Every Man In His Humour

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Several other plays have been thought to bear a greater or less part in the
war of the theatres. Among them the most important is a college play,
entitled "The Return from Parnassus," dating 1601-02. In it a much-quoted
passage makes Burbage, as a character, declare: "Why here's our fellow
Shakespeare puts them all down; aye and Ben Jonson, too. O that Ben Jonson
is a pestilent fellow; he brought up Horace, giving the poets a pill, but
our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him bewray his
credit." Was Shakespeare then concerned in this war of the stages? And
what could have been the nature of this "purge"? Among several
suggestions, "Troilus and Cressida" has been thought by some to be the play
in which Shakespeare thus "put down" his friend, Jonson. A wiser
interpretation finds the "purge" in "Satiromastix," which, though not
written by Shakespeare, was staged by his company, and therefore with his
approval and under his direction as one of the leaders of that company.

The last years of the reign of Elizabeth thus saw Jonson recognised as a
dramatist second only to Shakespeare, and not second even to him as a
dramatic satirist. But Jonson now turned his talents to new fields. Plays
on subjects derived from classical story and myth had held the stage from
the beginning of the drama, so that Shakespeare was making no new departure
when he wrote his "Julius Caesar" about 1600. Therefore when Jonson staged
"Sejanus," three years later and with Shakespeare'scompany once more, he
was only following in the elder dramatist's footsteps. But Jonson's idea
of a play on classical history, on the one hand, and Shakespeare's and the
elder popular dramatists, on the other, were very different. Heywood some
years before had put five straggling plays on the stage in quick
succession, all derived from stories in Ovid and dramatised with little
taste or discrimination. Shakespeare had a finer conception of form, but
even he was contented to take all his ancient history from North's
translation of Plutarch and dramatise his subject without further inquiry.
Jonson was a scholar and a classical antiquarian. He reprobated this
slipshod amateurishness, and wrote his "Sejanus" like a scholar, reading
Tacitus, Suetonius, and other authorities, to be certain of his facts, his
setting, and his atmosphere, and somewhat pedantically noting his
authorities in the margin when he came to print. "Sejanus" is a tragedy of
genuine dramatic power in which is told with discriminating taste the story
of the haughty favourite of Tiberius with his tragical overthrow. Our
drama presents no truer nor more painstaking representation of ancient
Roman life than may be found in Jonson's "Sejanus" and "Catiline his
Conspiracy," which followed in 1611. A passage in the address of the
former play to the reader, in which Jonson refers to a collaboration in an
earlier version, has led to the surmise that Shakespeare may have been that
"worthier pen." There is no evidence to determine the matter.

In 1605, we find Jonson in active collaboration with Chapman and Marston in
the admirable comedy of London life entitled "Eastward Hoe." In the
previous year, Marston had dedicated his "Malcontent," in terms of fervid
admiration, to Jonson; so that the wounds of the war of the theatres must
have been long since healed. Between Jonson and Chapman there was the
kinship of similar scholarly ideals. The two continued friends throughout
life. "Eastward Hoe" achieved the extraordinary popularity represented in
a demand for three issues in one year. But this was not due entirely to
the merits of the play. In its earliest version a passage which an
irritable courtier conceived to be derogatory to his nation, the Scots,
sent both Chapman and Jonson to jail; but the matter was soon patched up,
for by this time Jonson had influence at court.

With the accession of King James, Jonson began his long and successful
career as a writer of masques. He wrote more masques than all his
competitors together, and they are of an extraordinary variety and poetic
excellence. Jonson did not invent the masque; for such premeditated
devices to set and frame, so to speak, a court ball had been known and
practised in varying degrees of elaboration long before his time. But
Jonson gave dramatic value to the masque, especially in his invention of
the antimasque, a comedy or farcical element of relief, entrusted to
professional players or dancers. He enhanced, as well, the beauty and
dignity of those portions of the masque in which noble lords and ladies
took their parts to create, by their gorgeous costumes and artistic
grouping and evolutions, a sumptuous show. On the mechanical and scenic
side Jonson had an inventive and ingenious partner in Inigo Jones, the
royal architect, who more than any one man raised the standard of stage
representation in the England of his day. Jonson continued active in the
service of the court in the writing of masques and other entertainments far
into the reign of King Charles; but, towards the end, a quarrel with Jones
embittered his life, and the two testy old men appear to have become not
only a constant irritation to each other, but intolerable bores at court.
In "Hymenaei," "The Masque of Queens," "Love Freed from Ignorance," "Lovers
made Men," "Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue," and many more will be found
Jonson's aptitude, his taste, his poetry and inventiveness in these
by-forms of the drama; while in "The Masque of Christmas," and "The Gipsies
Metamorphosed" especially, is discoverable that power ofbroad comedy which,
at court as well as in the city, was not the least element of Jonson's
contemporary popularity.

