Benjamin Jonson was an English playwright, poet, actor, and literary critic, whose artistry
exerted a lasting impact upon English poetry and stage comedy. He popularised the comedy
of humours. He is best known for the satirical plays Every Man in His Humour, Volpone, or
The Fox, The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair and for his lyric and epigrammatic poetry;
he is generally regarded as the second most important English playwright during the reign
of James VI and I after William Shakespeare. Jonson was a classically educated, well-read
and cultured man of the English Renaissance with an appetite for controversy (personal
and political, artistic and intellectual) whose cultural influence was of unparalleled
breadth upon the playwrights and the poets of the Jacobean era and of the Caroline era.
Early life: In midlife, Jonson claimed that his paternal
grandfather was a member of the extended Johnston family of Annandale in the Scottish borders,
a genealogy that is attested by the three spindles (rhombi) in the Jonson family coat
of arms: one spindle is a diamond-shaped heraldic device used by the Johnston family. Jonson's
clergyman father died two months before his birth; his mother married a master bricklayer
two years later. Jonson attended school in St. Martin's Lane. Later, a family friend
paid for his studies at Westminster School, where the antiquarian, historian, topographer
and officer of arms, William Camden (1551–1623) was one of his masters. In the event, the
pupil and the master became friends, and the intellectual influence of Camden's broad-ranging
scholarship upon Jonson's art and literary style remained notable, until Camden's death
in 1623. On leaving Westminster School, Jonson was
to have attended the University of Cambridge, to continue his book learning but did not,
because of his unwilled apprenticeship to his bricklayer stepfather. According to the
churchman and historian Thomas Fuller (1608–61), Jonson at this time built a garden wall in
Lincoln's Inn. After having been an apprentice bricklayer, Ben Jonson went to the Netherlands
and volunteered to soldier with the English regiments of Francis Vere(1560–1609) in
Flanders. The Hawthornden Manuscripts (1619), of the
conversations between Ben Jonson and the poet William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585–1649),
report that, when in Flanders, Jonson engaged, fought and killed an enemy soldier in single
combat, and took for trophies the weapons of the vanquished soldier. After his military
activity on the Continent, Jonson returned to England and worked as an actor and as a
playwright. As an actor, Jonson was the protagonist "Hieronimo" (Geronimo) in the play The
Spanish Tragedy (ca. 1586), by Thomas Kyd (1558–94), the first revenge tragedy in
English literature. Moreover, by 1597, he was a working playwright employed by Philip
Henslowe, the leading producer for the English public theatre; by the next year, the production
of Every Man in His Humour (1598) had established Jonson's reputation as a dramatist.
Regarding his marriage Jonson described his wife to William Drummond as "a shrew, yet
honest". The identity of Jonson's wife has always been obscure, yet she sometimes is
identified as "Ann Lewis", the woman who married a Benjamin Jonson in 1594, at the church of
St Magnus-the-Martyr, near London Bridge.Concerning the family of Anne Lewis and Ben Jonson, the
St. Martin's Church registers indicate that Mary Jonson, their eldest daughter, died in
November 1593, at six months of age. Then a decade later, in 1603, Benjamin Jonson,
their eldest son, died of Bubonic plague when he was seven years old; to lament and honour
the dead boy, Benjamin Jonson père wrote the elegiac On My First Sonne (1603). Moreover,
32 years later, a second son, also named Benjamin Jonson, died in 1635. In that period, Ann
Lewis and Ben Jonson lived separate lives for five years; their matrimonial arrangement
cast Ann Lewis as the housewife Jonson, and Ben Jonson as the artist who enjoyed the residential
hospitality of his patrons, Sir Robert Townshend and Lord Aubigny, Esme Stuart, 3rd Duke of
Lennox. Career:
By summer 1597, Jonson had a fixed engagement in the Admiral's Men, then performing under
Philip Henslowe's management at The Rose. John Aubrey reports, on uncertain authority,
that Jonson was not successful as an actor; whatever his skills as an actor, he was evidently
more valuable to the company as a writer. By this time Jonson had begun to write original
plays for the Admiral's Men; in 1598 he was mentioned by Francis Meres in his Palladis
Tamia as one of "the best for tragedy." None of his early tragedies survive, however. An
undated comedy, The Case is Altered, may be his earliest surviving play.
In 1597 a play which he co-wrote with Thomas Nashe, The Isle of Dogs, was suppressed after
causing great offence. Arrest warrants for Jonson and Nashe were issued by Queen Elizabeth
I's so-called interrogator, Richard Topcliffe. Jonson was jailed in Marshalsea Prison and
charged with "Leude and mutynous behaviour", while Nashe managed to escape to Great Yarmouth.
Two of the actors, Gabriel Spenser and Robert Shaw, were also imprisoned. A year later,
Jonson was again briefly imprisoned, this time in Newgate Prison, for killing Gabriel
Spenser in a duel on 22 September 1598 in Hogsden Fields (today part of Hoxton). Tried
on a charge of manslaughter, Jonson pleaded guilty but was released by benefit of clergy,
a legal ploy through which he gained leniency by reciting a brief bible verse (the neck-verse),
forfeiting his 'goods and chattels' and being branded on his left thumb. While in jail Jonson
converted to Catholicism, possibly through the influence of fellow-prisoner Father Thomas
Wright, a Jesuit priest. In 1598 Jonson produced his first great success,
Every Man in His Humour, capitalising on the vogue for humorous plays which George Chapman
had begun with An Humorous Day's Mirth. William Shakespeare was among the first actors to
be cast. Jonson followed this in 1599 with Every Man out of His Humour, a pedantic attempt
to imitate Aristophanes. It is not known whether this was a success on stage, but when published
it proved popular and went through several editions.
