No More Learning

All the speeches
of Satan are replete with the most biting satire, delivered with an
appropriate degree of spirit. Fitzdottrel is one of those characters
which Jonson delighted to draw, and in which he stood unrivalled, a
_gull_, i. e. , a confident coxcomb, selfish, cunning, and conceited.
Mrs. Fitzdottrel possesses somewhat more interest than the generality
of our author's females, and is indeed a well sustained character. In
action the principal amusement of the scene (exclusive of the admirable
burlesque of witchery in the conclusion) was probably derived from the
mortification of poor Pug, whose stupid stare of amazement at finding
himself made an _ass_ of on every possible occasion must, if portrayed
as some then on the stage were well able to portray it, have been
exquisitely comic.

This play is strictly moral in its conception and conduct. Knavery and
folly are shamed and corrected, virtue is strengthened and rewarded,
and the ends of dramatic justice are sufficiently answered by the
simple exposure of those whose errors are merely subservient to the
minor interests of the piece.

HERFORD (_Studies in the Literary Relations of England and Germany_,
pp. 318-20): Jonson had in fact so far the Aristophanic quality of
genius, that he was at once a most elaborate and minute student of the
actual world, and a poet of the airiest and boldest fancy, and that he
loved to bring the two roles into the closest possible combination. No
one so capable of holding up the mirror to contemporary society without
distorting the slenderest thread of its complex tissue of usages; no
one, on the other hand, who so keenly delighted in startling away
the illusion or carefully undermining it by some palpably fantastic
invention. His most elaborate reproductions of the everyday world are
hardly ever without an infusion of equally elaborate caprice,--a leaven
of recondite and fantastic legend and grotesque myth, redolent of old
libraries and antique scholarship, furtively planted, as it were, in
the heart of that everyday world of London life, and so subtly blending
with it that the whole motley throng of merchants and apprentices,
gulls and gallants, discover nothing unusual in it, and engage with the
most perfectly matter of fact air in the business of working it out.
The purging of Crispinus in the _Poetaster_, the Aristophanic motive
of the _Magnetic Lady_, even the farcical horror of noise which is the
mainspring of the _Epicoene_, are only less elaborate and sustained
examples of this fantastic realism than the adventure of a Stupid
Devil in the play before us. Nothing more anomalous in the London of
Jonson's day could be conceived; yet it is so managed that it loses
all its strangeness.
So perfectly is the supernatural element welded
with the human, that it almost ceases to appear supernatural. Pug, the
hero of the adventure, is a pretty, petulant boy, more human by many
degrees than the half fairy Puck of Shakespeare, which doubtless helped
to suggest him, and the arch-fiend Satan is a bluff old politician,
anxious to ward off the perils of London from his young simpleton of a
son, who is equally eager to plunge into them. The old savage horror
fades away before Jonson's humanising touch, the infernal world loses
all its privilege of peculiar terror and strength, and sinks to the
footing of a mere rival state, whose merchandise can be kept out of the
market and its citizens put in the Counter or carted to Tyburn.

A. W. WARD (_Eng. Dram. Lit. _, pp. 372-3): The oddly-named comedy
of _The Devil is an Ass_, acted in 1616, seems already to exhibit a
certain degree of decay in the dramatic powers which had so signally
called forth its predecessor. Yet this comedy possesses a considerable
literary interest, as adapting both to Jonson's dramatic method, and
to the general moral atmosphere of his age, a theme connecting itself
with some of the most notable creations of the earlier Elizabethan
drama. . . . The idea of the play is as healthy as its plot is ingenious;
but apart from the circumstance that the latter is rather slow in
preparation, and by no means, I think, gains in perspicuousness as it
proceeds, the design itself suffers from one radical mistake. Pug's
intelligence is so much below par that he suffers as largely on account
of his clumsiness as on account of his viciousness, while remaining
absolutely without influence upon the course of the action.