BENJAMIN JONSON (1572–1637).
Benjamin Johnson, or Jonson, as he took the fancy to spell his name, was born, probably on 11 June 1572, at Westminster, after the death of his father, a minister, of Scottish origin. He was withheld, or withdrawn, from the University education justified by his scholastic attainments at Westminster to follow his step-father’s occupation of bricklaying, and when this proved intolerable, he served as a soldier in the Netherlands. In a prologue to The Sad Shepherd, left unfinished at his death in August 1637, he describes himself as ‘He that has feasted you these forty years’, and by 1597 at latest his connexion with the stage had begun. Aubrey tells us (ii. 12, 226) that he ‘acted and wrote, but both ill, at the Green Curtaine, a kind of nursery or obscure play-house, somewhere in the suburbes (I thinke towards Shoreditch or Clarkenwell)’, and again that he ‘was never a good actor, but an excellent instructor’. The earliest contemporary records, however, show Jonson not at the Curtain, but on the Bankside. On 28 July 1597 Henslowe (i. 200) recorded a personal loan to ‘Bengemen Johnson player’ of £4 ‘to be payd yt agayne when so euer ether I or any for me shall demande yt’, and on the very same day he opened on another page of his diary (i. 47) an account headed ‘Received of Bengemenes Johnsones share as ffoloweth 1597’ and entered in it the receipt of a single sum of 3s. 9d., to which no addition was ever made. Did these entries stand alone, one would infer, on the analogy of other transactions of Henslowe’s and from the signatures of two Admiral’s men as witnesses to the loan, that Jonson had purchased a share in the Admiral’s company for £4, that he borrowed the means to do this from Henslowe, and that Henslowe was to recoup himself by periodical deductions from the takings of the company as they passed through his hands. But there is no other evidence that Jonson ever had an interest in the Admiral’s, and there are facts which, if one could believe that Henslowe would regard the takings of any company but the Admiral’s as security for a loan, would lead to the conclusion that Jonson’s ‘share’ was with Pembroke’s men at the Swan. The day of Henslowe’s entries, 28 July 1597, is the very day on which the theatres were suppressed as a result of the performance of The Isle of Dogs (cf. App. D, No. cx), and it is hardly possible to doubt that Jonson was one of the actors who had a hand with Nashe (q.v.) in that play. The Privy Council registers record his release, with Shaw and Spencer of Pembroke’s men, from the Marshalsea on 3 Oct. 1597 (Dasent, xxviii. 33; cf. App. D, No. cxii); while Dekker in Satiromastix (l. 1513) makes Horace admit that he had played Zulziman in Paris Garden, and Tucca upbraid him because ‘when the Stagerites banisht thee into the Ile of Dogs, thou turn’dst Bandog (villanous Guy) & ever since bitest’. The same passage confirms Aubrey’s indication that Jonson was actor, and a bad actor, as well as poet. ‘Thou putst vp a supplication’, says Tucca, ‘to be a poor iorneyman player, and hadst beene still so, but that thou couldst not set a good face vpon ’t: thou hast forgot how thou amblest (in leather pilch) by a play-wagon, in the high way, and took’st mad Ieronimoes part, to get seruice among the mimickes.’ Elsewhere (l. 633) Tucca taunts him that ‘when thou ranst mad for the death of Horatio, thou borrowedst a gowne of Roscius the stager, (that honest Nicodemus) and sentst it home lowsie’. This imprisonment for the Isle of Dogs is no doubt the ‘bondage’ for his ‘first error’ to which Jonson refers in writing to Salisbury about Eastward Ho! in 1605, and the ‘close imprisonment, under Queen Elizabeth’, during which he told Drummond he was beset by spies (Laing, 19). Released, Jonson borrowed 5s. more from Henslowe (i. 200) on 5 Jan. 1598, and entered into a relationship with him and the Admiral’s as a dramatist, which lasted intermittently until 1602. It was broken, not only by plays for the King’s men, whose employment of him, which may have been at the Curtain, was due, according to Rowe, to the critical instinct of Shakespeare (H.