Introducción a la Literatura Inglesa: Jonson

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martes, 2 de noviembre de 2021

2. LITERATURA INGLESA RENACENTISTA

El día 2 trataremos sobre Donne, Marvell y la literatura de mediados del siglo XVII, terminando el tema 2. Y pasamos la semana siguiente al tema 3 (literatura de la Restauración y Siglo XVIII) empezando por JOHN MILTON.

En la Sección B, seguimos con el Tema 7, con Philip Larkin y Harold Pinter: Literatura inglesa y norteamericana 1900-1960.

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Algunos prosistas ingleses de la primera mitad del siglo XVII:

Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

_____. Essays. 1597, 1612, 1625. Observaciones sobre prudencia, gobierno, sabiduría, y ética, por parte de un político importante.
_____. The Advancement of Learning. 1605. Una panorámica del conocimiento de su época y de sus progresos.
_____. Novum Organum. 1620. Una nueva teoría de la ciencia experimental, en oposición a Aristóteles.
_____. The New Atlantis. 1627. Una visión utópica del futuro de la ciencia.

Robert Burton (1577-1640)
_____. The Anatomy of Melancholy. 1621-1638. (An encyclopedic baroque treatise on depression, madness, and love melancholy).

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
_____. De Cive. 1642. English trans 1651.
_____. Human Nature: or The Fundamental Elements of Policy. 1650.
_____. De Corpore Politico: or the Elements of Law, Moral and Politick. 1650.
_____. Leviathan: Or the Matter, Form, and Power of A Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil. Political philosophy. 1651. (Una de las principales obras de teoría política de todos los tiempos, y una justificación del poder absoluto del Estado).
_____. The Elements of Philosophy. 1655.
_____. Opera philosophica quae Latine scripsit. 1668.
_____. Behemoth: The History of the Causes of the Civil Wars of England. 1679, rev. ed. 1681.
_____, trans. The Iliads and Odysses of Homer. 1675.

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Más sobre el gran filósofo Thomas Hobbes (NIVEL AVANZADO)

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Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682)
_____. Religio Medici. 1643. Una defensa de la fe y de la moderación en religión, desde el punto de vista anglicano.
_____. Vulgar Errors (Pseudodoxia Epidemica). 1646. Una colección de curiosidades históricas y científicas, y refutación de errores populares al respecto.
_____. Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial... together with The Garden of Cyrus. 1658. Una meditación sobre la mortalidad y las sepulturas, y otra sobre la estructura numérica del universo.

Repaso histórico:
Algunos acontecimientos importantes del siglo XVII inglés:

Reinado de Jacobo I ("The Jacobean age") 1603-1625. Unión de las coronas inglesa y escocesa (pero no de los reinos). Colonias anglicanas en Virginia.
The Gunpowder Plot (1605) - "Guy Fawkes Day," the 5th of November. Odio público a los católicos.

Reinado de su hijo Charles I ("The Caroline age"), 1625-1649. Supremacía anglicana, y nuevas colonias (puritanas) en Nueva Inglaterra.

Guerras civiles y primera revolución: 1640-48 - "Long Parliament" y Commonwealth. Supresión de la Iglesia anglicana (y de los teatros y fiestas populares).

Ejecución de Charles I (1649). Oliver Cromwell, "Lord Protector" (1653-58) (Sobre estos acontecimientos puede verse la película MATAR A UN REY (To Kill a King)).

Restauración de Charles II (1660-85), del anglicanismo y de los teatros y fiestas populares.

James II (Jacobo II, hermano de Charles II) reina 1685-88 - reacción contra el rey católico.

Segunda revolución inglesa (1688) - Reinado de William of Orange y Mary II (hija de James II). Monarquía parlamentaria.

Unión de los reinos de Inglaterra y Escocia: The United Kingdom of Great Britain (bajo Queen Anne, hija de James II, en 1707).

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Finales de octubre-principios de noviembre. Dejamos atrás a Shakespeare, y nuestros siguientes autores de las lecturas serán por este orden Ben Jonson, John Donne, y Andrew Marvell, terminando así el tema 2. Traed sus lecturas, es importante tener los textos a mano en clase para hacer notas, etc. Mirad que leer literatura clásica es una manera intensiva de practicar y aprender inglés, para mejorar el nivel.