But Jonson had by no means given up the popular stage when he turned to the
amusement of King James. In 1605 "Volpone" was produced, "The Silent
Woman" in 1609, "The Alchemist" in the following year. These comedies,
with "Bartholomew Fair," 1614, represent Jonson at his height, and for
constructive cleverness, character successfully conceived in the manner of
caricature, wit and brilliancy of dialogue, they stand alone in English
drama. "Volpone, or the Fox," is, in a sense, a transition play from the
dramatic satires of the war of the theatres to the purer comedy represented
in the plays named above. Its subject is a struggle of wit applied to
chicanery; for among its 'dramatis personae', from the villainous Fox
himself, his rascally servant Mosca, Voltore (the vulture), Corbaccio and
Corvino (the big and the little raven), to Sir Politic Would-be and the
rest, there is scarcely a virtuous character in the play. Question has
been raised as to whether a story so forbidding can be considered a comedy,
for, although the plot ends in the discomfiture and imprisonment of the
most vicious, it involves no moral catastrophe. But Jonson was on sound
historical ground, for "Volpone" is conceived far more logically on the
lines of the ancients' theory of comedy than was ever the romantic drama of
Shakespeare, however repulsive we may find a philosophy of life that
facilely divides the world into the rogues and their dupes, and,
identifying brains with roguery and innocence with folly, admires the
former while inconsistently punishing them.

"The Silent Woman" is a gigantic farce of the most ingenious construction.
The whole comedy hinges on a huge joke, played by a heartless nephew on his
misanthropic uncle, who is induced to take to himself a wife, young, fair,
and warranted silent, but who, in the end, turns out neither silent nor a
woman at all. In "The Alchemist," again, we have the utmost cleverness in
construction, the whole fabric building climax on climax, witty, ingenious,
and so plausibly presented that we forget its departures from the
possibilities of life. In "The Alchemist" Jonson represented, none the
less to the life, certain sharpers of the metropolis, revelling in their
shrewdness and rascality and in the variety of the stupidity and wickedness
of their victims. We may object to the fact that the only person in the
play possessed of a scruple of honesty is discomfited, and that the
greatest scoundrel of all is approved in the end and rewarded. The comedy
is so admirably written and contrived, the personages stand out with such
lifelike distinctness in their several kinds, and the whole is animated
with such verve and resourcefulness that "The Alchemist" is a new marvel
every time it is read. Lastly of this group comes the tremendous comedy,
"Bartholomew Fair," less clear cut, less definite, and less structurally
worthy of praise than its three predecessors, but full of the keenest and
cleverest of satire and inventive to a degree beyond any English comedy
save some other of Jonson's own. It is in "Bartholomew Fair" that we are
presented to the immortal caricature of the Puritan, Zeal-in-the-Land Busy,
and the Littlewits that group about him, and it is in this extraordinary
comedy that the humour of Jonson, always open to this danger, loosens into
the Rabelaisian mode that so delighted King James in "The Gipsies
Metamorphosed." Another comedy of less merit is "The Devil is an Ass,"
acted in 1616. It was the failure of this play that caused Jonson to give
over writing for the public stage for a period of nearly ten years.

"Volpone" was laid as to scene in Venice. Whether because of the success
of "Eastward Hoe" or for other reasons, the other three comedies declare in
the words of the prologue to "The Alchemist":
"Our scene is London, 'cause we would make known
No country's mirth is better than our own."
Indeed Jonson went further when he came to revise his plays for collected publication in his folio of 1616, he transferred the scene of "Every Man in His Humou
r" from Florence to London also, converting Signior Lorenzo di Pazzi to Old
Kno'well, Prospero to Master Welborn, and Hesperida to Dame Kitely
"dwelling i' the Old Jewry."