-P. ii. 74), and for the Chapel children when these were established at Blackfriars in 1600, but also by a quarrel with Gabriel Spencer, whose death at his hands during a duel with swords in Hoxton Fields on 22 Sept. 1598 was ‘harde & heavey’ news to Henslowe (Henslowe Papers, 48) and brought Jonson to trial for murder, from which he only escaped by reading his neck-verse (Jeaffreson, Middlesex County Records, i. xxxviii; iv. 350; cf. Laing, 19). Jonson’s pen was critical, and to the years 1600–2 belongs the series of conflicts with other poets and with the actors generically known as the Poetomachia or Stage Quarrel (cf. ch. xi). Meanwhile Jonson, perhaps encouraged by his success in introducing a mask into Cynthia’s Revels (1601), seems to have conceived the ambition of becoming a Court poet. At first he was not wholly successful, and the selection of Daniel to write the chief Christmas mask of 1603–4 appears to have provoked an antagonism between the two poets, which shows itself in Jonson’s qualified acknowledgement to Lady Rutland of the favours done him by Lady Bedford (Forest, xii):
though she have a better verser got,
(Or poet, in the court-account) than I,
And who doth me, though I not him envy,
and long after in the remark to Drummond (Laing, 10) that ‘Daniel was at jealousies with him’. But the mask was a form of art singularly suited to Jonson’s genius. In the next year he came to his own, and of ten masks at Court during 1605–12 not less than eight are his. This employment secured him a considerable vogue as a writer of entertainments and complimentary verses, and a standing with James himself, with the Earl of Salisbury, and with other persons of honour, which not only brought him pecuniary profit, but also enabled him to withstand the political attacks made upon Sejanus, for which he was haled before the Council, and upon Eastward Ho!, for which he was once more imprisoned. During this period he continued to write plays, with no undue frequency, both for the King’s men and for the Queen’s Revels and their successors, the Lady Elizabeth’s. As a rule, he had published his plays, other than those bought by Henslowe, soon after they were produced, and in 1612 he seems to have formed the design of collecting them, with his masks and occasional verses, into a volume of Works. Probably the design was deferred, owing to his absence in France as tutor to the son of Sir Walter Raleigh, from the autumn of 1612 (M. P. xi. 279) to some date in 1613 earlier than 29 June, when he witnessed the burning of the Globe (M. L. R. iv. 83). For the same reason he took no part in the masks for the Princess Elizabeth’s wedding at Shrovetide. But he returned in time for that of the Earl of Somerset at Christmas 1613, and wrote three more masks before his folio Works actually appeared in 1616. In the same year he received a royal pension of 100 marks.
Jonson’s later life can only be briefly summarized. During a visit to Scotland he paid a visit to William Drummond of Hawthornden in January 1619, and of his conversation his host took notes which preserve many biographical details and many critical utterances upon the men, books, and manners of his time. In 1621 (cf. ch. iii) he obtained a reversion of the Mastership of the Revels, which he never lived to enjoy. His masks continued until 1631, when an unfortunate quarrel with Inigo Jones brought them to an end. His play-writing, dropped after 1616, was resumed about 1625, and to this period belong his share in The Bloody Brother of the Beaumont and Fletcher series, The Staple of News, The New Inn, The Magnetic Lady, and The Tale of a Tub. In 1637, probably on 6 August, he died. He had told Drummond ‘that the half of his comedies were not in print’, as well as that ‘of all his playes he never gained two hundreth pounds’ (Laing, 27, 35), and in 1631 he began the publication, by instalments, of a second volume of his Works. This was completed after his death, with the aid of Sir Kenelm Digby, in 1640 and 1641. But it did not include The Case is Altered, the printing of which in 1609 probably lacked his authority, or the Henslowe plays, of which his manuscripts, if he had any, may have perished when his library was burnt in 1623.
Collections
F1 (1616)
S. R. 1615, Jan. 20 (Tavernour). William Stansbye, ‘Certayne Masques at the Court never yet printed written by Ben Johnson’ (Arber, iii. 562).