A continuación empezaremos el tema 3, "Literatura inglesa 1660-1800" con otro de los principales clásicos ingleses, John Milton.

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ANDREW MARVELL        (1621-1678)

English metaphysical poet and satirist, born in Yorkshire, lived in Kingston-upon-Hull, studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, BA 1639; father died while he was a student; patronized by wealthy friends, 1640s travels widely in Europe, visits Constantinople; 1651-2 tutor for Sir Thomas Fairfax's family at Nunappleton, Yorkshire; later tutor employed by Oliver Cromwell near Eton; then lived in London, 1657 assistant to Milton as Latin Secretary; 1660, 1661 MP for Hull, 1662-5 diplomatic secretary in Holland and Russia; Opposition MP for Hull, salaried by constituents; friend of Prince Rupert, anti-Government satirist under the Restoration, anti-Anglican polemicist, refused employment and bribes from the King, died of a 'tertian ague', some say poisoned; buried at St. Giles; poems published posthumously by his housekeeper or alleged wife.

_____. "An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland." Written 1650.
_____. "Upon Appleton House." Poem. 1651, pub. 1678.
_____. "Bermudas." Poem. c. 1650.
_____. "The Garden." Poem. c. 1650. Luminarium:
    http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/marvell/garden.htm
_____. "The Mower against Gardens." Poem. c. 1650.
http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/marvell/mowagainst.htm
_____. "To His Coy Mistress."    c. 1650. http://www.poetsgraves.co.uk/Classic%20Poems/Marvell/to_his_coy_mistress.htm
_____. (Anon.). An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England.... Prose satire. "Amsterdam", 1678. (Folio).
_____. Miscellaneous Poems. 1681.

Sobre Andrew Marvell, unos apuntes complementarios.

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JOHN DONNE (1572-1631)
English metaphysical poet, b. London, Catholic gentry stock; st. Oxford, Cambridge, Lincoln's Inn; travelled Spain and Italy; secretary to Lord Chancellor and MP; secretly married patron's niece Anne More, dismissed in disgrace; many children, impoverished gentry, l. Surrey, ordained Anglican Priest; favour at King James's Court, Dean of St. Paul's, theatrical preacher, notorious weaver of paradoxes and alambicated wit.

_____. "Songs and Sonets" —in Poems.
_____. "Elegies"—in Poems.
_____. "Satires." —in Poems.
_____. Biathanatos. Discourse on suicide. Written 1608, posth. pub.
_____. Pseudo-Martyr. Discourse against Catholics. 1610.
_____. Ignatius His Conclave. Prose satire. 1610-11.
_____. The First Anniversary. Elegy. 1611.
_____. "Divine Poems." —in Poems.
_____. Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. 1624.
_____. Poems. 1633. 2nd ed. 1635.
_____. Essays in Divinity. 1651.

Apuntes sobre Donne:

John Donne. In Luminarium:
http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/index.html

Some notes on John Donne (from The Penguin Short History of English Literature).

-A note on the metaphysical poets and the metaphysical conceit.

- Un famoso pasaje de las Devotions upon Emergent Occasions de Donne—no es propiamente un poema, pero también lo es: No Man is an Island.

Otro famoso poema de Donne: "The Canonization": http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173353

- John Donne, Sonnet XIX - O to vex me...

- Sobre "The Good-Morrow" está esta explicación que hice yo hace tiempo, o esta otra en vídeo.

John Donne: NIVEL AVANZADO

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NIVEL AVANZADO: Dos poemas de otros "poetas metafísicos" anglicanos:

- George Herbert: "Prayer, 1".

- Henry Vaughan: "The Retreat."

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BEN JONSON (1572-1637)

English dramatist and poet, born in Westminster, orphaned son of a Protestant minister, studied at Westminster School, left Cambridge without a degree, apprenticed as bricklayer to his stepfather; volonteer in Flanders army 1592, killed enemy in single combat, actor in London c. 1594, imprisoned for manslaughter, converted to Catholicism for some time, married 1594, 2 children died; returned to Anglicanism 1606; pensioned by the King 1616; honorary MA Oxford 1619; poet for aristocratic patrons, apologist of Stuart royalty; neoclassical theorist and literary authority, overweight and hard drinker; model for Cavalier poets and Restoration dramatists.