Jonson's other work for the theatre in the last years of Elizabeth I's reign was marked
by fighting and controversy. Cynthia's Revels was produced by the Children of the Chapel
Royal at Blackfriars Theatre in 1600. It satirised both John Marston, who Jonson believed had
accused him of lustfulness in Histriomastix, and Thomas Dekker. Jonson attacked the two
poets again in Poetaster (1601). Dekker responded with Satiromastix, subtitled "the untrussing
of the humorous poet". The final scene of this play, whilst certainly not to be taken
at face value as a portrait of Jonson, offers a caricature that is recognisable from Drummond's
report – boasting about himself and condemning other poets, criticising performances of his
plays and calling attention to himself in any available way.
This "War of the Theatres" appears to have ended with reconciliation on all sides. Jonson
collaborated with Dekker on a pageant welcoming James I to England in 1603 although Drummond
reports that Jonson called Dekker a rogue. Marston dedicated The Malcontent to Jonson
and the two collaborated with Chapman on Eastward Ho, a 1605 play whose anti-Scottish sentiment
briefly landed both Jonson and Chapman in jail.
Royal patronage: At the beginning of the reign of James I,
King of England, in 1603 Jonson joined other poets and playwrights in welcoming the new
king. Jonson quickly adapted himself to the additional demand for masques and entertainments
introduced with the new reign and fostered by both the king and his consort Anne of Denmark.
In addition to his popularity on the public stage and in the royal hall, he enjoyed the
patronage of aristocrats such as Elizabeth Sidney (daughter of Sir Philip Sidney) and
Lady Mary Wroth. This connection with the Sidney family provided the impetus for one
of Jonson's most famous lyrics, the country house poem To Penshurst.
In February 1603 John Manningham reported that Jonson was living on Robert Townsend,
son of Sir Roger Townshend, and "scorns the world." Perhaps this explains why his trouble
with English authorities continued. That same year he was questioned by the Privy Council
about Sejanus, a politically themed play about corruption in the Roman Empire. He was again
in trouble for topical allusions in a play, now lost, in which he took part. Shortly after
his release from a brief spell of imprisonment imposed to mark the authorities' displeasure
at the work, in the second week of October 1605, he was present at a supper party attended
by most of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators. After the plot's discovery he appears to have
avoided further imprisonment; he volunteered what he knew of the affair to the investigator
Robert Ceciland the Privy Council. Father Thomas Wright, who heard Fawkes's confession,
was known to Jonson from prison in 1598 and Cecil may have directed him to bring the priest
before the council, as a witness.(Teague, 249).
At the same time, Jonson pursued a more prestigious career, writing masques for James's court.
The Satyr (1603) and The Masque of Blackness (1605) are two of about two dozen masques
which Jonson wrote for James or for Queen Anne, some of them performed at Apethorpe
Palace when the King was in residence. The Masque of Blacknesswas praised by Algernon
Charles Swinburne as the consummate example of this now-extinct genre, which mingled speech,
dancing and spectacle. On many of these projects he collaborated,
not always peacefully, with designer Inigo Jones. For example, Jones designed the scenery
for Jonson's masque Oberon, the Faery Prince performed at Whitehall on 1 January 1611 in
which Prince Henry, eldest son of James I, appeared in the title role. Perhaps partly
as a result of this new career, Jonson gave up writing plays for the public theatres for
a decade. He later told Drummond that he had made less than two hundred pounds on all his
plays together. In 1616 Jonson received a yearly pension of
100 marks (about £60), leading some to identify him as England's first Poet Laureate. This
sign of royal favour may have encouraged him to publish the first volume of the folio collected
edition of his works that year. Other volumes followed in 1640–41 and 1692. (See: Ben
Jonson folios) In 1618 Jonson set out for his ancestral Scotland
on foot. He spent over a year there, and the best-remembered hospitality which he enjoyed
was that of the Scottish poet, William Drummond of Hawthornden, in April 1619, sited on the
River Esk. Drummond undertook to record as much of Jonson's conversation as he could
in his diary, and thus recorded aspects of Jonson's personality that would otherwise
have been less clearly seen. Jonson delivers his opinions, in Drummond's terse reporting,
in an expansive and even magisterial mood. Drummond noted he was "a great lover and praiser
of himself, a contemner and scorner of others". In Edinburgh, Jonson is recorded as staying
with a John Stuart of Leith. While there he was made an honorary citizen of Edinburgh.
On returning to England, he was awarded an honorary Master of Arts degree from Oxford
University. From Edinburgh he travelled west and lodged
with the Duke of Lennox where he wrote a play based on Loch Lomond.
