Ben Jonson

“ And when she got home to her own room, and once more regarded the roll of sheets, before bestowing them away in a secret place, there was a fine bravery of triumph in her eyes. "Ben Jonson!" she said, but no longer with any anger, rather with a sovereign contempt. And then she locked up the treasure in her small cupboard of boxes, and went down-stairs again to seek out her mother, her heart now quite recovered from its envy, and beating warm and equally in its disposition toward all mankind, and her mind full of a perfect and complacent confidence. "Ben Jonson!" ”

“ But if Gifford had rendered no other service to Jonson’s fame he must be allowed to have once for all vindicated it from the cruellest aspersion which has ever been cast upon it. That in general Ben Jonson was a man of strong likes and dislikes, and was wont to manifest the latter as vehemently as the former, it would be idle to deny. ”

“ Ben Jonson was a great lover and praiser of himself, a contemner and scorner of others, given rather to lose a friend than a jest, jealous of every word and action of those about him, especially after drink, which is 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, thinketh nothing well done but what either he himself or some of his friends have said or done. He is passionately kind or angry, careless either to gain or keep ”

“ Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy,
My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy;
Seven years th' wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O, could I lose all father now. For why
Will man lament the state he should envy?
To have so soon 'scaped world's and flesh's rage,
And, if no other misery, yet age?
Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry;
For whose sake, henceforth, all his vows be such
As what he loves may never like too much. ”

“ In Ben Jonson, we find ourselves generally in low company, and we see no hope of getting out of it. He is like a person who fastens upon a disagreeable subject, and cannot be persuaded to leave it. His comedy, in a word, has not what Shakspeare somewhere calls ‘bless’d conditions.’ It is cross-grained, mean, and mechanical. It is handicraft wit. Squalid poverty, sheer ignorance, bare-faced impudence, or idiot imbecility, are his dramatic common-places—things that provoke pity or disgust, instead of laughter. ”

“ Jonson's Prose.
It is not easy to sympathize with the sweet enthusiasts who place Ben Jonson's "Timber, or Discoveries made upon Men and Matter," above Bacon's Essays. These sayings, maxims, and very brief essays were mainly written when Ben was old, and not yet wise enough to be contented. He appears as a contemner of times present, when the poet is no longer taken at his own estimate, which, in Jonson's case, was rather high. Many of the "Discoveries" had, not infrequently or of recent date, been discovered before. Thus of Fortune, "That which happens to any man, may to every man. ”

“ The ill man rides through all confidently; he is coated and booted for it. The oftener he offends, the more openly; and the fouler, the fitter in fashion. His modesty, like a riding-coat, the more it is worn, is the less cared for. It is good enough for the dirt still, and the ways he travels on.
No one will be surprised to find that Ben Jonson's chosen type or example of high-minded innocence, incessantly pursued by malice, delated and defamed, but always triumphant and confident, even when driven to the verge of a precipice, is none other than Ben Jonson. ”

“ Great as Ben Jonson is, and for wit and learning no man surpasses him, he is not to be compared with Shakspeare, who for profound knowledge of nature, and of all the highest qualities of dramatic art, is unapproachable. But ours is a learned court, Master Nicholas, and therefore we have a learned poet; but a right good fellow is Ben Jonson, and a boon companion, though somewhat prone to sarcasm, as you will find if you drink with him. ”

“ Though Ben Jonson never altogether recognized the truth of the maxim that the dramatic art has properly speaking no didactic purpose, his long and laborious life was not wasted upon a barren endeavour. In tragedy he added two works of uncommon merit to our dramatic literature. In comedy his aim was higher, his effort more sustained, and his success more solid than were those of any of his fellows. In the subsidiary and hybrid species of the masque, he helped to open a new and attractive though undoubtedly devious path in the field of dramatic literature. ”

