#emetics

But Ben Jonson cannot squander his gold, his gold which he has never possessed; he can only squander excrement. Karl Abraham [...] "cites, in proof of the close association between sadistic and anal impulses instances in his experiences with neurotics when an explosive bowel evacuation has been a substitute for a discharge of anger or rage, or has accompanied it." Certainly Jonson seems to explode in this fashion. The directness with which he gives way to the impulse is probably another cause of his chronic unpopularity. The climax of The Poetaster is the administering of emetic pills, the effects of which take, in this case, the form of a poetic joke. The comic high point of The Alchemist comes with the locking of one of the characters in a privy, where he will be overcome by the smell. This whole malodorous side of Jonson was given its fullest and most literal expression in the poem called The Famous Voyage which was too much for even Gifford and Swinburne, in which he recounts a nocturnal expedition made by two London blades in a wherry through the roofed-over tunnel of Fleet Ditch, which was the sewer for the private privies above it. A hardly less literal letting-go is the whole play of Bartholomew Fair[...]. It is Ben Jonson's least strained and inhibited play, and one of his most successful. He drops verse for colloquial prose; he forgets about classical precedents. He dumps out upon his central group of characters [...].