Benjamin Jonson (c. 11 June 1572 – 6 August 1637) was an English Renaissance
dramatist, poet and actor. A
contemporary of William Shakespeare, he is best known for his satirical plays, particularly Volpone and The Alchemist which are considered his best, and his lyric poems. A man of vast reading and a
seemingly insatiable appetite for controversy, Jonson had an unparalleled breadth of influence on Jacobean and Caroline playwrights and poets.
Early life
Although he was born in Westminster, London,
Jonson claimed his family was of Scottish Border
country descent, and this claim may have been supported by the fact that his coat of
arms bears three spindles or rhombi, a device shared by
a Borders family, the Johnstones of Annandale. His father died a month
before Ben's birth, and his mother remarried two years later, to a master bricklayer. Jonson
attended school in St. Martin's Lane, and was later sent to Westminster School, where one of his teachers was William
Camden. Jonson remained friendly with Camden, whose broad scholarship evidently influenced his own style, until the
latter's death in 1623. On leaving, Jonson was once thought to have gone on to the University of Cambridge; Jonson himself said that he did not go to university, but was put to a
trade immediately: a legend recorded by Fuller indicates that he worked on a garden wall
in Lincoln's Inn. He soon had enough of the trade, probably bricklaying, and spent some
time in the Low Countries as a volunteer with the regiments of Francis Vere. Jonson reports that while in the Netherlands, he killed an opponent in single combat and
stripped him of his weapons.[1]
Ben Jonson married some time before 1594, to a woman he described to Drummond as "a shrew, yet
honest." His wife has not been definitively identified, but she is sometimes identified as the Ann Lewis who married a Benjamin
Jonson at St Magnus-the-Martyr, near London
Bridge. The registers of St. Martin's Church state that his eldest daughter Mary died in November, 1593, when she was only
six months old. His eldest son Benjamin died of the plague ten years later (Jonson's epitaph to him On My First Sonne was written shortly after), and a second Benjamin died in 1635. For five years
somewhere in this period, Jonson lived separate from his wife, enjoying instead the hospitality of Lord Aubigny.
By the summer of 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 Lord 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, following the suppression of The Isle of Dogs (co-written
with Thomas Nashe), Jonson was briefly jailed in Marshalsea
Prison, but Nashe was able to escape to the country. A year later, Jonson was again briefly imprisoned, this time in
Newgate Prison, for killing another man, an actor Gabriel Spenser, in a duel on 22 September 1598 in Hogsden
Fields,[1] (today part of Hoxton). While in prison, Jonson was visited by a Roman Catholic
priest and converted to Catholicism. Tried on a charge of manslaughter, Jonson pleaded
guilty but was subsequently released by benefit of clergy (a legal ploy through which
he gained leniency by reciting a brief bible verse in Latin), forfeiting his "goods and chattels"
and being branded on his left thumb.[2]
In 1598, Jonson produced his first great success, Every Man in his
Humour, capitalising on the vogue for humour plays that had been begun by George
Chapman with An Humorous Day's Mirth. William Shakespeare was among the first cast. This play was followed the next year by
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 theater in the last years of Elizabeth I's reign
was, unsurprisingly, marked by fighting and controversy. Cynthia's Revels was produced by the Children of the Chapel Royal at Blackfriars Theatre
in 1600. It satirized both John Marston, who Jonson believed had accused him of
lustfulness, probably in Histrio-Mastix, and Thomas Dekker, against whom
Jonson's animus is not known. Jonson attacked the same two poets again in
1601's Poetaster. Dekker responded with Satiromastix, subtitled "the untrussing of
the humorous poet." The final scene of this play, while certainly not to be taken at face value as a portrait of Jonson, offers a
caricature that is recognizable from Drummond's report: boasting about himself and condemning other poets, criticizing actors'
performances of his plays, and calling attention to himself in any available way.
This "War of the Theatres" appears to have been concluded 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 landed both authors in jail for a brief time.
At the beginning of the reign of James I of England in 1603, Jonson joined other
poets and playwrights in welcoming the reign of 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.
Ben Jonson's ascendance
Jonson flourished as a dramatist during the first decade or so of James's reign; by 1616, he had
produced all the plays on which his reputation as a dramatist depends. These include the tragedy of Catiline (acted and printed 1611), which achieved only 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 appear to have been
successful at once. 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. In 1603, Overbury reported that Jonson was living on
Aurelian Townsend and "scorning the world."
His trouble with English authorities continued. In 1603, 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. After the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, he appears to have been asked by the Privy Council
to attempt to prevail on certain priests connected with the conspirators to cooperate with the government; whatever steps he took
in this regard do not appear to have been successful (Teague, 249).
At the same time, Jonson pursued a more prestigious career as a writer of masques for James'
court. The Satyr (1603) and The Masque of Blackness (1605) are but two of the some two dozen masques Jonson wrote for
James or for Queen Anne; the latter was praised by 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. Perhaps partly as a result
of this new career, Jonson gave up writing plays for the public theaters for a decade. Jonson later told Drummond that he had
made less than two hundred pounds on all his plays together.
