Ben Jonson strived to imitate the style of the classical Roman and Greek poets, finding himself a major figure in the Neoclassical Literature style. One of his more famous poems was “To Penshurst,” a country house poem written for the Sidney family, of Sir Robert Sidney and his son Sir Philip Sidney, who owned the Penshurst estate. According to “The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics,” the definition of a country house poem is a poem that “celebrates the home of a patron, friend, or model of the poet, treating the house and its landscape as an instance of civility and culture” (Hibbard). There are many other notable poems from this sub-genre of Renaissance literature, such as Aemilia Lanyer’s “Description of Cookeham” and Andrew Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House,” but the most famous is probably Jonson’s “To Penshurst.” “To Penshurst” was originally a part of a group of nonepigrammatic poems entitled “The Forest.” It is a 102 lined poem consisting of rhyming couplets that seem to be influenced by the poems of the Roman poets Horace (65-8 b.c.e.) and Martial (40-103 c.e.) (Budra). However, even though the poem is a great example of the country house poem sub-genre, it also doubles as a satirical poem. My argument is that “To Penshurst” is Jonson’s way of slyly offering his social criticism of the state of England’s social order in the 1600’s by disguising it within what is typically just a poem of praise and embellishment.
The poem opens with Jonson aggressively stating his dislike for gaudy country homes made “of touch or marble” with “polished pillars, or a roof of gold” (2 - 3). He does this by comparing Penshurst to these other houses and praises it for its simplicity and wholesomeness:
“Thou joy’st in better marks, of soil, of air, / Of wood, of water; therein thou art fair” (7 - 8). By praising Penshurst for its rural lifestyle and humble aesthetics, Jonson is making a stab at upper class families who do the opposite. Lines 9 through 18 use classical allusions to not only show off his own knowledge of mythology to impress the Sidney family, to whom tradition and learning were an integral part of their lifestyle (Budra), but to further his argument against the show-off types of the upper class. Jonson is saying that Penshurst is so superior to other estates that mythological creatures and lesser gods spend their time on the surrounding lands. After establishing the Eden-esque pastoral setting, starting at line 19 going all the way to line 55, Jonson lists of all the different types of real-world game and fruits that surround the estate. The general mood given from these lines possess an Eden like quality: the deer, rabbits, sheep, and cows are “for thy mess is willing to be killed” (30) and fish and eels “run into thy net” (33) and “leap on land / before the fisher, or into his hand” (37 - 38). The fruit also grows perfectly in season each time:
The early cherry, with the later plum,
Fig, grape, and quince, each in his time doth come;
The blushing apricot and the wooly peach
Hang on thy walls, that every child may reach (41 - 44)
The images of the perfect Utopia where animals lay down sacrifice their lives and fruit is always available to eat off the vine is an obvious exaggeration. In his article “The Feigned Commonwealth in the Poetry of Ben Jonson,” Anthony Mortimer discusses how Jonson’s “Utopia” works as a “poetic framework to facilitate the making of clear moral and ethical distinctions” (70), so the reason behind Jonson’s exaggeration is to once again criticize the courtly life. Animals are willing to be killed for the table and “pikes, now weary their own kind to eat” (34) because the ruthlessness and violence of hunting, a sport popular among the upper class, is gone from Jonson’s Penshurst. The reader of this poem must take everything Jonson writes with a grain of salt, so when he describes the fruition of the garden, he is really satirizing those who have never done hard labor in their privileged lives and believe gardening and farming are easy jobs and that plants and flowers just take care of themselves.
This idea of a lack of labor is seen again in the next section of the poem where Jonson describes the working class peoples who are arriving at Penshurst. Jonson states that the Penshurst estate was built with “no man’s ruin, no man’s grown” (46) and that there is “none that dwell about them wish them down” (47). These lines reflect Jonson’s desire for an ideal society, which is especially expressed in the following lines:
But all come in, the farmer and the clown,
And no one empty-handed, to salute
Thy lord and lady, though they have no suit. (48 - 50)
All peoples of all social statuses, the farmers and the peasants, are welcome at Penshurst as long as they bring their part with them. This sounds a little similar to the idea of Communism, seen again in these lines about the actual feast:
Where comes no guest but is allowed to eat,
Without his fear, and of thy lord’s own meat;
Where the same beer and bread, and selfsame wine,
That is his lordship’s shall also be mine (61 - 64)
At Penshurst, there is a general altruistic feeling that encroaches the estate; a hierarchy seems to be missing and the peasants eat the same food and drink the same wine as the higher class and the Lord and Lady of the house. These feelings of togetherness and equality are not Jonson’s way of promoting the idea of Communism, but rather to say the exact opposite. In the next lines, we see the speaker’s greediness:
And I not fain to sit (as some this day
At great men’s tables), and yet dine away.