The period between 1605 and 1620 may be viewed as Jonson's heyday. By 1616 he had produced
all the plays on which his present reputation as a dramatist is based, including the tragedy
Catiline (acted and printed 1611), which achieved limited success and the comedies Volpone (acted
1605 and printed in 1607), Epicoene, or the Silent Woman (1609), The Alchemist (1610),
Bartholomew Fair (1614) and The Devil is an Ass (1616). The Alchemist and Volpone were
immediately successful. Of Epicoene, Jonson told Drummond of a satirical verse which reported
that the play's subtitle was appropriate, since its audience had refused to applaud
the play (i.e., remained silent). Yet Epicoene, along with Bartholomew Fair and (to a lesser
extent) The Devil is an Ass have in modern times achieved a certain degree of recognition.
While his life during this period was apparently more settled than it had been in the 1590s,
his financial security was still not assured. Religion:
Jonson recounted that his father had been a prosperous Protestant landowner until the
reign of "Bloody Mary" and had suffered imprisonment and the forfeiture of his wealth during that
monarch's attempt to restore England to Catholicism. On Elizabeth's accession he was freed and
was able to travel to London to become a clergyman. (All we know of Jonson's father, who died
a month before his son was born, comes from the poet's own narrative.) Jonson's elementary
education was in a small church school attached to St Martin-in-the-Fields parish, and at
the age of about seven he secured a place at Westminster School, then part of Westminster
Abbey. Notwithstanding this emphatically Protestant
grounding, Jonson maintained an interest in Catholic doctrine throughout his adult life
and, at a particularly perilous time while a religious war with Spain was widely expected
and persecution of Catholics was intensifying, he converted to the faith. This took place
in October 1598, while Jonson was on remand in Newgate Gaol charged with manslaughter.
Jonson's biographer Ian Donaldson is among those who suggest that the conversion was
instigated by Father Thomas Wright, a Jesuit priest who had resigned from the order over
his acceptance of Queen Elizabeth's right to rule in England. Wright, although placed
under house arrest on the orders of Lord Burghley, was permitted to minister to the inmates of
London prisons. It may have been that Jonson, fearing that his trial would go against him,
was seeking the unequivocal absolution that Catholicism could offer if he were sentenced
to death. Alternatively, he could have been looking to personal advantage from accepting
conversion since Father Wright's protector, the Earl of Essex, was among those who might
hope to rise to influence after the succession of a new monarch. Jonson's conversion came
at a weighty time in affairs of state; the royal succession, from the childless Elizabeth,
had not been settled and Essex's Catholic allies were hopeful that a sympathetic ruler
might attain the throne. Conviction, and certainly not expedience alone,
sustained Jonson's faith during the troublesome twelve years he remained a Catholic. His stance
received attention beyond the low-level intolerance to which most followers of that faith were
exposed. The first draft of his play Sejanus was banned for "popery", and did not re-appear
until some offending passages were cut. In January 1606 he (with Anne, his wife) appeared
before the Consistory Court in London to answer a charge of recusancy, with Jonson alone additionally
accused of allowing his fame as a Catholic to "seduce" citizens to the cause. This was
a serious matter (the Gunpowder Plot was still fresh in mind) but he explained that his failure
to take communion was only because he had not found sound theological endorsement for
the practice, and by paying a fine of thirteen shillings (65p) he escaped the more serious
penalties at the authorities' disposal. His habit was to slip outside during the sacrament,
a common routine at the time—indeed it was one followed by the royal consort, Queen Anne,
herself—to show political loyalty while not offending the conscience. Leading church
figures, including John Overall, Dean of St Paul's, were tasked with winning Jonson back
to orthodoxy, but these overtures were resisted. In May 1610 Henry IV of France was assassinated,
purportedly in the name of the Pope; he had been a Catholic monarch respected in England
for tolerance towards Protestants, and his murder seems to have been the immediate cause
of Jonson's decision to rejoin the Church of England. He did this in flamboyant style,
pointedly drinking a full chalice of communion wine at the eucharist to demonstrate his renunciation
of the Catholic rite, in which the priest alone drinks the wine. The exact date of the
ceremony is unknown. However, his interest in Catholic belief and practice remained with
him until his death. Decline and death:
Jonson's productivity began to decline in the 1620s, but he remained well known. In
that time, rose to the prominence the Sons of Ben or the "Tribe of Ben" - those younger
poets such as Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace, and Sir John Suckling who took their bearing
in verse from Jonson. However, a series of setbacks drained his strength and damaged
his reputation. He resumed writing regular plays in the 1620s, but these are not considered
among his best. They are of significant interest, however, for their portrayal of Charles I's
England. The Staple of News, for example, offers a remarkable look at the earliest stage
of English journalism. The lukewarm reception given that play was, however, nothing compared
to the dismal failure of The New Inn; the cold reception given this play prompted Jonson
to write a poem condemning his audience (the Ode to Myself), which in turn prompted Thomas
Carew, one of the "Tribe of Ben," to respond in a poem that asks Jonson to recognise his
own decline. The principal factor in Jonson's partial eclipse
was, however, the death of James and the accession of King Charles I in 1625. Jonson felt neglected
by the new court. A decisive quarrel with Jones harmed his career as a writer of court
masques, although he continued to entertain the court on an irregular basis. For his part,
Charles displayed a certain degree of care for the great poet of his father's day: he
increased Jonson's annual pension to £100 and included a tierce of wine and beer.
