The song in The Devil is an Ass 2. 6. 94 ([see note]) was imitated by Sir John Suckling.
APPENDIX Extracts from the Critics
Gifford: There is much good writing in this comedy. All the speeches of Satan are replete with the most biting satire, delivered with an appropriate degree of spirit. Fitzdottrel is one of those characters which Jonson delighted to draw, and in which he stood unrivalled, a gull, i. e., a confident coxcomb, selfish, cunning, and conceited. Mrs. Fitzdottrel possesses somewhat more interest than the generality of our author’s females, and is indeed a well sustained character. In action the principal amusement of the scene (exclusive of the admirable burlesque of witchery in the conclusion) was probably derived from the mortification of poor Pug, whose stupid stare of amazement at finding himself made an ass of on every possible occasion must, if portrayed as some then on the stage were well able to portray it, have been exquisitely comic.
This play is strictly moral in its conception and conduct. Knavery and folly are shamed and corrected, virtue is strengthened and rewarded, and the ends of dramatic justice are sufficiently answered by the simple exposure of those whose errors are merely subservient to the minor interests of the piece.
Herford (Studies in the Literary Relations of England and Germany, pp. 318-20): Jonson had in fact so far the Aristophanic quality of genius, that he was at once a most elaborate and minute student of the actual world, and a poet of the airiest and boldest fancy, and that he loved to bring the two rôles into the closest possible combination. No one so capable of holding up the mirror to contemporary society without distorting the slenderest thread of its complex tissue of usages; no one, on the other hand, who so keenly delighted in startling away the illusion or carefully undermining it by some palpably fantastic invention. His most elaborate reproductions of the everyday world are hardly ever without an infusion of equally elaborate caprice,—a leaven of recondite and fantastic legend and grotesque myth, redolent of old libraries and antique scholarship, furtively planted, as it were, in the heart of that everyday world of London life, and so subtly blending with it that the whole motley throng of merchants and apprentices, gulls and gallants, discover nothing unusual in it, and engage with the most perfectly matter of fact air in the business of working it out. The purging of Crispinus in the Poetaster, the Aristophanic motive of the Magnetic Lady, even the farcical horror of noise which is the mainspring of the Epicœne, are only less elaborate and sustained examples of this fantastic realism than the adventure of a Stupid Devil in the play before us. Nothing more anomalous in the London of Jonson’s day could be conceived; yet it is so managed that it loses all its strangeness. So perfectly is the supernatural element welded with the human, that it almost ceases to appear supernatural. Pug, the hero of the adventure, is a pretty, petulant boy, more human by many degrees than the half fairy Puck of Shakespeare, which doubtless helped to suggest him, and the arch-fiend Satan is a bluff old politician, anxious to ward off the perils of London from his young simpleton of a son, who is equally eager to plunge into them. The old savage horror fades away before Jonson’s humanising touch, the infernal world loses all its privilege of peculiar terror and strength, and sinks to the footing of a mere rival state, whose merchandise can be kept out of the market and its citizens put in the Counter or carted to Tyburn.
A. W. Ward (Eng. Dram. Lit., pp. 372-3): The oddly-named comedy of The Devil is an Ass, acted in 1616, seems already to exhibit a certain degree of decay in the dramatic powers which had so signally called forth its predecessor. Yet this comedy possesses a considerable literary interest, as adapting both to Jonson’s dramatic method, and to the general moral atmosphere of his age, a theme connecting itself with some of the most notable creations of the earlier Elizabethan drama.... The idea of the play is as healthy as its plot is ingenious; but apart from the circumstance that the latter is rather slow in preparation, and by no means, I think, gains in perspicuousness as it proceeds, the design itself suffers from one radical mistake. Pug’s intelligence is so much below par that he suffers as largely on account of his clumsiness as on account of his viciousness, while remaining absolutely without influence upon the course of the action. The comedy is at the same time full of humor, particularly in the entire character of Fitzdottrel.
Swinburne (Study of Ben Jonson, pp. 65-7): If The Devil is an Ass cannot be ranked among the crowning masterpieces of its author, it is not because the play shows any sign of decadence in literary power or in humorous invention. The writing is admirable, the wealth of comic matter is only too copious, the characters are as firm in outline or as rich in color as any but the most triumphant examples of his satirical or sympathetic skill in finished delineation and demarcation of humors. On the other hand, it is of all Ben Jonson’s comedies since the date of Cynthia’s Revels the most obsolete in subject of satire, the most temporary in its allusions and applications: the want of fusion or even connection (except of the most mechanical or casual kind) between the various parts of its structure and the alternate topics of its ridicule makes the action more difficult to follow than that of many more complicated plots: and, finally, the admixture of serious sentiment and noble emotion is not so skilfully managed as to evade the imputation of incongruity. [The dialogue between Lady Tailbush and Lady Eitherside in Act 4. Sc. 1 has some touches ‘worthy of Molière himself.’ In Act 4. Sc. 3 Mrs. Fitzdottrel’s speech possesses a ‘a noble and natural eloquence,’ but the character of her husband is ‘almost too loathsome to be ridiculous,’ and unfit ‘for the leading part in a comedy of ethics as well as of morals.’] The prodigality of elaboration lavished on such a multitude of subordinate characters, at the expense of all continuous interest and to the sacrifice of all dramatic harmony, may tempt the reader to apostrophize the poet in his own words:
You are so covetous still to embrace More than you can, that you lose all.
Yet a word of parting praise must be given to Satan: a small part as far as extent goes, but a splendid example of high comic imagination after the order of Aristophanes, admirably relieved by the low comedy of the asinine Pug and the voluble doggrel by the antiquated Vice.