_____. Every Man in his Humour. Comedy. 1596, 1598. (Prologue)
_____. Cynthia's Revels. Drama. 1600.
_____. Every Man Out of His Humour. Comedy. 1600.
_____. The Poetaster. Comedy. Acted at Blackfriars, 1601.
_____. Sejanus His Fall. Tragedy. 1603.
_____. The Masque of Blackness. Acted 1605.
_____. Volpone. Comedy. 1606.
_____. Epicoene: Or, The Silent Woman. Comedy. 1609-10.
_____. The Masque of Queens. 1609.
_____. The Alchemist. Comedy. c. 1610.
_____. Catiline His Conspiracy. Tragedy. Pub. 1611.
_____. Love Restored. Masque. 1612.
_____. Bartholomew Fair. Comedy. 1614.
_____. The Workes of Beniamin Jonson. 1616.
_____. "To the Memory of my Beloved, Master William Shakespeare, and What He Has Left Us." 1623.
_____. The Staple of Newes. Comedy. 1626.
_____. Works. 2nd ed. 1640. (Including: Timber: Or, Discoveries, criticism).

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Some notes on Ben Jonson

Ben Jonson: NIVEL AVANZADO

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El lunes 2 seguiremos con Ben Jonson, y pasamos rápidamente a Donne y Marvell, para terminar la unidad 2.

El 25 y 26 de octubre seguimos centrados en Shakespeare, y pasamos a continuación a Ben Jonson.

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NIVEL AVANZADO: Hamlet.

Richard II: The Deposition Scene (IV.1)

As You Like It: All the World's a Stage

Macbeth: The Sleepwalking Scene (V.1)

SHAKESPEARE - MÁS MATERIALES A NIVEL AVANZADO

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Esta semana vemos algo de Shakespeare. Leed algo por anticipado— o id recuperando algo de lecturas pasadas si preferís. Voy añadiendo materiales relativos a los temas ya vistos en clase, en cada una de las unidades.

No olvidéis traer los textos a clase. Procuraremos leer todos los días un ratito, y traducir y comentar al paso. Así pues, esta semana Shakespeare primero, y después pasamos a Jonson, Donne y Marvell, por ese orden.

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Una introducción a Shakespeare en su contexto histórico (nivel algo avanzado).

En Project Gutenberg tenéis los textos completos de todas las obras de Shakespeare. Por ejemplo:

The Tragedy of King Richard II

(the deposition scene: 4.1)

Hay muchas películas sobre obras de Shakespeare. Sobre el mismo Shakespeare, una película reciente recomendable es All Is True (El último acto), de Kenneth Branagh. Aquí una canción de Shakespeare de esta película: "Fear No More".

Seguimos mientras añadiendo autores del siglo XX en la SECCIÓN B

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WORKS BY SHAKESPEARE

William Shakespeare (1564-1616), born and dead in Stratford-upon-Avon, leading dramatist with the King's Men at the Globe Theatre, London; poet and actor; collaborated with Ben Jonson, Marston, and Fletcher; major writer of history plays, comedies, tragicomedies, tragedies and dramatic romances. Total dramatist, both realistic, poetic and metadramatic; keen sense of the stage and of social dramatism; artificer of creative language, of complex and diverse characters, and of fast-moving plots usually based on previous dramas or stories.

EARLY WORKS (1589-93):

Titus Andronicus
The Comedy of Errors
Henry VI (3 parts)
Richard III

and later (1593-97)

The Taming of the Shrew
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
Love's Labour's Lost
Romeo and Juliet
King John
Richard II
A Midsummer Night's Dream
The Merchant of Venice

Venus and Adonis (1593)
The Rape of Lucrece (1594)

MIDDLE WORKS (1598-1604)

Henry IV (2 parts)
Henry V
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Much Ado About Nothing
Julius Caesar
As You Like It
Hamlet
Twelfth Night
Troilus and Cressida
All's Well that Ends Well
Measure for Measure

LATER TRAGEDIES (1605-8):

Othello
King Lear
Macbeth
Antony and Cleopatra
Coriolanus
Timon of Athens

ROMANCES AND LAST WORKS

The Sonnets (1609)

Pericles
Cymbeline
The Winter's Tale
The Tempest

Henry VIII
The Two Noble Kinsmen

Collected plays in the "First Folio", a.k.a.
Mr William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories and Tragedies, 1623.

