Ben Jonson / by John Palmer

Includes index

Chapter 1|21 pages
The First Twenty-Five Years
Abstract
BEN JONSON was born in 1573. Men lived quickly under Elizabeth. Jonson was a finished scholar at thirteen, a soldier at seventeen, married at nineteen, celebrated for his lost tragedies at twenty-three, convicted of homicide and the author of one of the most famous of English comedies at twenty-five. Incidentally, he had found time to collaborate and quarrel with a number of contemporary authors, to change his religion, to be suspected of a plot against the Government and, most notoriously of all, to be a bricklayer.

Chapter 2|18 pages
The Comedy of Humours
Abstract
JONSON, writing the comedy of humours, proclaimed himself to be a stubborn and systematic realist. He was undertaking to present men and things as he saw them. The things were all about him in the streets, houses and taverns of London. The men he saw as humours walking—this man greedy, that man vain, jealous, proud, artful or fond. He took the world as he found it. But this was a mad world and comedy required that he should discover method in it. His characters were taken from life, but, once they had entered his comedies, they must leave behind them all their human inconsistencies and run true to form. Henceforth they were in the hands of a master logician who would present them as studies in special types of behaviour. There was to be no room for romantic wilfulness or unexpected fun. All was to be hard, clear and persistent. Here was an author who would never wait for an inspiration, never lose or see things in flashes, but look into himself steadily for things noted and remembered.

Chapter 3|25 pages
Poetomachia
Abstract
THE poets’ war or battle of the stages lasted for three years. It began with a manifesto and ended with an apology. Often it seems but a tiresome brawling between rival dramatists in which mean issues hide, not very successfully, behind high words and legendary names. Poetomachia is a sounding title. It arouses majestic expectations. It sets us looking for noble causes such as might appropriately divide the choice and master spirits of a great age, and it has encouraged biographers and critics to enlarge, even to transfigure, the argument.

Chapter 4|18 pages
Elizabeth and James
Abstract
JONSON, in forty years, made no more than two hundred pounds out of his plays. His livelihood was elsewhere. This was the age of the noble patron, and Jonson was to spend most of his life sitting at the tables of men on whom he depended largely for employment and support. Among them, fortunately, was King James himself—for this was also the age of the Court mask—a form of entertainment in which Jonson, for nearly twenty years, had no rival in the land. Henslowe paid ten pounds for a play, but the Lord High Treasurer might be required to disburse as much as forty pounds for a mask. Jonson, lacking the popular touch, was driven from the common stage and it was a sound instinct which prompted him almost from the outset to seek the approval of a more fastidious public. Even during the poets’ war he had been twitted with having finer friends than his estate allowed. He did not deny it. On the contrary, he admitted that much of the hostility he aroused was provoked by envy of his better company. The young barristers of the Inns of Court, men from the sister universities, and such noble friends as d’Aubigny, Pembroke, Cotton, and Spencer were better able to appreciate his learning ;han the audiences which were crowding into the Globe and the Blackfriars. Noblemen were educated in those days, and Jonson was constantly driven to appeal from the crowd to the judgment of more 66sophisticated spirits. He was drawn socially upwards by a process of attraction and sympathy.

Chapter 5|11 pages
Star Chamber
Abstract
THE position of Jonson as a purveyor of entertainments to the Court was made finally secure in January, 1605, when by royal invitation he wrote his first royal mask for the Queen. Therein his erudition was taxed to satisfy an odd persistent fancy that she had to be black as well as comely. Jonson, beginning with Pliny and Solinus and remembering a river in Aethiopia by the name of Niger, brings a bevy of black beauties to Whitehall and celebrates Britannia ruled by a sun, Whose beams shine day and night, and are of force To blanch an Aetheop and revive a corse.

Chapter 6|30 pages
Maturity
Abstract
SOME time during the summer or autumn of 1605 Jonson wrote Volpone or The Fox. The exact circumstances of his return to the comic stage are not known, but the dedication clearly indicates the mood in which he resumed pride of place among the poets of mirth and satire. The author who retired from comedy in 1601 returned in 1605 even prouder in spirit, but rather more cautious in his contempt of persons. While rebuking the licence and ignorance of the public stage he will not imitate those who “ to make a name with the multitude or to draw their beastly claps care not whose living faces they intrench with their petulant styles ”. But the amenities of the poets’ war, if left behind, are not forgotten. “ Petulant styles ” was a phrase with a history, looking back to the scornful farewell of the Apologetical Dialogue.

