“Eastward Hoe” was the joint production of Ben Jonson, George Chapman, and John Marston. What part each author had in it is not known; but the consequences were near being very serious to them all. They were accused of reflecting on the Scots, who crowded the court at that time to the utter disgust of the English gentlemen; and, in perfect unison with the arbitrary temper of the times, were all three not only committed to prison, but in peril as to their ears and noses. On submission however they received pardons. Jonson, on his releasement from prison, gave an entertainment to his friends, among whom were Camden and Selden. His mother seems now to have risen mightily in her ideas, and to have affected the Roman matron, although the bricklayer’s wife would, in past time, have bound her son to the hod and trowel. In the midst of the entertainment she drank to him, and produced a paper of poison, which she intended to have mixed with his liquor, having first taken a portion of it herself, if the punishment of mutilation had not been remitted.
That mixture of poetry and spectacle, which, in our ancient literature, is termed a masque, had been encouraged by Elizabeth, and became still more fashionable during the reigns of James and Charles. The queens of both monarchs, being foreigners, understood the English language but imperfectly, so that the music, dancing, and decorations of a masque were better adapted to their amusement than the more intellectual entertainment of the regular drama. After Queen Elizabeth’s example, they occasionally assisted in the representation, and probably were still better pleased to be performers than spectators. Jonson was the chief manufacturer of this article for the court; and a year seldom passed without his furnishing more than one piece of this sort. They were usually got up, as the phrase is, with the utmost splendour. In the scenery, Jonson had Inigo Jones for an associate. As compositions, these trifles rank little higher than shows and pageants; but they possessed a property peculiarly acceptable at court—they abounded with incense and servility. However crusty Jonson might be as a critical censor, he saw plainly what food his royal master relished, and furnished the table plentifully.
This occupation interrupted the periodical production of his regular plays; but the interval had not been frivolously passed. In 1609, he produced “Epicœne, or the Silent Woman.” This was generally esteemed to be the most perfect pattern of a play hitherto brought out in England, and might be selected as a proof that its author was a careful and learned observer of the dramatic laws. We are assured that Jonson was personally acquainted with a man quite as ridiculous as Morose is represented to be. It may here be observed that the description of humour, drawn from the knowledge and observation of particular persons, was in the line of this author’s peculiar genius and talent. There is more wit and fancy in the dialogue of this play than in any by the same hand. Truewit is a scholar, with an alloy of pedantry; but he is the best gentleman ever drawn by Jonson, whose strength, in general, was not properly wit or sharpness of conceit, but the natural imitation of various and contrasted follies. The Alchemist came out in 1610. Jonson shows in it much learning relative to changes in the external appearance of metals, and uses some of the very terms of art met with in Eastward Hoe; which makes it probable that the passages in which they are contained are from his pen. This piece was unusually free from personal allusions; yet it was not popular at first. The partisans of inferior writers were constantly let loose whenever Jonson brought out a new play; but their censure was harmless, for he numbered among his friends and admirers, Shakspeare, Beaumont, Fletcher, Donne, Camden, Selden, and a host of worthies of every class. In 1613, he made the tour of France, and was introduced to Cardinal Perron, who showed him his translation of Virgil; but Perron not being his master and sovereign, but a foreign cardinal, with his customary bluntness he told him it was a bad one. About this time he and Inigo Jones quarrelled; and he ridiculed his colleague of the Masques, under the character of Sir Lantern Leatherhead, a Hobby-horse Seller. His next play was “The Devil is an Ass,” 1616.
