“Few Wise Women’s Honesties”: Dialoguing with Roman Women in Ben Jonson’s Roman Plays

Sejanus His Fall (first performed in 1603 and first published in 1605) and Catiline His Conspiracy (first performed and published in 1611) are the only extant Roman tragedies by Ben Jonson. Their titles feature evident similarities, both with regard to their structure (proper noun + possessive determiner + common noun) and content. The centrality attributed to the male protagonist in both plays is obvious by simply looking at the noun phrases that constitute their titles. Early modern connoisseurs of classical history—the so-called “Reader[s] extraordinary” of Catiline’s introductory note—would have no trouble in identifying the parallelism between the two Romans’ downward spirals of power. This chapter focuses on the Roman female characters in Sejanus and Catiline in order to assess whether, and to what extent, Jonson can be considered a subversive playwright, as suggested by a number of scholars who claim to have identified a proto-feminist approach in his works.¹ After a very brief account of the circumstances of the staging and failure of the two tragedies, the main female characters will be introduced and examined, with an especial emphasis on their relationship with their male counterparts. Finally, since Jonson shapes his Roman female characters especially through a skillful use of dramatic dialogue, the stylistic features of the women’s lines will be analysed, mainly by deploying the linguistic tools offered by Conversation Analysis (hereafter CA).