1616 saw a pension of 100 marks (about £60) a year conferred upon him, 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 1640-1 and 1692. [See: Ben Jonson folios.]
In 1618, Ben 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,
Drummond of Hawthornden. 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. In the
postscript added by Drummond, he is described as "a great lover and praiser of himself, a contemner and scorner of others".
While in Scotland, he was made an honorary citizen of Edinburgh. On returning to England, he was awarded an honorary
Master of Arts degree from
Oxford University.
The period between 1605 and 1620 may be viewed as Jonson's heyday.
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.
Decline and death
The 1620s begin a lengthy and slow decline for Jonson. He was still well-known; from this time dates the prominence of 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.
Jonson returned to writing regular plays in the 1620s, but these are not considered among his
best. They are of significant interest for the study of the culture 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 recognize his own
decline.[3]
The burning of his library in 1623 was a severe blow, as his Execration upon Vulcan shows. This poem spurred George Chapman to
a lengthy and ill-tempered rebuttal focused on what Chapman saw as his former collaborator's intolerable pride. In
1628 he became city chronologer of London, succeeding Thomas Middleton; he accepted the salary
but did little work for the office. He had suffered a debilitating stroke that year and this position eventually became a
sinecure. In his last years he relied heavily for an income on his great friend and patron,
William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Newcastle.
The principal factor in Jonson's partial eclipse was, however, the death of James and the accession of King Charles I in 1625. Justly or not, 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.
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 is buried in Westminster Abbey, with the inscription, "O Rare Ben Jonson,"
laid in the slab over his grave. It has been suggested that this could be read "Orare Ben Jonson" (pray for Ben Jonson), which
would indicate a deathbed return to Catholicism. The fact that he was buried in an upright grave is an indication of his reduced
circumstances at the time of his death.[4]
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 the 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, Mecaenas, 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 some signs of an accommodation with the romantic tendencies of Elizabethan comedy.
Within this general progression, however, Jonson's comic style remained constant and easily recognizable. 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.[5] This commitment entailed negations: after The Case is
Altered, Jonson eschewed distant locations, noble characters, romantic plots, and other staples of Elizabethan comedy.
Jonson focused instead on the satiric and realistic inheritance of new comedy. He
sets his plays in contemporary settings, peoples them with recognizable types, and sets them to actions that, if not strictly
realistic, involve 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 Congreve, for example, judged
Epicoene.) He was, moreover, 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 applies the two
features of his style which save his classical imitations from mere pedantry: the vividness with which he depicts the lives of
his characters, and the intricacy of his plots. Coleridge, for instance, claimed that The Alchemist had 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, however, largely avoided the debates about
rhyme and meter that had consumed Elizabethan classicists such as Campion and
Harvey. Accepting both rhyme and stress, Jonson uses 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. Jonson’s epigrams explore various attitudes, most of them 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 somewhat longer and mostly addressed to specific individuals. The 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.’’
‘’Underwoods,’’ 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 reports Jonson saying
that Shakespeare "wanted art." Whether Drummond is viewed as accurate or not, the comments fit well with Jonson's well-known
theories about literature.
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 response, "Would he had blotted a thousand," was taken as malicious.
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".[2] 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 one of which
(Every Man in his Humour) 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 in the
present state of knowledge.
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 less Greek," had a natural genius. The poem has traditionally been thought
to exemplify the contrast Jonson perceived between himself, the disciplined and erudite classicist, scornful of ignorance and
skeptical 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 a rising number of
critics see it as a heartfelt tribute to the "Sweet Swan Of Avon," the "Soul of the Age!" It has been compellingly argued that
Jonson helped to edit the First Folio, and he may have been inspired to write this poem,
surely one of his greatest, 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
During most of the seventeenth century Jonson was a towering literary figure, and his influence was enormous. Before the 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. In the eighteenth century 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 appreciated by the Romantics, but overall he was denigrated for not writing in
a Shakespearean vein. In the twentieth century, Jonson's status rose significantly.
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 seventeenth century. After the English theatres were reopened on
the Restoration of Charles II,
Jonson's work, along with Shakespeare's and Fletcher's work, 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 eighteenth century
have ranked Jonson below only Shakespeare among English Renaissance
dramatists. Critical judgment has tended to emphasize 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 initiate this interpretation in his poem on Shakespeare.