“ In this Ben Jonson was no doubt defective; for he was too accurate an observer of men and manners to be himself a man of fashion, literary or otherwise. But it would be an error to suppose him, as a comic dramatist, to have stood towards the world around him in the attitude of a philosopher, careless of mere transient externalisms. It is said that the scene of his Every Man in his Humour was originally laid near Florence ”

“ The fanciful, smooth, and flowing verse of its graver parts would be worthy of Fletcher, were it not that the music is less fresh and pure in melody, and that among the finest and sweetest passages there are interspersed such lamentably flat and stiff couplets as would have been impossible to any other poet of equal rank. If justice has not been done in modern times to Ben Jonson as one of the greatest of dramatists and humourists, much more than justice has been done to him as a lyric poet. ”

“ There is no unpoetic note in his best poetry such as there is too often—nay, too constantly—in the severer work and the stronger genius of Ben Jonson. What he might have done under happier auspices, or with a tougher fibre of resolution and perseverance in his character, it is waste of time and thought for his most sympathetic and compassionate admirers to assume or to conjecture: what he has done, with all its shortcomings and infirmities, is enough to secure for him a distinct and honorable place among the humorists and the poets of his country. ”

“ Ben Jonson is naturally the man who betrays the most conscious preoccupation with the question. He is not, however, a rigid or consistent unitarian. In his two earliest plays the scene shifts from the country to a neighbouring town, and the induction to Every Man Out of his Humour is in part an apology for his own liberty, in part a criticism of the licence of others. ”

“ Ben Jonson traveled too. For a time he traveled in France with Sir Walter Raleigh's son, while Sir Walter himself was shut up in the Tower. But Jonson's most famous journey is his walk to Scotland. He liked to believe that he belonged to a famous Border family, and wished to visit the land of his forefathers. So in the mid-summer of 1618 he set out. We do not know how long he took to make his lengthy walk, but in September he was comfortably settled in Leith, being "worthily entertained" by all the greatest and most learned men of the day. ”

“ Since the days of Ben Jonson and until the days of Sheridan there was no one who could fairly be compared with him. His comedy was not in the least like the bold, broad, healthy, Aristophanic humor of Ben Jonson; the two stand better in contrast than in comparison. Jonson drew from the whole living English world of his time; Congreve drew from the men and women whom he had seen in society. Congreve took society as he found it in his earlier days. The men and women with whom he then mixed were for the most part flippant, insincere, corrupt, and rather proud of their corruption ”

“ I think I have a fever—hell and furies! Or else this ale grows hotter i' the mouth. Ben, if I die before you, let me waste Richly and freely in the good brown earth, Untrumpeted and by no bust marked out. What good, Ben Jonson, if the world could see What face was mine, who wrote these plays and sonnets? Life, you have hurt me. Since Death has a veil I take the veil and hide, and like great Cæsar Who drew his toga round him, I depart. ”

“ But in all these immortal figures there is the lifeblood of eternal life which can only be infused by the sympathetic faith of the creator in his creature—the breath which animates every word, even if the word be not the very best word that might have been found, with the vital impulse of infallible imagination. But it is difficult to believe that Ben Jonson can have believed, even with some half sympathetic and half sardonic belief, in all the leading figures of his invention. ”

“ In due course, Laureate Jonson shared the fate of all potentates, and was gathered to the laurelled of Elysium. The fatality occurred in 1637. When his remains were deposited in the Poet's Corner, with the eloquent laconism above them, "O Rare Ben Jonson!" all the wits of the day stood by the graveside, and cast in their tribute of bays. ”

“ And yet, even while possessed and overmastered by the sense of the incomparable energy, the impeccable skill, and the indefatigable craftsmanship, which combined and conspired together to produce this æsthetically blameless masterpiece the reader whose instinct requires something more than merely intellectual or æsthetic satisfaction must recognize even here the quality which distinguishes the genius of Ben Jonson from that of the very greatest imaginative humourists—Aristophanes or Rabelais, Shakespeare or Sterne, Vanbrugh or Dickens, Congreve or Thackeray. ”