In 1617, the salary of poet-laureat was settled on him for life by King James, and he published his works in one folio volume. His fame, both as to poetry and learning, was now so fully established, that he was invited to the University of Oxford by several members, and particularly by Dr. Corbet, of Christ Church. That college was his residence during his stay, and he was created Master of Arts in full convocation, in July, 1619. In the following October, on the death of Daniel, he received the appointment of Poet-laureat, after having discharged the duties of the office for some time. At the latter end of this year he travelled into Scotland on foot, to visit his correspondent, Drummond of Hawthornden. Jonson had formed a design of writing on the history and geography of Scotland, and had received some curious documents from Drummond. The acquisition of additional materials appears to have been the main object of his journey. In the freedom of social intercourse, he expressed his sentiments strongly concerning the authors and poets of his own time. Drummond committed the heads of their conversations to writing, and has been severely censured on account of what he has left us concerning his guest. He says that he was “a great lover and praiser of himself; a contemner and scorner of others; chusing rather to lose his friend than his jest; jealous of every word and action of those about him, especially after drink, which was one of the elements in which he lived; a dissembler of the parts which reigned in him; a bragger of some good that he wanted; he thought nothing right, but what either himself or some of his friends had said or done. He was passionately kind and angry; careless either to gain or keep; vindictive, but if he was well answered, greatly chagrined; interpreting the best sayings and deeds often to the worst. He was for either religion, being versed in both; oppressed with fancy, which over-mastered his reason, a general disease among the poets.” Drummond’s letters exhibit Jonson in a much more favourable light; and this inconsistency may, perhaps, be explained by supposing that they exhibit the Scotch poet’s deliberate opinion of his guest, while the strictures contained in his loose notes were probably penned in a moment of irritation, to which he appears to have been subject. If, indeed, the received notions of Jonson’s heat of temper had any foundation, we may suppose him and his northern host to have been occasionally so far advanced in disputation, that “testy Drummond could not speak for fretting.” Jonson recorded his adventures on this journey in a poem, which was accidentally burnt; a loss which he lamented in another poem called “An Execration upon Vulcan.”
The laureateship obliged him annually to provide, besides other entertainments of the court, the Christmas Masque: of these we have a series in his works, from 1615 to 1625. In 1625, his comedy called The Staple of News was exhibited. In 1627, The New Inn was performed at the Blackfriars theatre, and deservedly hissed off the stage. Three of Jonson’s plays underwent that fate. He was so much incensed against the town, that in 1631 he published it with the following title: “The New Inn, or the Light Heart, a comedy; as it was never acted, but most negligently played, by some, the king’s servants, and more squeamishly beheld and censured by others, the king’s subjects, 1629; and now at last set at liberty to the readers.” To this he annexed an ode to himself, threatening to leave the stage, which was sarcastically parodied by Owen Feltham, a writer of note, and author of a book called “Resolves.” Jonson’s mingled foibles and excellencies are pleasantly touched by Sir John Suckling, in his “Session of the Poets.” An improbable story is told by Cibber, and repeated by Smollet, that in 1629, Ben, being reduced to distress, and living in an obscure alley, petitioned his Majesty to assist him in his poverty and sickness; but that, on receiving ten pounds, he said to the messenger who brought the donation, “His Majesty has sent me ten pounds, because I am poor and live in an alley: go and tell him that his soul lives in an alley.” His annual pension had been increased from a hundred marks to a hundred pounds, with the welcome addition of a yearly tierce of Canary wine. He received from the king a further present of one hundred pounds in that very year, which he acknowledged in an epigram published in his works. Could he, as he does in his “Epistle Mendicant,” have further solicited the Lord Treasurer for relief in 1631, had he been guilty of such an insult to royalty in 1629? There is reason to believe that he had pensions from the city, and from several of the nobility and gentry; particularly from Mr. Sutton, the founder of the Charter-house. Yet, with all these helps, his finances were unredeemed from disorder.
In his distress, he came upon the stage again, in spite of his last defeat. Two comedies without a date, “The Magnetic Lady,” and “The Tale of a Tub,” belong to these latter compositions, which Dryden has called his dotages; at all events, they are the dotages of Jonson. Alexander Gill, a poetaster of the times, attacked him with brutal fury, on account of his “Magnetic Lady.” Gill was a bad man as well as a bad poet; and Jonson availed himself of his adversary’s weak points in a short but cutting reply. His last masque was performed July 30, 1634, and the only piece extant of later date is his “New Year’s Ode for 1635.” He died of palsy, August 6, 1637, in his sixty-third year, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. His grave-stone only bears the quaint inscription,—“O rare Ben Jonson!”