UNA COMEDIA FESTIVA DE SHAKESPEARE (EN ESPAÑOL). NOCHE DE REYES, por Morfeo Teatro, grupo de teatro de nuestra Facultad.

(Nuestra selección, min. 25)

An introductory lesson on Shakespeare. There are a few mistakes, but anyway it's lively and worth hearing.

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Sección B: Recordatorio: Id estudiando a la par los autores del siglo XX. Ahora vamos por la Unidad 6.
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SECCIÓN A:

Una introducción sencillita a Shakespeare, en español: "La Biblioteca: William Shakespeare": https://soundcloud.com/cesarvidal/la-biblioteca-050516

- Y otra en inglés: https://youtu.be/QPMbnodlFgM

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NIVEL AVANZADO:

Shakespeare: Nivel avanzado

Una lección sobre King Lear, una de sus grandes tragedias.

En español, una representación de Hamlet (Estudio 1).

Entrar en Shakespeare es no salir. Quien quiera ampliar conocimientos sobre él (y es, dicho mal y pronto, el autor más importante que haya escrito jamás en cualquier literatura) tiene millones de páginas en Internet. Ask Google.

Y unas notas sobre dos contemporáneos que precedieron a Shakespeare: Kyd y Marlowe.

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Con los Pilares acabamos la primera fase del curso "antes de Shakespeare". Momento de reflexión y evaluación sobre la marcha del curso...

- ¿Seguís bien las clases? Si hay problemas de comprensión, etc.—se admiten más preguntas en clase, y consulta de dudas en tutorías. Quienes no asistan, espero que lleven una marcha de estudio constante sin embargo, porque no es en absoluto recomendable el intentar prepararse esta asignatura en unas pocas semanas antes del examen.

- ¿Tenéis material adecuado? Habéis comprado, en efecto, un buen diccionario, un buen manual o dos, de literatura inglesa y norteamericana?

- ¿Consultáis con regularidad esta web y los materiales adicionales? ¿Os acordáis de traer a clase las lecturas al día? ¿Vais siguiendo por vuestra cuenta la sección B del programa (siglo XX), a la par que la sección A?

Si no es el caso, ahora estáis a tiempo de coger la marcha, que aún estamos iniciando el curso. Pero si no lo habéis hecho hasta ahora, pensad que requiere quizá un cambio de hábitos y más horario semanal dedicado al estudio de esta asignatura.

Id decidiendo ya si queréis hacer trabajos de curso o solamente examen final, y organizad el trabajo de modo acorde. Si alguien quiere hacer los trabajos en forma de presentación en clase, que me aviste para fijar fecha.

- Para la preparación de la materia del examen: tened en cuenta que una pregunta del tema será el nombre de uno de los autores de la sección A del programa, para hacer una redacción en inglés sobre él. Otro tema de redacción (a elegir entre el primero y éste) será más amplio, sobre un género y época, tipo "La poesía en el Renacimiento"—pero naturalmente conviene hablar en ella de los autores y lecturas que conozcáis relacionados con esa cuestión, y utilizar tanto lo que oigáis en clase o preparéis con manuales, como vuestra propia experiencia de lectura. El comentario / traducción (parte principal del examen) puede ser de cualquier texto del programa, pero si pongo un texto de la sección B será a elegir con otro de la sección A.

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El 9 de octubre leeremos algo de Spenser (The Faerie Queene), y pasamos a Shakespeare.

English drama before Shakespeare:

- Medieval Mysteries and Moralities

- Humanist drama:

John Heywood, The Play of the Weather. 1533.

Nicholas Udall, Ralph Roister Doister. c. 1552.

Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, Gorboduc. 1562.