Here no man tells my cups; nor, standing by,
A waiter doth my gluttony envy,
But gives me what I call, and lets me eat; (65 - 69)
In Mortimer’s article, he says that “[at Penshurst, every man has his own function and his own dignity, [but] the poet, with his bitter memories of unrecognized function and insulted dignity, is something of a spectre at the feast” (74). The speaker here is acting as a parasite, a popular theme of Jonson that is seen in his famous play Volpone. The speaker has not brought his part to the table, but still partakes in the feast, drinking many “cups” and ordering the waiter to bring him more food. In his article “Jonson's Universal Parasite: Patronage and Embodied Critique in ‘To Penshurst’,” Peter Remien discusses how by acting as a parasite in poem, Jonson “works to reconfigure the social and natural hierarchies upon which the poem is structured in order to enable alternative social interactions aligned on a horizontal rather than vertical axis” (257). In other words, Jonson shows a clink in the chain of his Utopia: there are still parasites that take advantage of others, which is why, ultimately, Jonson is showing that Communism would intrinsically fail due to the the nature of man to be gluttonous and greedy.
The next section of the poem praises the lady of the house for her “housewifery” (85). It is interesting that Jonson praises her for being the reason that the house runs so smoothly and that she is the reason that the king’s previous visit went well. In the social order of things in the 1600’s, women were commonly thought of as not only lesser than men, but as property of men. Jonson uses the lady of the house as a contrast for how life typically is among the upper class:
These, Penshurst, are thy praise, and yet not all.
Thy lady’s noble, fruitful, chaste withal.
His children thy great lord may call his own,
A fortune in this age but rarely known. (89 - 92)
Penshurst is praised by the speaker, and by all, for its bountiful meals and clean linens and rooms, but the real center of praise should be, in Jonson’s opinion, the lady of the house’s chastity, or faithfulness. Jonson takes another passive aggressive stab at people, typically the upper class, who have illegitimate children or whose wives sleep around with other men. The upper class have become so corrupt that even staying faithful to one’s spouse has become “rarely known” among them.
After a short section offering approval of the young children’s upbringing, specifically their piousness and education, Jonson ends the poem similarly to how it starts:
Now, Penshurst, they that will proportion thee
With other edifices, when they see
Those proud, ambitious heaps, and nothing else,
May say, their lords have built, but thy lord dwells.
In his article, Mortimer also discusses the end of the poem: “the importance of the structural circle can, of course, be overestimated. The fact that a poem ends the way it begins may, in most cases, demonstrate nothing more than the desire for an obvious kind of symmetry. Nevertheless, the application of the circle concept to ‘To Penshurst’ is, I believe no mere piece of interpretive ingenuity” (75). Just as we have figuratively circled the grounds of Penshurst with the speaker, we are brought back full circle to the idea that other worlds and estates exist aside from the Utopia that Penshurst creates and Jonson’s last comment on the state of things. He claims that even though other houses may be large and impressive, they are nothing more to Jonson than “proud, ambitious heaps” because they do not instil the type of moral, altruistic living that is found in Penshurst. The last line is extremely powerful in driving home this idea. Jonson states that even though these other families may have built these impressive homes, their core values are corrupt to the point that they just live in the house, whereas at Penshurst, the family, the house, and the entire estate are one, allowing his lord to “dwell.”
“To Penshurst” by Ben Jonson is meant not only as an epitome for the perfect rural life, but also as a subtle criticism of the social order found in England, and most of Europe’s developed countries, in the 1600’s. Unlike poets from other styles of the Renaissance period, such as Metaphysical, who use metaphors or conceits to voice their opinions, Jonson makes his criticism more obvious but still disguised by irony and sarcasm. The reader can take Jonson’s poem at face value, but when read between the lines, Jonson’s poem moves from just another country house poem, meant to praise and flatter, to an important piece of historical criticism.
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