Leonard Digges echoed this line of thought in his verses affixed to 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. Saint-Évremond, indeed, 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
seventeenth century almost synonymous with "art"; Jonson, for instance, used "artificer" as a synonym for "artist"
(Discoveries, 33). For Lewis Theobald, too, Jonson “ow[ed] all his Excellence to
his Art,” in contrast to Shakespeare, the natural genius. 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
unfavorably to Shakespeare. Particularly in the tragedies, with their lengthy speeches abstracted from Sallust and 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."[6] For the most part, the eighteenth 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 eighteenth 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."[7] 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 contemporay public; if Jonson 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 nineteenth 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 nineteenth
century. Moreover, the emphasis 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 nineteenth 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 twentieth 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 attempts 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 in a group of critics that was appreciative of 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 work, particularly his masques and pageants, offers 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, Jonson has been 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
If Jonson's reputation as a playwright has traditionally been linked to Shakespeare, his reputation as a poet has, since the
early twentieth century, been linked to that of John Donne. In this comparison, Jonson
represents the cavalier strain of poetry, which emphasized grace and clarity of
expression; Donne, by contrast, epitomized 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, though, 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 describes 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 all of 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 it sheds on English
literary history, particularly as regards 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 Son"; "To Celia"; "Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes"; the poem on Penshurst; and the epitaph on
boy player Solomon Pavy.
Jonson's works
Plays
- A Tale of a Tub, comedy (ca. 1596? revised? performed 1633; printed
1640)
- The Case is Altered, comedy (ca. 1597-8; printed 1609), 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 (ca. 1605-6; 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 Oct. 31, 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 Jan. 19, 1629; printed
1631)
- The Magnetic Lady, or Humors Reconciled, comedy (licensed Oct. 12, 1632;
printed 1641)
- The Sad Shepherd, pastoral (ca. 1637, printed 1641), unfinished
- Mortimer his Fall, history (printed 1641), a fragment
Masques
- The Coronation Triumph, or The King's Entertainment (performed
March 15, 1604; printed 1604); with Thomas Dekker
- A Private Entertainment of the King and Queen on May-Day (The Penates) (May 1, 1604; printed 1616)
- The Entertainment of the Queen and Prince Henry at Althorp (The
Satyr) (June 25, 1603; printed 1604)
- The Masque of Blackness (Jan. 6, 1605; printed 1608)
- Hymenaei (Jan. 5, 1606; printed 1606)
- The Entertainment of the Kings of Great Britain and Denmark (The Hours) (July 24, 1606; printed 1616)
- The Masque of Beauty (Jan. 10, 1608; printed 1608)
- The Masque of Queens (Feb. 2, 1609; printed 1609)
- The Hue and Cry after Cupid, or The Masque at Lord
Haddington's Marriage (Feb. 9, 1608; printed ca. 1608)
- The Speeches at Prince Henry's Barriers, or The
Lady of the Lake (Jan. 6, 1610; printed 1616)
- Oberon, the Faery Prince (Jan. 1, 1611; printed 1616)
- Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly (Feb. 3, 1611;
printed 1616)
- Love Restored (Jan. 6, 1612; printed 1616)
- A Challenge at Tilt, at a Marriage (Dec. 27, 1613/Jan. 1, 1614; printed 1616)
- The Irish Masque at Court (Dec. 29, 1613; printed 1616)
- Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists (Jan. 6, 1615;
printed 1616)
- The Golden Age Restored (Jan. 1, 1616; printed 1616)
- Christmas, His Masque (Christmas 1616; printed 1641)
- The Vision of Delight (Jan. 6, 1617; printed 1641)
- Lovers Made Men, or The Masque of Lethe, or The Masque at Lord
Hay's (Feb. 22, 1617; printed 1617)
- Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (Jan. 6, 1618; printed 1641) The
masque was a failure; Jonson revised it by placing the anti-masque first, turning it into:
- For the Honor of Wales (Feb. 17, 1618; printed 1641)
- News from the New World Discovered in the Moon
(Jan. 7, 1620: printed 1641)
- The Entertainment at Blackfriars, or The Newcastle Entertainment (May 1620?; MS)
- Pan's Anniversary, or The Shepherd's Holy-Day (June 19, 1620?; printed
1641)
- The Gypsies Metamorphosed (Aug 3 and 5, 1621; printed 1640)
- The Masque of Augurs (Jan. 6, 1622; printed 1622)
- Time Vindicated to Himself and to His Honours
(Jan. 19, 1623; printed 1623)
- Neptune's Triumph for the Return of Albion (Jan.
26, 1624; printed 1624)
- The Masque of Owls at Kenilworth (Aug. 19, 1624; printed 1641)
- The Fortunate Isles and Their Union (Jan. 9, 1625;
printed 1625)
- Love's Triumph Through Callipolis (Jan. 9, 1631; printed
1631)
- Chloridia: Rites to Chloris and Her Nymphs (Feb. 22, 1631; printed 1631)
- The King's Entertainment at Welbeck in Nottinghamshire
(May 21, 1633; printed 1641)
- Love's Welcome at Bolsover ( July 30, 1634; printed 1641)
Other Works
- Epigrams (1612)
- The Forest (1616), including To Penshurst
- 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
- Underwoods (1640)
- Timber, or Discoveries, a commonplace book.
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); The Entertainment at Britain's Burse for
James I (1609); 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 skeptical
about Jonson's presence in the play. A few attributions of anonymous plays, like The
London Prodigal, have been ventured by individual researchers, but have met with cool responses.[8]
Notes
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