Ben Jonson, ‘my ningle’
Sir, – In the course of his remarkable and enlightening description of an
unpublished seventeenth-century account of Ben Jonson’s journey on foot to
Edinburgh (Commentary, September 11), James Loxley states that the
playwright Thomas Dekker, a contemporary of Jonson, “had labelled him
‘ningle’ and ‘hermaphrodite’ in Satiromastix”. This formulation can easily
mislead its readers.
The play Satiromastix (1601) was Dekker’s revenge for the caricatures of him
and John Marston in Jonson’s immediately preceding satiric comedy, Poetaster
(which I have recently edited for the forthcoming Cambridge edition of
Jonson’s complete works). In Dekker’s retaliatory play, the character Tucca,
a specialist in creative verbal abuse, calls the Jonson character “thou
thin-bearded hermaphrodite” (Bowers ed, 1.2.289), alluding to the sparse
beard later memorialized by Ben himself when he quoted a proposed epitaph on
himself to William Drummond during the Scottish trip: “here lies honest Ben
/ that had not a beard on his chin”. (The comic aptness of Tucca’s insult
was heightened when the play was acted by a boys’ troupe, the Paul’s Boys,
who did not use false beards onstage.) In the same scene of Satiromastix,
Dekker’s Tucca additionally characterizes the Jonson character as
“‘copper-faced rascal”, “my Saracen’s-head at Newgate” (referring to a
tavern sign), “you brown-bread-mouth stinker”, “saffron-cheek sunburnt
gipsy”, “low-minded pigmy”, and “hungry-face pudding-pie-eater”. None of
Tucca’s hyperbolic nouns in this scene is designed as information.
Dekker also assigns his Jonson character a fawning hanger-on, Asinius Bubo
(“Asinine Owl”), who incessantly refers to the poet as “my ningle” (or “mine
ingle”). At twenty-nine Jonson was a bit long in the tooth to be an ingle,
defined in dictionaries from 1598 through 1658 as a subservient boy hired or
kept for sodomy; and of course Jonson was also famously nonsubservient.
(This joke, too, must have been improved by the context of the boys’
production.) The dimwitted Bubo, having called his idol “ningle” some twenty
times in the play, is forced in its conclusion to swear off: “You shall not
call Horace [the Jonson character] your Ningle” (5.2.276–7). Bubo may in
fact have been claiming the poet as his intimate friend or confidant, not
his lover; the Oxford English Dictionary recognizes the former meanings in
its draft revision dated September 2009.
In short, neither the “hermaphrodite” nor the “ningle” in Satiromastix has any
force as evidence to support the reading that “Wellbeck, where my Gossip
made fat Harry Ogle his mistress” describes Jonson initiating a homosexual
relationship with a corpulent sixtyish subordinate blood relative of his
aristocratic hostess. What the document’s words mean I do not know, but the
locution “made X his mistress” does not ring true as early
seventeenth-century idiom for casual sex of any variety. Even more
certainly, no discovered or admitted act of sodomy would at that period have
been reported matter-of-factly in writing in a subordinate clause. Nor do I
believe that our Ben made anyone pregnant in Welbeck. The very lack of
affect in the anonymous author’s statement drains away its potential sexual
aura. It remains an intriguing conundrum yet to be solved, perhaps in the
course of further editing.
GABRIELE BERNHARD JACKSON
Department of English, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122.
Magyarland
Sir, – Thank you for Lauro Martines’s review of two new books on the Thirty
Years War (September 25). However, I would like to point out that the
territories of modern-day Hungary and Croatia were never part of the Holy
Roman Empire.
When Stephen was crowned as the first Christian King of Hungary on Christmas
Day in 1000 ad, he gained recognition from the Pope without also having to
swear an oath of loyalty to the Holy Roman Emperor. This has generally been
considered a great diplomatic victory, which ensured Hungarian independence.
However, this same independence meant that the princes of the Holy Roman
Empire were not formally obliged to assist in the later defence of Hungary
against Ottoman aggression, even when the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperors also
became elective Kings of Hungary.
Furthermore, at the time of the Thirty Years War, the Hungarian territory
actually under Habsburg rule was mostly limited to northern Croatia and what
is now Slovakia, then better known as “Upper Hungary”. Central Hungary was
under direct Ottoman rule, while Transylvania – now part of Romania – was an
independent principality under Ottoman vassalage. The Transylvanian princes
Gabriel (Gábor) Bethlen and George (György) Rákóczi both exploited the
disruptions of the Thirty Years War to gain territorial advantages from the
Habsburgs, but they baulked at challenging the Habsburg claim to the
Hungarian crown as some of their predecessors had done. Bethlen, who brought
economic prosperity and cultural enrichment to his subjects, was nonetheless
scorned by C. V. Wedgwood as a “swarthy little Tartar”.