In his comedies of London life, despite his trend towards caricature,
Jonson has shown himself a genuine realist, drawing from the life about him
with an experience and insight rare in any generation. A happy comparison
has been suggested between Ben Jonson and Charles Dickens. Both were men
of the people, lowly born and hardly bred. Each knew the London of his
time as few men knew it; and each represented it intimately and in
elaborate detail. Both men were at heart moralists, seeking the truth by
the exaggerated methods of humour and caricature; perverse, even
wrong-headed at times, but possessed of a true pathos and largeness of
heart, and when all has been said -- though the Elizabethan ran to satire,
the Victorian to sentimentality -- leaving the world better for the art
that they practised in it.

In 1616, the year of the death of Shakespeare, Jonson collected his plays,
his poetry, and his masques for publication in a collective edition. This
was an unusual thing at the time and had been attempted by no dramatist
before Jonson. This volume published, in a carefully revised text, all the
plays thus far mentioned, excepting "The Case is Altered," which Jonson did
not acknowledge, "Bartholomew Fair," and "The Devil is an Ass," which was
written too late. It included likewise a book of some hundred and thirty
odd 'Epigrams', in which form of brief and pungent writing Jonson was an
acknowledged master; "The Forest," a smaller collection of lyric and
occasional verse and some ten 'Masques' and 'Entertainments'. In this same
year Jonson was made poet laureate with a pension of one hundred marks a
year. This, with his fees and returns from several noblemen, and the small
earnings of his plays must have formed the bulk of his income. The poet
appears to have done certain literary hack-work for others, as, for
example, parts of the Punic Wars contributed to Raleigh's 'History of the
World'. We know from a story, little to the credit of either, that Jonson
accompanied Raleigh's son abroad in the capacity of a tutor. In 1618
Jonson was granted the reversion of the office of Master of the Revels, a
post for which he was peculiarly fitted; but he did not live to enjoy its
perquisites. Jonson was honoured with degrees by both universities, though
when and under what circumstances is not known. It has been said that he
narrowly escaped the honour of knighthood, which the satirists of the day
averred King James was wont to lavish with an indiscriminate hand. 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." Accordingly Jonson
read not only the Greek and Latin classics down to the lesser writers, but
he acquainted himself especially with the Latin writings of his learned
contemporaries, their prose as well as their poetry, their antiquities and
curious lore as well as their more solid learning. Though a poor man,
Jonson was an indefatigable collector of books. He told Drummond that "the
Earl of Pembroke sent him £20 every first day of the new year to buy new
books." Unhappily, in 1623, his library was destroyed by fire, an accident
serio-comically described in his witty poem, "An Execration upon Vulcan."
Yet even now a book turns up from time to time in which is inscribed, in
fair large Italian lettering, the name, Ben Jonson. With respect to
Jonson's use of his material, Dryden said memorably of him: "[He] was not
only a professed imitator of Horace, but a learned plagiary of all the
others; you track him everywhere in their snow....But he has done his
robberies so openly that one sees he fears not to be taxed by any law. He
invades authors like a monarch, and what would be theft in other poets is
only victory in him." And yet it is but fair to say that Jonson prided
himself, and justly, on his originality. In "Catiline," he not only uses
Sallust's account of the conspiracy, but he models some of the speeches of
Cicero on the Roman orator's actual words. In "Poetaster," he lifts a
whole satire out of Horace and dramatises it effectively for his purposes.
The sophist Libanius suggests the situation of "The Silent Woman"; a Latin
comedy of Giordano Bruno, "Il Candelaio," the relation of the dupes and the
sharpers in "The Alchemist," the "Mostellaria" of Plautus, its admirable
opening scene. But Jonson commonly bettered his sources, and putting the
stamp of his sovereignty on whatever bullion he borrowed made it
thenceforward to all time current and his own.

