35-) English Literature

35-) English Literature 

Ben Jonson 

Theatrical career

Jonson was born two months after his father died. His stepfather was a bricklayer, but by good fortune the boy was able to attend Westminster School. His formal education, however, ended early, and he at first followed his stepfather’s trade, then fought with some success with the English forces in the Netherlands. On returning to England, he became an actor and playwright, experiencing the life of a strolling player. He apparently played the leading role of Hieronimo in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. By 1597 he was writing plays for Philip Henslowe, the leading impresario for the public theatre. With one exception (The Case Is Altered), these early plays are known, if at all, only by their titles. Jonson apparently wrote tragedies as well as comedies in these years, but his extant writings include only two tragedies, Sejanus (1603) and Catiline (1611).

The year 1598 marked an abrupt change in Jonson’s status, when Every Man in His Humour was successfully presented by the Lord Chamberlain’s theatrical company (a legend has it that Shakespeare himself recommended it to them), and his reputation was established. In this play Jonson tried to bring the spirit and manner of Latin comedy to the English popular stage by presenting the story of a young man with an eye for a girl, who has difficulty with a phlegmatic father, is dependent on a clever servant, and is ultimately successful—in fact, the standard plot of the Latin dramatist Plautus. But at the same time Jonson sought to embody in four of the main characters the four “humours” of medieval and Renaissance medicine—choler, melancholy, phlegm, and blood—which were thought to determine human physical and mental makeup.

That same year Jonson killed a fellow actor in a duel, and, though he escaped capital punishment by pleading “benefit of clergy” (the ability to read from the Latin Bible), he could not escape branding. During his brief imprisonment over the affair he became a Roman Catholic.

Following the success of Every Man in His Humour, the same theatrical company acted Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), which was even more ambitious. It was the longest play ever written for the Elizabethan public theatre, and it strove to provide an equivalent of the Greek comedy of Aristophanes; “induction,” or “prelude,” and regular between-act comment explicated the author’s views on what the drama should be.

The play, however, proved a disaster, and Jonson had to look elsewhere for a theatre to present his work. The obvious place was the “private” theatres, in which only young boys acted (see children’s company). The high price of admission they charged meant a select audience, and they were willing to try strong satire and formal experiment; for them Jonson wrote Cynthia’s Revels (c. 1600) and Poetaster (1601). Even in these, however, there is the paradox of contempt for human behaviour hand in hand with a longing for human order.

From 1605 to 1634 he regularly contributed masques for the courts of James I and Charles I, collaborating with the architect and designer Inigo Jones. This marked his favour with the court and led to his post as poet laureate.

Shortly thereafter, writing for the Children of the Queen’s Chapel, Jonson became embroiled in a public feud with playwrights John Marston and Thomas Dekker. In Cynthia’s Revells and Poetaster (both 1601), Jonson portrayed himself as the impartial, well informed judge of art and society and wrote unflattering portraits of the two dramatists. Marston and Dekker counterat­tacked with a satiric portrayal of Jonson in the play Satiromastix; or, The Untrussing of the Humorous Poet (1602). Interestingly, scholars speculate that the dis­pute, which became known as the “War of the The­atres,” was mutually contrived in order to further the authors’ careers. In any event, Jonson later reconciled with Marston, and collaborated with him and George Chapman in writing Eastward Ho! (1605). A joke at the King’s expense in this play landed him once again, along with his coauthors, in prison. Once freed, how­ever, Jonson entered a period of good fortune and productivity. He had many friends at court, and James I valued his learning highly. His abilities thus did not go unrecognized, and he was frequently called upon to write his popular, elegant masques, such as The Mas­que of Blacknesse (1605). During this period, Jonson also produced his most successful comedies, begin­ning in 1606 with Volpone and following with The Silent Woman (1609), The Alchemist (1610), and Bar­tholomew Fayre (1614). Jonson’s remaining tragedies, Sejanus His Fall (1603) and Catiline His Conspiracy (1611), though monuments to his scholarship, were not well received due to their rigid imitation of classical tragic forms and their pedantic tone.

In 1616 Jonson published his Workes, becoming the first English writer to dignify his dramas by terming them “works,” and for this perceived presumption he was soundly ridiculed. In that year Jonson assumed the responsibilities and privileges of Poet Laureate, though without formal appointment. From 1616 to 1625 he primarily wrote masques for presentation at court. He had already collaborated with poet, architect, and stage designer Inigo Jones one several court masques, and the two continued their joint efforts, establishing the reign of James I as the period of the consummate masque. For his achievements, the University of Ox­ford honored him in 1619 with a master of arts degree.