Chapter 7|21 pages
The Tragedies
Abstract
MERES in 1598 named Jonson in his list of the nine poets who were “ our best for tragedy ”. We have no tragedies of Jonson but Sejanus (1603) and Catiline (1611). All others were destroyed by the author. Of the tragic work to which Meres alludes not a line remains. Only by accident does Jonson refer to the fact that he ever wrote a tragedy previous to Sejanus, when he lets slip in the preface that it was so far the best of his efforts in that kind.

Chapter 8|21 pages
Whitehall
Abstract
IT was all very well for Jonson to complain of “ concupiscence and antics ”, but, while he made only a handful of guineas from time to time out of the theatre, his livelihood depended upon his organising these same antics on a large scale for the nobility and the Court. The series of plays on which his fame rests with posterity were profitably interlarded with the series of masks whereby he secured maintenance and support.

Chapter 9|25 pages
The Masterpieces
Abstract
JONSON reached the summit of his achievement in the three great comedies of his early prime : Volpone or the Fox, The Silent Woman, and The Alchemist. In matter, feeling, style and method, they express most faithfully his mind and temper. Jonson was a man of many moods. Readers who come upon his various achievements haphazard might well hesitate between them. Some have found in him a romantic poet who wilfully imprisoned his genius within the limits of a comic method artificially applied in and out of season. Others have preferred a sheaf of lyrics to all his tremendous output of tragedies, comedies and satires. Some linger by preference with his Sad Shepherd and treasure above all things his rare excursions into the pastoral manner. Others find him more appropriately embedded in the infinite variety of fanciful, erudite and ingenious masks. There is validity enough in their hesitations to make it necessary for anyone who gives supremacy to the three great comedies clearly to justify his election.

Chapter 10|17 pages
Bartholomew Fair
Abstract
JONSON, last of the English humanists, only-just missed the full effects of the Puritan disaster. He outlived a generation which had fought a losing battle against the assemblies, corporations and conventicles. It was more than a contest of persons and sects. It raised the most important issue with which England was ever confronted, dividing not only parties and professions, but the minds of those who participated. Many of the most ferocious enemies of humanism were renegade poets, actors and dramatists. Donne, who began as a humanist, climbed at last into the pulpit as a prophet of doom. Corbet took orders and became a preacher. Marston forsook the stage for a country rectory. Pamphleteers like Munday and Gosson, who lashed the poets in a frenzy of indignation, addressed the pious world as brands snatched from the burning. Even the Protestant party and ministers of the Crown were not always sure of their attitude. There was a time when it looked as though the Reformation itself might encourage and use the play of free minds in its struggle with the Papists. The first Cromwell made a serious effort to mobilise the forces of merriment against the Catholic Church, while under Elizabeth cardinals, bishops and abbots were mocked in anti-clerical plays. There were masked revelries in the streets of London with the connivance of such pillars of authority as Sir William Cecil. This was a generation 192caught between the possibilities of a positive humanism and the moral forces which culminated in the negative ecstasies of the Fifth Monarchy.

Chapter 11|21 pages
The Happy Laureate
Abstract
JONSON in 1617 was forty-three years of age. He had written his best plays. He had published his works in a first collected edition. On February 3rd of that year he was granted by the King a pension of one hundred marks which, though the title had not yet been invented or the position created, made him in effect the first poet laureate of England. He presented now a very different figure from the lank and haggard youth, back from the wars, who had killed Gabriel Spencer some sixteen years previously. The “ raw-boned anatomy ” of Every Man out of His Humour, “ who walks up and down like a charged musket ”, had begun to put on flesh and soon, since he could no longer hope to redeem his figure, he would be driven to jest upon it. “ Twenty stones less two pounds ” was shortly to be his confession. In 1619 he walked from London to Edinburgh and back again. Was it a last despairing effort to keep hard in body as in mind ? It was an heroic remedy, but unsuccessful. For another eight or ten years he remained outwardly at the height of his powers, but the dissolution was begun.