In a 1943 pamphlet, the exiled Slovak historian and statesman, Vladimír
Clementis, suggested that English language use of the name Hungary should be
limited to the old Kingdom of Hungary (Regnum Hungariae), whereas modern
Hungary – within the borders established by the Treaty of Trianon (1921) –
should be referred to as Magyarland (Magyaroszág). Lauro Martines’s twofold
error is a common one. Perhaps the general adoption of the nomenclature
suggested by Clementis would have prevented such mistakes . . . or perhaps
it would have just added to the confusion.
DANIEL BAMFORD
Department of Modern History, University of Birmingham.
Sir, – In his review of Europe’s Tragedy by Peter H. Wilson, Lauro Martines
repeats a comparison between the Holy Roman Empire losing between 15 and 30
per cent of its population and the Soviet Union, “which suffered the
heaviest casualties of the Second World War”, losing only 12 per cent. But
while the Soviet Union undoubtedly did suffer the greatest casualties
numerically, proportionally, the greatest loser was Poland, which lost just
over 20 per cent of its population.
ADAM ZAMOYSKI
12 Avenue Studios, Sydney Close, London SW3.
‘Groatsworth’
Sir, – In his review of Meredith Anne Skura’s Tudor Autobiography: Listening
for inwardness (September 18), Adam Smyth wrote: “Greene’s Groatsworth of
Witte (1592) purports to be [Robert Greene’s] deathbed repentance, but it
was probably written by Henry Chettle”. Smyth clearly has not read Richard
Westley’s definitive examination of that argument, published in the 2005
Oxford journal, Literary and Linguistic Computing. Westley subjected the
whole of both Greene’s and Chettle’s works to computerized linguistic
analysis. He found that Groatsworth was littered with words and phrases that
Greene used habitually and that Chettle never did. The spelling was Greene’s
too, not Chettle’s.
ALAN D. HAWKINS
5330 Orange Avenue, #16C, San Diego, California 92115.
Coniston
Sir, – Michael Bentley’s placement of R. G. Collingwood’s birth and death at
Coniston in Cumbria (September 25) is a geographic anachronism.
The County of Cumbria is a monstrosity not created until 1974 by an
amalgamation of Cumberland and Westmorland plus some parts of Lancashire.
Coniston was in Lancashire for the whole of Collingwood’s life.
PETER FINLINSON
3 Corngrave Close, Marske By the Sea, Redcar.
Jefferson’s slaves
Sir, – Readers of Michael O’Brien’s review of Annette Gordon-Reed’s The
Hemingses of Monticello (September 25) may be interested in the following
passage from Domestic Manners of the Americans by Frances Trollope (mother
of Anthony), published in 1832:
Few names are held in higher estimation in America, than that of Jefferson; it
is the touchstone of the democratic party, and all seem to agree that he was
one of the greatest of men; yet I have heard his name coupled with deeds
which would make the sons of Europe shudder. The facts I allude to are
spoken openly by all, not whispered privately by a few; and in a country
where religion is the tea-table talk, and its strict observance a
fashionable distinction, these facts are recorded, and listened to, without
horror, nay, without emotion.
Mr. Jefferson is said to have been the father of children by almost all his
numerous gang of female slaves. These wretched offspring were also the
lawful slaves of their father, and worked in his house and plantations as
such; in particular, it is recorded that it was his especial pleasure to be
waited upon by them at table, and the hospitable orgies for which his
Montecielo [sic] was so celebrated, was incomplete, unless the goblet he
quaffed were tendered by the trembling hand of his own slavish offspring.
I once heard it stated by a democratical adorer of this great man, that when,
as it sometimes happened, his children by Quadroon slaves were white enough
to escape suspicion of their origin, he did not pursue them if they
attempted to escape, saying laughingly, “Let the rogues get off, if they
can; I will not hinder them.” This was stated in a large party, as a proof
of his kind and noble nature, and was received by all with approving smiles.
If I know any thing of right or wrong, if virtue and vice be indeed something
more than words, then was this great American an unprincipled tyrant, and
most heartless libertine.
HENRY COHEN
4328 Roland Springs Drive, Baltimore, Maryland 21210.
Democratic rights
Sir, – Jonathan Pearson, in his review of Ben Wilson’s What Price Liberty?
(September 11), does not seem to me to give sufficient weight to the
challenge we face in balancing freedom and security in our post-2001 world.
Richard Evans, in The Coming of the Third Reich, put it succinctly:
“Democracies that are under threat of destruction face the impossible
dilemma of either yielding to that threat by insisting on preserving the
democratic niceties, or violating their own principles by curtailing
democratic rights”.
JIM SEVERANCE
S6596 Eli Valley Road, Loganville, Wisconsin 53943.
No Reformation
Sir, – I enjoyed Tom Shippey’s overview of the work of Philip K. Dick (October
2), but he might expect dissent from his list of three classic “alternative
history” novels. Keith Roberts’s Pavane (1968: Spanish Armada succeeds;
Reformation foiled; Industrial Revolution slowed) both predates and, in
subtlety and thoughtfulness, easily surpasses The Alteration (1976), the
similarly themed work by Kingsley Amis, which Shippey cites.
MARK VALENTINE
Stable Cottage, Kildwick, Yorkshire.
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