The lyric and especially the occasional poetry of Jonson has a peculiar
merit. His theory demanded design and the perfection of literary finish.
He was furthest from the rhapsodist and the careless singer of an idle day;
and he believed that Apollo could only be worthily served in singing robes
and laurel crowned. And yet many of Jonson's lyrics will live as long as
the language. Who does not know "Queen and huntress, chaste and fair."
"Drink to me only with thine eyes," or "Still to be neat, still to be
dressed"? Beautiful in form, deft and graceful in expression, with not a
word too much or one that bears not its part in the total effect, there is
yet about the lyrics of Jonson a certain stiffness and formality, a
suspicion that they were not quite spontaneous and unbidden, but that they
were carved, so to speak, with disproportionate labour by a potent man of
letters whose habitual thought is on greater things. It is for these
reasons that Jonson is even better in the epigram and in occasional verse
where rhetorical finish and pointed wit less interfere with the spontaneity
and emotion which we usually associate with lyrical poetry. There are no
such epitaphs as Ben Jonson's, witness the charming ones on his own
children, on Salathiel Pavy, the child-actor, and many more; and this even
though the rigid law of mine and thine must now restore to William Browne
of Tavistock the famous lines beginning: "Underneath this sable hearse."
Jonson is unsurpassed, too, in the difficult poetry of compliment, seldom
falling into fulsome praise and disproportionate similtude, yet showing
again and again a generous appreciation of worth in others, a
discriminating taste and a generous personal regard. There was no man in
England of his rank so well known and universally beloved as Ben Jonson.
The list of his friends, of those to whom he had written verses, and those
who had written verses to him, includes the name of every man of prominence
in the England of King James. And the tone of many of these productions
discloses an affectionate familiarity that speaks for the amiable
personality and sound worth of the laureate. In 1619, growing unwieldy
through inactivity, Jonson hit upon the heroic remedy of a journey afoot to
Scotland. On his way thither and back he was hospitably received at the
houses of many friends and by those to whom his friends had recommended
him. When he arrived in Edinburgh, the burgesses met to grant him the
freedom of the city, and Drummond, foremost of Scottish poets, was proud to
entertain him for weeks as his guest at Hawthornden. Some of the noblest
of Jonson's poems were inspired by friendship. Such is the fine "Ode to
the memory of Sir Lucius Cary and Sir Henry Moryson," and that admirable
piece of critical insight and filial affection, prefixed to the first
Shakespeare folio, "To the memory of my beloved master, William
Shakespeare, and what he hath left us." to mention only these. Nor can the
earlier "Epode," beginning "Not to know vice at all," be matchedin stately
gravity and gnomic wisdom in its own wise and stately age.

But if Jonson had deserted the stage after the publication of his folio and
up to the end of the reign of King James, he was far from inactive; for
year after year his inexhaustible inventiveness continued to contribute to
the masquing and entertainment at court. In "The Golden Age Restored,"
Pallas turns from the Iron Age with its attendant evils into statues which
sink out of sight; in "Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue," Atlas figures
represented as an old man, his shoulders covered with snow, and Comus, "the
god of cheer or the belly," is one of the characters, a circumstance which
an imaginative boy of ten, named John Milton, was not to forget. "Pan's
Anniversary," late in the reign of James, proclaimed that Jonson had not
yet forgotten how to write exquisite lyrics, and "The Gipsies
Metamorphosed" displayed the old drollery and broad humorous stroke still
unimpaired and unmatchable. These, too, and the earlier years of Charles
were the days of the Apollo Room of the Devil Tavern where Jonson presided,
the absolute monarch of English literary Bohemia. We hear of a room
blazoned about with Jonson's own judicious 'Leges Convivales' in letters of
gold, of a company made up of the choicest spirits of the time, devotedly
attached to their veteran dictator, his reminiscences, opinions,
affections, and enmities. And we hear, too, of valorous potations; but in
the words of Herrick addressed to his master, Jonson, at the Devil Tavern,
as at the Dog, the Triple Tun, and at the Mermaid,
"We such clusters had
As made us nobly wild, not mad,
And yet each verse of thine
Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine."

But the patronage of the court failed in the days of King Charles, though
Jonson was not without royal favours; and the old poet returned to the
stage, producing, between 1625 and 1633, "The Staple of News," "The New
Inn," "The Magnetic Lady," and "The Tale of a Tub," the last doubtless
revised from a much earlier comedy. None of these plays met with any
marked success, although the scathing generalisation of Dryden that
designated them "Jonson's dotages" is unfair to their genuine merits. Thus
the idea of an office for the gathering, proper dressing, and promulgation
of news (wild flight of the fancy in its time) was an excellent subject for
satire on the existing absurdities among the newsmongers; although as much
can hardly be said for "The Magnetic Lady," who, in her bounty, draws to
her personages of differing humours to reconcile them in the end according
to the alternative title, or "Humours Reconciled." These last plays of the
old dramatist revert to caricature and the hard lines of allegory; the
moralist is more than ever present, the satire degenerates into personal
lampoon, especially of his sometime friend, Inigo Jones, who appears
unworthily to have used his influence at court against the broken-down old
poet. And now disease claimed Jonson, and he was bedridden for months. He
had succeeded Middleton in 1628 as Chronologer to the City of London, but
lost the post for not fulfilling its duties. King Charles befriended him,
and even commissioned him to write still for the entertainment of the
court; and he was not without the sustaining hand of noble patrons and
devoted friends among the younger poets who were proud to be "sealed of the
tribe of Ben."