Despite the strokes that he suffered in the 1620s, Jonson continued to write. At his death
in 1637 he seems to have been working on another play, The Sad Shepherd. Though only two acts
are extant, this represents a remarkable new direction for Jonson: a move into pastoral
drama. During the early 1630s he also conducted a correspondence with James Howell, who warned
him about disfavour at court in the wake of his dispute with Jones.
Jonson died on 6 August 1637 and his funeral was held on 9 August. He is buried in the
north aisle of the nave in Westminster Abbey, with the inscription "O Rare Ben Johnson " set
in the slab over his grave. John Aubrey, in a more meticulous record than usual, notes
that a passer-by, John Young of Great Milton, Oxfordshire, saw the bare grave marker and
on impulse paid a workman eighteen pence to make the inscription. Another theory suggests
that the tribute came from William Davenant, Jonson's successor as Poet Laureate (and card-playing
companion of Young), as the same phrase appears on Davenant's nearby gravestone, but essayist
Leigh Hunt contends that Davenant's wording represented no more than Young's coinage,
cheaply re-used. The fact that Jonson was buried in an upright position was an indication
of his reduced circumstances at the time of his death, although it has also been written
that he asked for a grave exactly 18 inches square from the monarch and received an upright
grave to fit in the requested space. It has been claimed that the inscription could
be read "Orare Ben Jonson" (pray for Ben Jonson), possibly in an allusion to Jonson's acceptance
of Catholic doctrine during his lifetime (although he had returned to the Church of England)
but the carving shows a distinct space between "O" and "rare".
A monument to Jonson was erected in about 1723 by the Earl of Oxford and is in the eastern
aisle of Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner. It includes a portrait medallion and the same
inscription as on the gravestone. It seems Jonson was to have had a monument erected
by subscription soon after his death but the English Civil War intervened.
His work: Drama:
Apart from two tragedies, Sejanus and Catiline, that largely failed to impress Renaissance
audiences, Jonson's work for the public theatres was in comedy. These plays vary in some respects.
The minor early plays, particularly those written for boy players, present somewhat
looser plots and less-developed characters than those written later, for adult companies.
Already in the plays which were his salvos in the Poet's War, he displays the keen eye
for absurdity and hypocrisy that marks his best-known plays; in these early efforts,
however, plot mostly takes second place to variety of incident and comic set-pieces.
They are, also, notably ill-tempered. Thomas Davies called Poetaster "a contemptible mixture
of the serio-comic, where the names of Augustus Caesar, Maecenas, Virgil, Horace, Ovid and
Tibullus, are all sacrificed upon the altar of private resentment." Another early comedy
in a different vein, The Case is Altered, is markedly similar to Shakespeare's romantic
comedies in its foreign setting, emphasis on genial wit and love-plot. Henslowe's diary
indicates that Jonson had a hand in numerous other plays, including many in genres such
as English history with which he is not otherwise associated.
The comedies of his middle career, from Eastward Ho to The Devil is an Ass are for the most
part city comedy, with a London setting, themes of trickery and money, and a distinct moral
ambiguity, despite Jonson's professed aim in the Prologue to Volpone to "mix profit
with your pleasure". His late plays or "dotages", particularly The Magnetic Lady and The Sad
Shepherd, exhibit signs of an accommodation with the romantic tendencies of Elizabethan
comedy. Within this general progression, however,
Jonson's comic style remained constant and easily recognisable. He announces his programme
in the prologue to the folio version of Every Man in His Humour: he promises to represent
"deeds, and language, such as men do use." He planned to write comedies that revived
the classical premises of Elizabethan dramatic theory—or rather, since all but the loosest
English comedies could claim some descent from Plautus and Terence, he intended to apply
those premises with rigour. This commitment entailed negations: after The Case is Altered,
Jonson eschewed distant locations, noble characters, romantic plots and other staples of Elizabethan
comedy, focusing instead on the satiric and realistic inheritance of new comedy. He set
his plays in contemporary settings, peopled them with recognisable types, and set them
to actions that, if not strictly realistic, involved everyday motives such as greed and
jealousy. In accordance with the temper of his age, he was often so broad in his characterisation
that many of his most famous scenes border on the farcical (as William Congreve, for
example, judged Epicoene.) He was more diligent in adhering to the classical unities than
many of his peers—although as Margaret Cavendish noted, the unity of action in the major comedies
was rather compromised by Jonson's abundance of incident. To this classical model Jonson
applied the two features of his style which save his classical imitations from mere pedantry:
the vividness with which he depicted the lives of his characters, and the intricacy of his
plots. Coleridge, for instance, claimed that The Alchemisthad one of the three most perfect
plots in literature. Poetry:
Jonson's poetry, like his drama, is informed by his classical learning. Some of his better-known
poems are close translations of Greek or Roman models; all display the careful attention
to form and style that often came naturally to those trained in classics in the humanist
manner. Jonson largely avoided the debates about rhyme and meter that had consumed Elizabethan
classicists such as Thomas Campion and Gabriel Harvey. Accepting both rhyme and stress, Jonson
used them to mimic the classical qualities of simplicity, restraint and precision.