Misfortune, however, marked Jonson’s later years. A fire destroyed his library in 1623, and when James I died in 1625, Jonson lost much of his influence at court, though he was named City Chronologer in 1628. Later that year, he suffered the first of several strokes which left him bedridden. Jonson produced four plays during the reign of Charles I, and was eventually grant­ed a new pension in 1634. None of these later plays was successful. The rest of his life, spent in retirement, he filled primarily with study and writing; at his death, on August 6, 1637, two unfinished plays were discov­ered among his mass of papers and manuscripts. Jon­son left a financially depleted estate, but was neverthe­less buried with honor in Westminster Abbey.

Jonson’s earliest comedies, such as Every Man in His Humour, derive from Roman comedy in form and structure and are noteworthy as models of the comedy of “humours,” in which each character represents a type dominated by a particular obsession. Although Jonson was not the first to employ the comedy of humours, his use of the form in Every Man in His Humour and Every Man out of His Humour is considered exempla­ry, and such characterization continued to be a feature of his work. Of particular significance in appraisals of Jonson are the four comical satires produced between 1606 and 1614: Volpone, The Silent Woman, The Al­chemist, and Bartholomew Fayre. Each exposes some aberration of human appetite through comic exagger­ation and periodic moralisms while evincing Jonson’s interest in the variety of life and in the villain as a cunning, imaginative artist. Volpone, his most famous and most frequently staged work, is also his harshest attack on human vice, specifically targeting greed. Like The Silent Woman and The Alchemist, it mixes didac­tic intent with scenes of tightly constructed comic coun­terpoise. The last of Jonson’s great dramas is the pan­oramic Bartholomew Fayre. Softening the didacticism that characterized his earlier work, Jonson expressed the classical moralist’s views of wisdom and folly through a multiplicity of layered, interrelated plots in a colorfully portrayed and loosely structured form. All four comedies exhibit careful planning executed with classical precision, a command of low speech and col­loquial usage, and a movement toward more realistic, three-dimensional character depiction.

Critics note that Jonson’s later plays, beginning with The Divell is an Asse in 1616, betray the dramatist’s diminishing artistry. These later dramas were dismissed by John Dryden, who undertook the first extensive anal­ysis of Jonson, as mere “dotages.” While generously likening him to Virgil and calling him “the most learned and judicious writer which any theatre ever had,” Dryden’s comments also signaled the start of a decline in Jonson’s reputation, for his observations included a comparison of Jonson and Shakespeare, one which nodded admiringly toward Jonson, but bowed adoring­ly before Shakespeare. This telling comparison col­ored Jonson’s reputation for more than 200 years, fueled by such 19th-century Romantic critics as Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1818), and Will­iam Hazlitt (1819), who found Jonson lacking in imag­ination, delicacy, and soul. His “greatest defect,” ac­cording to George Saintsbury, was the “want of pas­sion.” “Yet,” he conceded, “his merits are extraordi­nary.” Most 19th-century critics agreed with the assessment of John Addington Symonds that the “higher gifts of poetry, with which Shakespeare—‘nature’s child’—was so richly endowed, are almost absolutely wanting in Ben Jonson.”

T.S. Eliot, writing in 1919, focused attention on Jonson’s reputation as “the most deadly kind that can be compelled upon the memory of a great poet. To be universally accepted; to be damned by the praise that quenches all desire to read the book; to be afflicted by the imputation of the virtues which excite the least pleasure; and to be read only by historians and anti­quaries—this is the most perfect conspiracy of approv­al.” With this began a reevaluation of Jonson, whose reputation benefited from modernist reaction against Romanticist sensibility, and who began to be appreciated on his own terms. English critic L.C. Knights, in 1937, considered Jonson “a very great poet”; and while Edmund Wilson, in 1948, still found none of Shakespeare’s “immense range” in Jonson, he thought him “a great man of letters” and acknowl­edged his influence on writers as diverse as Milton, Congreve, Swift, and Huxley. Recent scholarship has sought to place Jonson in the theatrical and political milieu of London, addressing his relationship with his audience and the monarchy. This focus on historical context has also produced an emphasis on the former bricklayer’s “self-fashioning” into dramatist, critic, and finally the first poet laureate. Many critics now regard him as a fore-runner in the 17th-century move­ment toward classicism, and his plays are often ad­mired for their accurate depictions of the men and women of his day, their mastery of form, and their successful blend of the serious and the comic, the top­ical, and the timeless.

