, clearer, steadier vision than that of the early masterpieces—a mind of an easier and more comprehensive grasp upon the meaning of life, and of a deeper and saner sense of moral values. It is primarily as a moral thinker that Jonson addresses us here: The Staple of News is a great moral poem in dramatic form. Compared with it in this respect, most of the satirical dramas of that age are the merest ephemerae. No other even of Jonson's own plays contains so much that is of abiding significance: it represents his power and energy as a moral thinker at their highest. For nine years-and this in the very prime of life—Jonson had written no plays, and had had no outlet for his satiric energy other than short poems and occasional masks; and it would almost seem that he tried in our play to express the entire satiric consciousness accumulated during this period of comparative silence. In order to swell the grand total, his recent masks, too, were made to return. most of the thought of this kind which he had put into them. Scarcely a single prominent abuse of the times, one might believe, came off untouched. Greatest of all, and the informing idea of the whole play, is the satire against the many-headed evil of money-worship, and the misuse of |