"Epigrams" (published in the 1616 folio) is an entry in a genre that was popular among
late-Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences, although Jonson was perhaps the only poet of his time
to work in its full classical range. The epigrams explore various attitudes, most from the satiric
stock of the day: complaints against women, courtiers and spies abound. The condemnatory
poems are short and anonymous; Jonson's epigrams of praise, including a famous poem
to Camden and lines to Lucy Harington, are longer and are mostly addressed to specific
individuals. Although it is included among the epigrams, "On My First Sonne" is neither
satirical nor very short; the poem, intensely personal and deeply felt, typifies a genre
that would come to be called "lyric poetry." It is possible that the spelling of 'son'
as 'Sonne' is meant to allude to the sonnet form, with which it shares some features.
A few other so-called epigrams share this quality. Jonson's poems of "The Forest" also
appeared in the first folio. Most of the fifteen poems are addressed to Jonson's aristocratic
supporters, but the most famous are his country-house poem "To Penshurst" and the poem "To
Celia" ("Come, my Celia, let us prove") that appears also in Volpone.
Underwood, published in the expanded folio of 1640, is a larger and more heterogeneous
group of poems. It contains A Celebration of Charis, Jonson's most extended effort at
love poetry; various religious pieces; encomiastic poems including the poem to Shakespeare and
a sonnet on Mary Wroth; the Execration against Vulcan and others. The 1640 volume also contains
three elegies which have often been ascribed to Donne (one of them appeared in Donne's
posthumous collected poems). Relationship with Shakespeare:
There are many legends about Jonson's rivalry with Shakespeare, some of which may be true.
Drummond reports that during their conversation, Jonson scoffed at two apparent absurdities
in Shakespeare's plays: a nonsensical line in Julius Caesar, and the setting of The Winter's
Tale on the non-existent seacoast of Bohemia. Drummond also reported Jonson as saying that
Shakespeare "wanted art" (i.e., lacked skill). Whether Drummond is viewed as accurate or
not, the comments fit well with Jonson's well-known theories about literature.
In "De Shakespeare Nostrat" in Timber, which was published posthumously and reflects his
lifetime of practical experience, Jonson offers a fuller and more conciliatory comment. He
recalls being told by certain actors that Shakespeare never blotted (i.e., crossed out)
a line when he wrote. His own claimed response was "Would he had blotted a thousand!" However,
Jonson explains, "He was, indeed, honest and of an open and free nature, had an excellent
phantasy, brave notions and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility that
sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped". Jonson concludes that "there was ever more
in him to be praised than to be pardoned." Also when Shakespeare died, he said, "He was
not of an age, but for all time." Thomas Fuller relates stories of Jonson and
Shakespeare engaging in debates in the Mermaid Tavern; Fuller imagines conversations in which
Shakespeare would run rings around the more learned but more ponderous Jonson. That the
two men knew each other personally is beyond doubt, not only because of the tone of Jonson's
references to him but because Shakespeare's company produced a number of Jonson's plays,
at least two of which (Every Man in His Humour and Sejanus His Fall) Shakespeare certainly
acted in. However, it is now impossible to tell how much personal communication they
had, and tales of their friendship cannot be substantiated.
Jonson's most influential and revealing commentary on Shakespeare is the second of the two poems
that he contributed to the prefatory verse that opens Shakespeare's First Folio. This
poem, "To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare and What He Hath Left
Us", did a good deal to create the traditional view of Shakespeare as a poet who, despite
"small Latine, and lesse Greeke", had a natural genius. The poem has traditionally been thought
to exemplify the contrast which Jonson perceived between himself, the disciplined and erudite
classicist, scornful of ignorance and sceptical of the masses, and Shakespeare, represented
in the poem as a kind of natural wonder whose genius was not subject to any rules except
those of the audiences for which he wrote. But the poem itself qualifies this view:
Yet must I not give Nature all: Thy Art, My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part.
Some view this elegy as a conventional exercise, but others see it as a heartfelt tribute to
the "Sweet Swan of Avon", the "Soul of the Age!" It has been argued that Jonson helped
to edit the First Folio, and he may have been inspired to write this poem by reading his
fellow playwright's works, a number of which had been previously either unpublished or
available in less satisfactory versions, in a relatively complete form.
Reception and influence: Jonson was a towering literary figure, and
his influence was enormous for he has been described as 'One of the most vigorous minds
that ever added to the strength of English literature'. Before the English Civil War,
the "Tribe of Ben" touted his importance, and during the Restoration Jonson's satirical
comedies and his theory and practice of "humour characters" (which are often misunderstood;
see William Congreve's letters for clarification) was extremely influential, providing the blueprint
for many Restoration comedies. John Aubrey wrote of Jonson in "Brief Lives." By 1700
Jonson's status began to decline. In the Romantic era, Jonson suffered the fate of being unfairly
compared and contrasted to Shakespeare, as the taste for Jonson's type of satirical comedy
decreased. Jonson was at times greatly appreciated by the Romantics, but overall he was denigrated
for not writing in a Shakespearean vein. In 2012, after more than two decades of research,
Cambridge University Press published the first new edition of Jonson's complete works for
60 years. Drama:
As G. E. Bentley notes in Shakespeare and Jonson: Their Reputations in the Seventeenth
Century Compared, Jonson's reputation was in some respects equal to Shakespeare's in
the 17th century. After the English theatres were reopened on the Restoration of Charles
II, Jonson's work, along with Shakespeare's and Fletcher's, formed the initial core of
the Restoration repertory. It was not until after 1710 that Shakespeare's plays (ordinarily
in heavily revised forms) were more frequently performed than those of his Renaissance contemporaries.
