Tragic Time in Ben Jonson's Sejanus and Catiline

Abstract

This essay explores Ben Jonson's treatment of dramatic and historical time in his Roman tragedies, Sejanus His Fall (1603) and Catiline His Conspiracy (1611). Although the plays conspicuously fail to respect neoclassical strictures about the unity of time, both reproduce the temporal compression of Greek and Roman tragedy through their sustained intertextual engagements with a wide range of Roman source texts, including, above all, Lucan's Bellum Civile, and the works of the late antique court poet Claudian. The ultimate effect of these quotations, allusions, and reminiscences is to transform Jonson's dramas of early imperial corruption and late Republican civil conflict into proleptic visions of Roman history as a phantasmagoria of unceasing political violence, extending to the ends of both classical antiquity and classical literature.