Eastward Ho!

by Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston

New RSC Classics series, highlighting rarely performed Tudor and Jacobean plays.

Genres: Plays, Drama, Fiction, School, Poetry Plays, Classics

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1605

About the author

Benjamin Jonson was an English Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor. A contemporary of William Shakespeare, he is best known for his satirical plays, particularly Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, which are considered his best, and his lyric poems. A man of vast reading and a seemingly insatiable appetite for controversy, Jonson had an unparalleled breadth of influence on Jacobean and Caroline playwrights and poets. A house in Dulwich College is named after him.

See more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Jonson

Reviews

[Florence Ridley]

Maybe my brain is just frazzled, but this wasn't that good. The plot wasn't exactly complicated because nothing actually happens but there were too many characters with silly names constantly yapping. It feels silly to criticise a play for having too much talking in it but there we go. Kind of boring.

[Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all)]

Written with 2 collaborators, this is the play that landed Jonson in jail for making fun of the king and the first recorded scandal of "pounds for peerages". Before trash TV, there was trash theatre. Playwrights had to churn out enough material for a new show every week or two, it couldn't all be Hamlet, you know--even Will Shakespeare wrote a couple of right dogs.

The "city play" satirizes life in London and the downside of the upwardly mobile, and this is no exception. The status-hungry daughter ends up with no estate and no joy; the money-hungry moneylender ends up with no wife and no reputation; the young rakehell discovers just how much fun hell actually is to those locked up in it. And of course, the wise, hardworking and modest carry the day.

Light as air, and yet rather tedious and dull, with a rushed and very unconvincing end, moral as it purports to be. Basically, they slapped a moral on the end and finished it that way. Read it because I must, for class.
Two and a half stars.

[Gill]

Great fun. Written by Chapman, Marston and Jonson in turn, but remarkably coherent. Some of the jokes and puns are genuinely funny, not bad going for over four centuries.

The ending's a little drawn-out, but that bit was Ben's writing, so arguably only to be expected. Well worth the time.

Read while suffering the Dread Covid as part of the REP online readathon of the repertoire of the Jacobean Children's Companies.

[TomsReaditAll]

This was difficult and confusing

[Jocelyn Chin]

Volpone was better

[James F]

Chapman, Jonson, and Marston are among the best playwrights of the late Elizabethan/Jacobean period, and this is one of the better plays of the period. A “city comedy”, the play has some witty dialogue but no real comic characters or scenes; it’s a fairly serious comedy about Touchstone, a London goldsmith, his two apprentices, Golding who is a model of industriousness and sobriety, and Quicksilver, who is a rake and associates with the dissolute and spendthrift knight, Sir Petronel Flash, and keeps a mistress named Sindefy. Touchstone has two daughters who are equally diverse; the older, Gertrude, dreams of becoming a “lady” and marries Sir Petronel, while the younger is a model daughter and bourgeois character who marries Golding. Other characters who play an important if secondary role are Touchstone’s wife, a usurer named Security, and Security’s young wife Winifred. The main point of the play is to set off the industrious and honest bourgeoisie against the decadent nobility; the authors were jailed for writing it. It ends with the “prodigal” daughter and apprentice being forgiven, with the appropriate moral speeches at the end.

This was in the Brooke and Paradise anthology, and I think I had read it before, but probably decades ago.

[E]

Actual rating: 3.5

In general, this play was really entertaining and I enjoyed reading it. However, the end was a little too simple in my opinion.
Furthermore, it really stunned me how the content of this drama led to imprisonment of the authors soon after it was published. I didn't find anything that big of an offence in it. But I guess that is what makes literature that interesting and important: it tells of a past age and the change of ideals.

[Arani]

3.5 stars, maybe I’ll consider 4 stars after the lecture. I did enjoy “Eastward Ho!” but I felt like Quicksilver and Petronel got off too easily…though with it being a play, I suppose there’s a time constraint on character development.

(sitting in eng335 rn) after further reflection, I'm bumping it up to 4 stars

[Amanda]

A much more moral tale, with lots of references to The Spanish Tragedy, The Alchemist and various other late Elizabethan and early Jacobean plays.

[Richard Anderson]

Some biting satire, a bit of tedium.

[Daisy]

fun!

[Charlotte]

This was a bit all over the place but it was funny nonetheless.

[Hal]

Marston ditching Jonson and Chapman when they got arrested over this play is hilarious.

[Lawrence]

A friend who knew I was reading Marlowe's plays gave me this to read as a complement to my Elizabethan literature excursion. Enjoyed this play very much. It is a very funny farce. And I would love to see a really good production of the play. I imagine such a staging could make the audience roll with laughter. The characters' names alone are enough to make you laugh out loud. AL, thanks for sharing this one (and it's a perfect one for a cross country plane trip); now let's find a good production to see.

[Imad]

very good

[Michael P.]

This is an absolutely brilliant comedy. This edition is just fine, but you can do better.

[Michael P.]

Useful student edition of a great play.