Many critics since the 18th century have ranked Jonson below only Shakespeare among English
Renaissance dramatists. Critical judgment has tended to emphasise the very qualities
that Jonson himself lauds in his prefaces, in Timber, and in his scattered prefaces and
dedications: the realism and propriety of his language, the bite of his satire, and
the care with which he plotted his comedies. For some critics, the temptation to contrast
Jonson (representing art or craft) with Shakespeare (representing nature, or untutored genius)
has seemed natural; Jonson himself may be said to have initiated this interpretation
in the second folio, and Samuel Butler drew the same comparison in his commonplace book
later in the century. At the Restoration, this sensed difference
became a kind of critical dogma. Charles de Saint-Évremond placed Jonson's comedies above
all else in English drama, and Charles Gildon called Jonson the father of English comedy.
John Dryden offered a more common assessment in the "Essay of Dramatic Poesie," in which
his Avatar Neander compares Shakespeare to Homer and Jonson to Virgil: the former represented
profound creativity, the latter polished artifice. But "artifice" was in the 17th century almost
synonymous with "art"; Jonson, for instance, used "artificer" as a synonym for "artist"
(Discoveries, 33). For Lewis Theobald, too, Jonson "ow all his Excellence to his Art,"
in contrast to Shakespeare, the natural genius. Nicholas Rowe, to whom may be traced the legend
that Jonson owed the production of Every Man in his Humour to Shakespeare's intercession,
likewise attributed Jonson's excellence to learning, which did not raise him quite to
the level of genius. A consensus formed: Jonson was the first English poet to understand classical
precepts with any accuracy, and he was the first to apply those precepts successfully
to contemporary life. But there were also more negative spins on Jonson's learned art;
for instance, in the 1750s, Edward Young casually remarked on the way in which Jonson's learning
worked, like Samson's strength, to his own detriment. Earlier, Aphra Behn, writing in
defence of female playwrights, had pointed to Jonson as a writer whose learning did not
make him popular; unsurprisingly, she compares him unfavourably to Shakespeare. Particularly
in the tragedies, with their lengthy speeches abstracted from Sallustand Cicero, Augustan
critics saw a writer whose learning had swamped his aesthetic judgment.
In this period, Alexander Pope is exceptional in that he noted the tendency to exaggeration
in these competing critical portraits: "It is ever the nature of Parties to be in extremes;
and nothing is so probable, as that because Ben Johnson had much the most learning, it
was said on the one hand that Shakespear had none at all; and because Shakespear had much
the most wit and fancy, it was retorted on the other, that Johnson wanted both." For
the most part, the 18th century consensus remained committed to the division that Pope
doubted; as late as the 1750s, Sarah Fielding could put a brief recapitulation of this analysis
in the mouth of a "man of sense" encountered by David Simple.
Though his stature declined during the 18th century, Jonson was still read and commented
on throughout the century, generally in the kind of comparative and dismissive terms just
described. Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg translated parts of Peter Whalley's edition
into German in 1765. Shortly before the Romantic revolution, Edward Capell offered an almost
unqualified rejection of Jonson as a dramatic poet, who (he writes) "has very poor pretensions
to the high place he holds among the English Bards, as there is no original manner to distinguish
him and the tedious sameness visible in his plots indicates a defect of Genius." The disastrous
failures of productions of Volpone and Epicoene in the early 1770s no doubt bolstered a widespread
sense that Jonson had at last grown too antiquated for the contemporary public; if he still attracted
enthusiasts such as Earl Camden and William Gifford, he all but disappeared from the stage
in the last quarter of the century. The romantic revolution in criticism brought
about an overall decline in the critical estimation of Jonson. Hazlitt refers dismissively to
Jonson's "laborious caution." Coleridge, while more respectful, describes Jonson as psychologically
superficial: "He was a very accurately observing man; but he cared only to observe what was
open to, and likely to impress, the senses." Coleridge placed Jonson second only to Shakespeare;
other romantic critics were less approving. The early 19th century was the great age for
recovering Renaissance drama. Jonson, whose reputation had survived, appears to have been
less interesting to some readers than writers such as Thomas Middleton or John Heywood,
who were in some senses "discoveries" of the 19th century. Moreover, the emphasis which
the romantic writers placed on imagination, and their concomitant tendency to distrust
studied art, lowered Jonson's status, if it also sharpened their awareness of the difference
traditionally noted between Jonson and Shakespeare. This trend was by no means universal, however;
William Gifford, Jonson's first editor of the 19th century, did a great deal to defend
Jonson's reputation during this period of general decline. In the next era, Swinburne,
who was more interested in Jonson than most Victorians, wrote, "The flowers of his growing
have every quality but one which belongs to the rarest and finest among flowers: they
have colour, form, variety, fertility, vigour: the one thing they want is fragrance" – by
"fragrance," Swinburne means spontaneity. In the 20th century, Jonson's body of work
has been subject to a more varied set of analyses, broadly consistent with the interests and
programmes of modern literary criticism. In an essay printed in The Sacred Wood, T. S.