In the beginning of 1638, elegies on his death were published, under the title of “Jonsonius Virbius, or, the Memory of Ben Jonson Revived, by the Friends of the Muses.” This collection contains poems by Lord Falkland, Lord Buckhurst, Sir John Beaumont, Sir Thomas Hawkins, Mr. Waller, Mayne, Cartwright, Waryng, the author of “Effigies Amoris,” and other contributors of note. In 1640, the former volume of his works was reprinted; with a second, containing the rest of his plays, masques, and entertainments; Underwoods; English Grammar; his translation of Horace’s Art of Poetry; and Discoveries. The latter is a prose work of various and extensive learning, containing opinions on all subjects, worthy to be weighed even at this distant period. In 1716, his works were reprinted in six volumes octavo. Another edition appeared in 1756, under the care of Mr. Whalley, of St. John’s, Oxford, with notes, and the addition of a comedy not inserted in any former edition, called “The Case is Altered.” But all former editions are superseded in value by that of Mr. Gifford.
Jonson was married, and had children; particularly a son and a daughter, both celebrated by him in epitaphs at their death; but none of his children survived him.
As a dramatic writer, he is remarkable for judgment in the arrangement of his plots; a happy choice of characters; and skill in maintaining character throughout the piece. The manners of the most trifling persons are always consistent. Dryden censures him for exhibiting mechanic humour, “Where men were dull and conversation low.” This remark is so far just, that Jonson chiefly aimed at mirth by the contrast and collision of what Dryden terms humour. The reader, however, would do the dramatist injustice, were he to apply the word humour to him in its modern and confined sense. Jonson cultivated it according to a more philosophical definition; as a technical term for characters swayed and directed by some predominant passion, the display of which, under various circumstances, formed the strength of the comedy. Among the writers of that age, Jonson alone perhaps felt all the impropriety arising from frequent and violent change of scene. Yet Jonson himself, who disapproved of Shakspeare’s practice in that particular, was not wholly free from it, as Dryden has remarked with some appearance of triumph. Pope has touched on his genius in respect to dramatic poetry. He says,—“That when Jonson got possession of the stage, he brought critical learning into vogue; and this was not done without difficulty, which appears from those frequent lessons, and indeed almost declamations, which he was forced to prefix to his first plays, and put into the mouths of his actors the grex, chorus, &c., to remove the prejudices and reform the judgment of his hearers. Till then the English authors had no thoughts of writing upon the model of the ancients; their tragedies were only histories in dialogue, and their comedies followed the thread of any novel as they found it, no less implicitly than if it had been true history.” In fact, this author’s object was to found a reputation on understanding, and submitting to the discipline of the ancient stage; but his success fell short of his just expectations, and he growls on every occasion against the rude taste of an age which preferred to his laboured and well-concocted scenes, the more glowing, wild, and irregular effusions of his unlearned contemporaries. Beyond this there appears nothing to confirm the eagerly propagated opinion of his pride and malignity, at least in the earlier part of his life. At that time he contributed an encomium to almost every play or poem that appeared, from Shakspeare down to the translator of Du Bartas. His antagonist, Decker, seems to hint at a personal failing, seldom allied to malignity, when, in the “Satiromastix,” Sir Vaughan says to Horace, that is, Jonson, “I have some cousin-german at court shall beget you the reversion of the master of the king’s revels, or else to be his Lord of Misrule now at Christmas.” We have already quoted Drummond to the purport, that “drink was one of the elements in which he lived;” which accounts but too well for the poverty of his latter days, in spite of royal and noble munificence. In reference to this unfortunate propensity, the following amusing story is told:—Camden had recommended him to Sir Walter Raleigh, who trusted him with the care and education of his eldest son Walter, a gay spark, who could not brook Ben’s rigorous treatment; but perceiving one foible in his disposition, made use of that to throw off the yoke of his government. This was an unlucky habit Ben had contracted, through his love of jovial company, of being overtaken with liquor, which Sir Walter did of all vices most abominate, and hath most exclaimed against. One day, when Ben had taken a plentiful dose, and was fallen into a sound sleep, young Raleigh got a great basket, and a couple of men, who laid Ben in it, and then with a pole carried him between their shoulders to Sir Walter, telling him their young master had sent home his tutor.