Chapter 12|13 pages
Discoveries
Abstract
JONSON is rarely to be found in slippers, and the nearest thing to catching him in the confessional mood is to read the commonplace book quaintly published among his collected works as the Discoveries. You will not take him by surprise. These notes are set down, with deliberation, to be read. But they ramble through a multitude of subjects, and the care used in their writing does not detract from the sincerity of the views expressed.

Chapter 13|18 pages
The Later Masks
Abstract
THE masks have so far been taken as incidents in Jonson’s career as a poet and dramatist with a livelihood to secure. They have also served to show that the “ supposèdly rugged old bard ” could be light, ingenious and merry, when his mood and company permitted, or stagger the world with his learning and logic when he so desired. The later masks reveal more completely the depth and variety of his genius and the environment in which he worked as the first laureate of England.

Chapter 14|19 pages
Decline and Fall
Abstract
MISFORTUNES came not single spies but in battalions. In 1623 Jonson lost his library. In 1625 he lost King James. In 1626 he was struck with the palsy. In 1628 he became somehow involved with the authorities in connection with the assassination of the Duke of Buckingham. From 1626 to 1631, for four years, there was no mask at Court. He returned to the stage in 1628 with The New Inn, but the play was so ill-received that he swore never to write another. In 1629 he was in such straits for money that he was driven to petition his Majesty for a hundred pounds. In 1630 came the final breach with Inigo Jones. In 1631 the City, which in 1628 had appointed him chronologer, an office which brought him in a “ chanderly pension ” of £33 6s. 8d. per annum, withdrew the grant “ until he should have presented to the Court some fruits of his labours in that place ”. The Aldermen evidently regarded the appointment as involving certain obligations towards the City clocks. Jonson had regarded it as a sinecure.

Chapter 15|15 pages
The Dotages
Abstract
SUCH biography, as can be gleaned from the later plays of Jonson, beginning in 1616 with The Devil is an Ass and ending in 1633 with A Tale of a Tub, has already been presented. Indulgence might be extended to a critic who shrank from the task of assessing these productions and retrieving from them such pages as are necessary to a complete appreciation of the author’s work. The task cannot, however, be honestly avoided. The fact that none of these plays is ever likely to be performed again upon the stage and that few are likely to be read with attention, even by those who are familiar with the best of Jonson’s work, makes it all the more necessary to examine them. They contribute to an understanding of his mind and method. They contain, moreover, a great deal that is worth recovery and add to our appreciation of the author’s versatility and range.

Chapter 16|17 pages
Anthology
Abstract
DRUMMOND wrote of Jonson that in his merry humour he was wont to name himself the Poet. That he constructed stage plays or invented masks was accidental. The heart of his mystery lay in the wider term. Of Jonson, the poet, much has been incidentally quoted, but the examples given of his quality, the best and worst of him, have so far been cited only so far as they revealed his character, witnessed to events in his life or illustrated his dramatic progress. A small anthology of his poetry submitted for its own sake is, therefore, necessary. A presentation of Jonson’s work which neglected A Celebration to Charis, with his epigrams, odes and elegies would clearly be incomplete.

Chapter 17|15 pages
Green Fields
Abstract
FROM January 14th, 1634, when the King and Queen witnessed A Tale of a Tub, to August 6th, 1637, when Jonson died, the personal glimpses are few. The King, in September, 1634, commanded the City aldermen to restore his pension as City chronologer. On New Year’s Day and on the King’s birthday, 1635, the poet expressed his gratitude to King Charles for the last time. On November 20th of the same year he lost his only surviving son, for whom he had secured the reversion of his post as Master of the Revels not yet inherited from Sir John Astley.

Chapter 17|15 pages
Green Fields
Abstract
FROM January 14th, 1634, when the King and Queen witnessed A Tale of a Tub, to August 6th, 1637, when Jonson died, the personal glimpses are few. The King, in September, 1634, commanded the City aldermen to restore his pension as City chronologer. On New Year’s Day and on the King’s birthday, 1635, the poet expressed his gratitude to King Charles for the last time. On November 20th of the same year he lost his only surviving son, for whom he had secured the reversion of his post as Master of the Revels not yet inherited from Sir John Astley.