Eliot attempted to repudiate the charge that Jonson was an arid classicist by analysing
the role of imagination in his dialogue. Eliot was appreciative of Jonson's overall conception
and his "surface", a view consonant with the modernist reaction against Romantic criticism,
which tended to denigrate playwrights who did not concentrate on representations of
psychological depth. Around mid-century, a number of critics and scholars followed Eliot's
lead, producing detailed studies of Jonson's verbal style. At the same time, study of Elizabethan
themes and conventions, such as those by E. E. Stoll and M. C. Bradbrook, provided a more
vivid sense of how Jonson's work was shaped by the expectations of his time.
The proliferation of new critical perspectives after mid-century touched on Jonson inconsistently.
Jonas Barish was the leading figure among critics who appreciated Jonson's artistry.
On the other hand, Jonson received less attention from the new critics than did some other playwrights
and his work was not of programmatic interest to psychoanalytic critics. But Jonson's career
eventually made him a focal point for the revived sociopolitical criticism. Jonson's
works, particularly his masques and pageants, offer significant information regarding the
relations of literary production and political power, as do his contacts with and poems for
aristocratic patrons; moreover, his career at the centre of London's emerging literary
world has been seen as exemplifying the development of a fully commodified literary culture. In
this respect he is seen as a transitional figure, an author whose skills and ambition
led him to a leading role both in the declining culture of patronage and in the rising culture
of mass consumption. Poetry:
Jonson has been called 'the first poet laureate'. If Jonson's reputation as a playwright has
traditionally been linked to Shakespeare, his reputation as a poet has, since the early
20th century, been linked to that of John Donne. In this comparison, Jonson represents
the cavalier strain of poetry, emphasising grace and clarity of expression; Donne, by
contrast, epitomised the metaphysical school of poetry, with its reliance on strained,
baroque metaphors and often vague phrasing. Since the critics who made this comparison
(Herbert Grierson for example), were to varying extents rediscovering Donne, this comparison
often worked to the detriment of Jonson's reputation.
In his time Jonson was at least as influential as Donne. In 1623, historian Edmund Bolton
named him the best and most polished English poet. That this judgment was widely shared
is indicated by the admitted influence he had on younger poets. The grounds for describing
Jonson as the "father" of cavalier poets are clear: many of the cavalier poets described
themselves as his "sons" or his "tribe". For some of this tribe, the connection was as
much social as poetic; Herrick described meetings at "the Sun, the Dog, the Triple Tunne". All
of them, including those like Herrick whose accomplishments in verse are generally regarded
as superior to Jonson's, took inspiration from Jonson's revival of classical forms and
themes, his subtle melodies, and his disciplined use of wit. In these respects Jonson may be
regarded as among the most important figures in the prehistory of English neoclassicism.
The best of Jonson's lyrics have remained current since his time; periodically, they
experience a brief vogue, as after the publication of Peter Whalley's edition of 1756. Jonson's
poetry continues to interest scholars for the light which it sheds on English literary
history, such as politics, systems of patronage and intellectual attitudes. For the general
reader, Jonson's reputation rests on a few lyrics that, though brief, are surpassed for
grace and precision by very few Renaissance poems: "On My First Sonne"; "To Celia"; "To
Penshurst"; and the epitaph on boy player Solomon Pavy.
Jonson's works: Plays:
A Tale of a Tub, comedy (c. 1596 revised performed 1633; printed 1640)
The Isle of Dogs, comedy (1597, with Thomas Nashe; lost)
The Case is Altered, comedy (c. 1597–98; printed 1609), possibly with Henry Porter
and Anthony Munday Every Man in His Humour, comedy (performed
1598; printed 1601) Every Man out of His Humour, comedy ( performed
1599; printed 1600) Cynthia's Revels (performed 1600; printed
1601) The Poetaster, comedy (performed 1601;
printed 1602) Sejanus His Fall, tragedy (performed 1603;
printed 1605) Eastward Ho, comedy (performed and printed
1605), a collaboration with John Marston and George Chapman
Volpone, comedy (c. 1605–06; printed 1607)
Epicoene, or the Silent Woman, comedy (performed 1609; printed 1616)
The Alchemist, comedy (performed 1610; printed 1612)
Catiline His Conspiracy, tragedy (performed and printed 1611)
Bartholomew Fair, comedy (performed 31 October 1614; printed 1631)
The Devil is an Ass, comedy (performed 1616; printed 1631)
The Staple of News, comedy (performed Feb. 1626; printed 1631)
The New Inn, or The Light Heart, comedy (licensed 19 January 1629; printed 1631)
The Magnetic Lady, or Humors Reconciled, comedy (licensed 12 October 1632; printed
1641) The Sad Shepherd, pastoral (c. 1637, printed
1641), unfinished Mortimer His Fall, history (printed 1641),
a fragment Masques:
The Coronation Triumph, or The King's Entertainment (performed 15 March 1604; printed
1604); with Thomas Dekker A Private Entertainment of the King and
Queen on May-Day (The Penates) (1 May 1604; printed 1616)
The Entertainment of the Queen and Prince Henry at Althorp (The Satyr) (25 June 1603;
printed 1604) The Masque of Blackness (6 January 1605;
printed 1608) Hymenaei (5 January 1606; printed 1606)
The Entertainment of the Kings of Great Britain and Denmark (The Hours) (24 July 1606;
printed 1616) The Masque of Beauty (10 January 1608;
printed 1608) The Masque of Queens (2 February 1609;
printed 1609) The Hue and Cry After Cupid, or The Masque
at Lord Haddington's Marriage (9 February 1608; printed c. 1608)
The Entertainment at Britain's Burse (11 April 1609; lost, rediscovered 1997)
The Speeches at Prince Henry's Barriers, or The Lady of the Lake (6 January 1610; printed
1616) Oberon, the Faery Prince (1 January 1611;
printed 1616) Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly (3
February 1611; printed 1616) Love Restored (6 January 1612; printed
1616) A Challenge at Tilt, at a Marriage (27
December 1613/1 January 1614; printed 1616) The Irish Masque at Court (29 December
1613; printed 1616) Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists
(6 January 1615; printed 1616) The Golden Age Restored (1 January 1616;
printed 1616) Christmas, His Masque (Christmas 1616;
printed 1641) The Vision of Delight (6 January 1617;
printed 1641) Lovers Made Men, or The Masque of Lethe,
or The Masque at Lord Hay's (22 February 1617; printed 1617)
Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (6 January 1618; printed 1641) The masque was a failure;
Jonson revised it by placing the anti-masque first, turning it into:
For the Honour of Wales (17 February 1618; printed 1641)
News from the New World Discovered in the Moon (7 January 1620: printed 1641)
The Entertainment at Blackfriars, or The Newcastle Entertainment (May 1620?; MS)
Pan's Anniversary, or The Shepherd's Holy-Day (19 June 1620?; printed 1641)
The Gypsies Metamorphosed (3 and 5 August 1621; printed 1640)
The Masque of Augurs (6 January 1622; printed 1622)
Time Vindicated to Himself and to His Honours (19 January 1623; printed 1623)
Neptune's Triumph for the Return of Albion (26 January 1624; printed 1624)
The Masque of Owls at Kenilworth (19 August 1624; printed 1641)
The Fortunate Isles and Their Union (9 January 1625; printed 1625)
Love's Triumph Through Callipolis (9 January 1631; printed 1631)
Chloridia: Rites to Chloris and Her Nymphs (22 February 1631; printed 1631)
The King's Entertainment at Welbeck in Nottinghamshire (21 May 1633; printed 1641)
Love's Welcome at Bolsover ( 30 July 1634; printed 1641)
Other works: Epigrams (1612)
The Forest (1616), including To Penshurst On My First Sonne (1616), elegy
A Discourse of Love (1618) Barclay's Argenis, translated by Jonson
(1623) The Execration against Vulcan (1640)
Horace's Art of Poetry, translated by Jonson (1640), with a commendatory verse by
Edward Herbert Underwood (1640)
English Grammar (1640) Timber, or Discoveries made upon men and
matter, as they have flowed out of his daily readings, or had their reflux to his peculiar
notion of the times, a commonplace book To Celia (Drink to Me Only With Thine
Eyes), poem It is in Jonson's Timber, or Discoveries...
that he famously quipped on the manner in which language became a measure of the speaker
or writer: Language most shows a man: Speak, that I may
see thee. It springs out of the most retired and inmost parts of us, and is the image of
the parent of it, the mind. No glass renders a man's form or likeness so true as his
speech. Nay, it is likened to a man; and as we consider feature and composition in a man,
so words in language; in the greatness, aptness, sound structure, and harmony of it.
— Ben Jonson, 1640 (posthumous) As with other English Renaissance dramatists,
a portion of Ben Jonson's literary output has not survived. In addition to The Isle
of Dogs (1597), the records suggest these lost plays as wholly or partially Jonson's
work: Richard Crookback (1602); Hot Anger Soon Cold (1598), with Porter and Henry Chettle;
Page of Plymouth (1599), with Dekker; and Robert II, King of Scots (1599), with Chettle
and Dekker. Several of Jonson's masques and entertainments also are not extant: The Entertainment
at Merchant Taylors (1607); The Entertainment at Salisbury House for James I (1608); and
The May Lord (1613–19). Finally, there are questionable or borderline
attributions. Jonson may have had a hand in Rollo, Duke of Normandy, or The Bloody Brother,
a play in the canon of John Fletcher and his collaborators. The comedy The Widow was printed
in 1652 as the work of Thomas Middleton, Fletcher and Jonson, though scholars have been intensely
sceptical about Jonson's presence in the play. A few attributions of anonymous plays, such
as The London Prodigal, have been ventured by individual researchers, but have met with
cool responses. Biographies of Ben Jonson:
Ben Jonson: His Life and Work by Rosalind Miles
Ben Jonson: His Craft and Art by Rosalind Miles
Ben Jonson: A Literary Life by W. David Kay
Ben Jonson: A Life by David Riggs (1989) Ben Jonson: A Life by Ian Donaldson (2011)
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