“ Worse men were made knights in his day than worthy Ben Jonson.
From 1616 to the close of the reign of King James, Jonson produced nothing for the stage. But he "prosecuted" what he calls "his wonted studies" with such assiduity that he became in reality, as by report, one of the most learned men of his time. Jonson's theory of authorship involved a wide acquaintance with books and "an ability," as he put it, "to convert the substance or riches of another poet to his own use." ”

“ CRI. Marry, that will I: I dare give you that advantage too. ANA. You dare! well, look to your liberal sconce. AMO. Make your play still, upon the answer, sir. ANA. Hold your peace, you are a hobby-horse. ASO. Sit by me, master. MER. Now, Crites, strike home. [A CHARGE.] CRI. You shall see me undo the assured swaggerer with a trick, instantly: I will play all his own play before him; court the wench in his garb, in his phrase, with his face; leave him not so much as a look, an eye, a stalk, or an imperfect oath, to express himself by, after me. [ASIDE TO MERCURY.] MER. Excellent, Crites. ”

“ It is an intolerable scandal that the public should be content to endure such an outrage as the intrusion of another man's abominable absurdities into the text of such a writer as Ben Jonson. This effusion of his young friend's, which must surely have been meant as a joke—and a very bad, not to say a very brutal one, is probably the most hideous nonsense ever written on the desecrated subject of death and decay. ”

“ For Ben Jonson was still living, not yet much over fifty, though with his great bulk and reeling gait seeming nearer seventy; now, too, since Shakespeare is gone, easily at the head of all the literary workers in London; indeed, in some sense always at the head by reason of his dogged self-insistence and his braggadocio. All the street world [33] knows him, as he swaggers along the Strand to his new jolly rendezvous at the Devil Tavern, near St. Dunstan’s, in Fleet Street—not far off from the Temple Church—where he and his fellows meet in the Apollo Chamber, over whose door Ben has written ”

“ Ben Jonson had theories about poetry and the drama, and he was neither chary in talking of them nor in experimenting with them in his plays. This makes Jonson, like Dryden in his time, and Wordsworth much later, an author to reckon with; particularly when we remember that many of Jonson’s notions came for a time definitely to prevail and to modify the whole trend of English poetry. First of all Jonson was a classicist, that is, he believed in restraint and precedent in art in opposition to the prevalent ungoverned and irresponsible Renaissance spirit. ”

“ Some of our opponents regard Ben Jonson as their prophet. To him they fly for counsel and comfort. They throw his sayings at our heads whenever they get a chance. In the index to Mr. Lang’s Shakespeare-Bacon and the Great Unknown (1912) Ben Jonson’s name takes up more space than even Shakespeare’s. According to Mr. Lang “it is easy to prove that Will (i.e. the Stratford man) was recognised as the author by Ben Jonson.” If this were true there would be no Shakespeare question at all, none at least so far as I am concerned. ”

“ The famous men whose names may most naturally and most rationally be coupled with the more illustrious name of Ben Jonson came short of the triumph which might have been theirs in consequence of their worst faults or defects—of the weaker and baser elements in their moral nature ”

“ We cannot conceive him to have associated frequently with men of larger acquirements than himself, and not to have made much of their treasures his own. The conversation of such a man as Ben Jonson alone, supposing him to have made no more display of his learning than chance or vanity would occasionally produce, must have supplied ample sources of information to a mind so curious, watchful, and retentive, that it did not suffer the slightest thing to escape its grasp. ”

“ Ben Jonson, [193] who ranked so high as a dramatist, has been pronounced to be, next to Shakespeare, the greatest wit and humorist of his time. His expression was through the pen, not by the tongue: no man was more taciturn in society. Much of Jonson's matter was better adapted to his time than to ours; words which seem to us so coarse and vulgar passed unchallenged in the period which gave them birth.
Here are five lines from Jonson, with which he closes a play directed against plagiarists and libellers generally. He sums up thus ”