His masques at court

It appears that Jonson won royal attention by his Entertainment at Althorpe, given before James I’s queen as she journeyed down from Scotland in 1603, and in 1605 The Masque of Blackness was presented at court. The “masque” was a quasi-dramatic entertainment, primarily providing a pretense for a group of strangers to dance and sing before an audience of guests and attendants in a royal court or nobleman’s house. This elementary pattern was much elaborated during the reign of James I, when Jones provided increasingly magnificent costumes and scenic effects for masques at court. The few spoken words that the masque had demanded in Elizabethan days expanded into a “text” of a few hundred lines and a number of set songs. Thus the author became important as well as the designer: he was to provide not only the necessary words but also a special “allegorical” meaning underlying the whole entertainment. It was Jonson, in collaboration with Jones, who gave the Jacobean masque its characteristic shape and style. He did this primarily by introducing the suggestion of a “dramatic” action. It was thus the poet who provided the informing idea and dictated the fashion of the whole night’s assembly. Jonson’s early masques were clearly successful, for during the following years he was repeatedly called upon to function as poet at court. Among his masques were Hymenaei (1606), Hue and Cry After Cupid (1608), The Masque of Beauty (1608), and The Masque of Queens (1609). In his masques Jonson was fertile in inventing new motives for the arrival of the strangers. But this was not enough: he also invented the “antimasque,” which preceded the masque proper and which featured grotesques or comics who were primarily actors rather than dancers or musicians.

Important though Jonson was at the court in Whitehall, it was undoubtedly Jones’s contributions that caused the most stir. That tension should arise between the two men was inevitable, and eventually friction led to a complete break: Jonson wrote the Twelfth Night masque for the court in 1625 but then had to wait five years before the court again asked for his services.

His plays and achievement

Ben Jonson occupies by common consent the second place among English dramatists of the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. He was a man of contraries. For “twelve years a papist,” he was also—in fact though not in title—Protestant England’s first poet laureate. His major comedies express a strong distaste for the world in which he lived and a delight in exposing its follies and vices. A gifted lyric poet, he wrote two of his most successful plays entirely in prose, an unusual mode of composition in his time. Though often an angry and stubborn man, no one had more disciples than he. He was easily the most learned dramatist of his time, and he was also a master of theatrical plot, language, and characterization. It is a measure of his reputation that his dramatic works were the first to be published in folio (the term, in effect, means the “collected works”) and that his plays held their place on the stage until the period of the Restoration. Later they fell into neglect, though The Alchemist was revived during the 18th century, and in the mid-20th century several came back into favour: Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair especially have been staged with striking success.

Jonson’s chief plays are still very good theatre. His insistence on putting classical theory into practice in them has reinforced rather than weakened the effect of his gift of lively dialogue, robust characterization, and intricate, controlled plotting. In each of them he maneuvers a large cast of vital personages, all consistently differentiated from one another. Jonson’s plots are skillfully put together; incident develops out of incident in a consistent chain of cause and effect, taking into account the respective natures of the personages involved and proceeding confidently through a twisting, turning action that is full of surprises without relying on coincidence or chance. Sometimes Jonson’s comedy derives from the dialogue, especially when it is based on his observation of contemporary tricks of speech. But there are also superbly ludicrous situations, often hardly removed from practical joke.

Jonson is renowned for his method of concentrating on a selected side, or on selected sides, of a character, showing how they dominate the personality. This is to some extent a natural outcome of his classical conception of art, but it also stems from his clear, shrewd observation of people. In Jonson’s plays both eccentricity and normal behaviour are derived from a dominating characteristic, so that the result is a live, truthfully conceived personage in whom the ruling passion traces itself plainly. The later plays, for example, have characters whose behaviour is dominated by one psychological idiosyncrasy. But Jonson did not deal exclusively in “humours.” In some of his plays (notably Every Man in His Humour), the stock types of Latin comedy contributed as much as the humours theory did. What the theory provided for him and for his contemporaries was a convenient mode of distinguishing among human beings. The distinctions so made could be based on the “humours,” on Latin comic types, or, as in Volpone, in the assimilation of humans to different members of the animal kingdom. The characters Volpone, Mosca, Sir Epicure Mammon, Face, Subtle, Dol Common, Overdo, and Ursula are not simply “humours”; they are glorious type figures, so vitally rendered as to take on a being that transcends the type. This method was one of simplification, of typification, and yet also of vitalization.

The Restoration dramatists’ use of type names for their characters (Cockwood, Witwoud, Petulant, Pinchwife, and so on) was a harking back to Jonson, and similarly in the 18th century, with such characters as Peachum, Lumpkin, Candour, and Languish. And though, as the 18th century proceeded, comic dramatists increasingly used names quite arbitrarily, the idea of the Jonsonian “type” or “humour” was always at the root of their imagining. Jonson thus exerted a great influence on the playwrights who immediately followed him. In the late Jacobean and Caroline years, it was he, Shakespeare, and Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher who provided all the models. But it was he, and he alone, who gave the essential impulse to dramatic characterization in comedy of the Restoration and also in the 18th and 19th centuries.