'Devils Liquore' and 'Virgins Milke': Fashion, Fetishism and Jonson's Line (Three Old Norse Saga Studies) (Writer Ben Jonson) (Essay‪)‬

I. Fashion and the Line In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, English satirists and moralists produced a considerable anti-fashion discourse. Modern and postmodern analyses of fashion tend to proceed on the premise that a person gains an identity on assuming the latest style. Yet many early modern observers instead consider what is abandoned and effaced: the family line. There is a strong sense that families are destroyed in economic terms by excessive consumption and, as a result of the perceived promiscuity of fashionable women, may be wasted biologically as well. 'The Funeral Obseques of Sir All-in-New-Fashions' (1) distils exactly this sense that fashion may erase a family: the modish corpse of Sir All-in is mourned by tailors and spurriers, but no heir. (2) Ben Jonson is only the most eminent satirist to show an interest in such matters of fashion and lineage in his Discoveries, his poetry, and in The Devil is an Ass (1616) and Epicoene (1609). (3) It is unsurprising that he should do so, given that he considered himself heir to a patrilineal literary inheritance stretching back to antiquity, yet worked in a literary marketplace which reduced plays to fashions of choice. Mode, in its Jonsonian incarnation, encourages its adherents to confuse separate moral and ontological categories: to treat people like things and to treat things like people. And on occasion, Jonson represents this mentality in explicitly sexual forms as idolatry (or, in modern terms, fetishism) by which desire is displaced from fecund bodies to barren commodities; the inevitable casualty is the line.