Jonson died, August 6, 1637, and a second folio of his works, which he had
been some time gathering, was printed in 1640, bearing in its various parts
dates ranging from 1630 to 1642. It included all the plays mentioned in
the foregoing paragraphs, excepting "The Case is Altered;" the masques,
some fifteen, that date between 1617 and 1630; another collection of lyrics
and occasional poetry called "Underwoods, including some further
entertainments; a translation of "Horace's Art of Poetry" (also published
in a vicesimo quarto in 1640), and certain fragments and ingatherings which
the poet would hardly have included himself. These last comprise the
fragment (less than seventy lines) of a tragedy called "Mortimer his Fall,"
and three acts of a pastoral drama of much beauty and poetic spirit, "The
Sad Shepherd." There is also the exceedingly interesting 'English Grammar'
"made by Ben Jonson for the benefit of all strangers out of his observation
of the English language now spoken and in use," in Latin and English; and
'Timber, or discoveries' "made upon men and matter as they have flowed out
of his daily reading, or had their reflux to his peculiar notion of the
times." The 'Discoveries', as it is usually called, is a commonplace book
such as many literary men have kept, in which their reading was chronicled,
passages that took their fancy translated or transcribed, and their passing
opinions noted. Many passage of Jonson's 'Discoveries' are literal
translations from the authors he chanced to be reading, with the reference,
noted or not, as the accident of the moment prescribed. At times he
follows the line of Macchiavelli's argument as to the nature and conduct of
princes; at others he clarifies his own conception of poetry and poets by
recourse to Aristotle. He finds a choice paragraph on eloquence in Seneca
the elder and applies it to his own recollection of Bacon's power as an
orator; and another on facile and ready genius, and translates it, adapting
it to his recollection of his fellow-playwright, Shakespeare. To call such
passages -- which Jonson never intended for publication -- plagiarism, is
to obscure the significance of words. To disparage his memory by citing
them is a preposterous use of scholarship. Jonson's prose, both in his
dramas, in the descriptive comments of his masques, and in the
'Discoveries', is characterised by clarity and vigorous directness, nor is
it wanting in a fine sense of form or in the subtler graces of diction.

When Jonson died there was a project for a handsome monument to his memory.
But the Civil War was at hand, and the project failed. A memorial, not
insufficient, was carved on the stone covering his grave in one of the
aisles of Westminster Abbey:
"O rare Ben Jonson."

FELIX E. SCHELLING.

THE COLLEGE,
PHILADELPHIA, U.S.A.

The following is a complete list of his published works: --

DRAMAS. -- Every Man in his Humour, 4to, 1601; The Case is Altered, 4to,
1609; Every Man out of his Humour, 4to, 1600; Cynthia's Revels, 4to, 1601;
Poetaster, 4to, 1602; Sejanus, 4to, 1605; Eastward Ho (with Chapman and
Marston), 4to, 1605; Volpone, 4to, 1607; Epicoene, or the Silent Woman,
4to, 1609 (?), fol., 1616; The Alchemist, 4to, 1612; Catiline, his
Conspiracy, 4to, 1611; Bartholomew Fayre, 4to, 1614 (?), fol., 1631; The
Divell is an Asse, fol., 1631; The Staple of Newes, fol., 1631; The New
Sun, 8vo, 1631, fol., 1692; The Magnetic Lady, or Humours Reconcild, fol.,
1640; A Tale of a Tub, fol., 1640; The Sad Shepherd, or a Tale of Robin
Hood, fol., 1641; Mortimer his Fall (fragment), fol., 1640.

To Jonson have also been attributed additions to Kyd's Jeronymo, and
collaboration in The Widow with Fletcher and Middleton, and in the Bloody
Brother with Fletcher.

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