- The University Wits:

John Lyly, Sapho and Phao. 1584.
_____. Endimion. 1591.

- Robert Greene, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. c. 1589.

- Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy. 1580s.

- Christopher Marlowe,
_____. Tamburlaine the Great. c. 1586.
_____. The Jew of Malta. c. 1592.
_____. Edward II. 1593.
_____. Doctor Faustus. c. 1592-93.

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Después de los Pilares, pasamos a la unidad 2 - Renaissance literature. Necesitaremos los textos de Sidney, Spenser y Shakespeare (de éste hay varios).

El lunes hablamos sobre todo de un par de poetas renacentistas, Sidney y Spenser. Sobre ambos hay material en Luminarium, un interesante sitio web sobre literatura inglesa clásica que tenéis recomendado en el programa.

"Sir Philip Sidney." At Luminarium.org
http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/sidney.htm

Luego pasaremos a Shakespeare, de quien hay una selección más larga de fragmentos. Id leyendo lo que podáis, y traed a clase los textos. También se pueden consultar problemas de comprensión con las lecturas en tutorías, tomando nota de vuestras dudas.

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SIR PHILIP SIDNEY (1554-1586)

English renaissance poet, critic and man of letters, aristocratic courtier under Elizabeth, and Protestant leader; d. in combat at Zutphen, Low Countries.

_____. Arcadia. Prose romance. 1580s, pub. 1590.
_____. Astrophil and Stella. Sonnet sequence. c. 1582, pub. 1591, 1598. (Sonnet 1 - Sonnet 45)
_____. An Apologie for Poetry or The Defence of Poetry. Discourse. Written c. 1580, pub. 1595.

- A video lecture on Sidney - Astrophil and Stella

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NIVEL AVANZADO:

- The English humanists

- A video documentary on Sir Philip Sidney.

- The Elizabethan Sonnet

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EDMUND SPENSER (1552-1599)

English poet, b. London middle classes, st. Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, MA 1576; colonist in Ireland, advocates famine and genocide, victim of Irish rebellion, Elizabethan courtier, quasi-Poet laureate.

_____. "Visions" and sonnets, trans. from Petrarch and du Bellay.
_____. The Shepheards Calendar. 1579.
_____. "Astrophel." Elegy on Sir Philip Sidney.
_____. Complaints. 1591.
_____. Colin Clouts come Home again. Pastoral. 1595.
_____. Amoretti. Sonnet sequence. c. 1595.
_____. Four Hymns on Love and Beauty. 1596.
_____. Epithalamion. Poem. 1595
_____. Prothalamion. Poem. 1596.
_____. The Faerie Queene. Unfinished epic poem. Books 1-3, 1590. Then 1596, 1609.
_____. A View of the Present State of Ireland. 1596, pub. 1603.

Sonnet 54 from Amoretti.

Jonson in Coote

On Ben Jonson. From The Penguin Short History of English Literature, by Stephen Coote (1993).

("Shakespeare and the Drama: 1500-1642", 12):

...

Shakespeare's work is never (...) openly autobiographical. Indeed, on the level of personality, England's greatest poet remains her most enigmatic. In studying the works we come no nearer to the man. Rather, Shakespeare is so wholly absorbed in his art—in the imaginative exploration of mankind through the dramatist's resources of language, action, and role-play—that what we do come to appreciate is the inexhaustible richness of human invention itself. In the noble words of Ben Jonson: 'He was not of an age, but for all time'.

The tribute paid to Shakespeare by Jonson (1572-1637) was the more generous for the rivalry he felt towards the greater man, but if Jonson awarded Shakespeare the honours of posterity, he gained for himself some of those offered by his age. He was effectively Poet Laureate (pensioned, but not titled) and, though his later years were spent in poverty, the nobility of England attended his funeral in recognition of his genius.

Jonson—convivial, critical, the pundit of his age—remains a fine writer of lyric, a great satirist and a major figure in that classical and humanist tradition of literature which stretches from Sidney, through Milton and Dryden, to the other Johnson and Gray. That this tradition of humane, decorous, yet profoundly experienced poetry was also the standard by which to satirize his times is given dramatic form in Jonson's Poetaster (1601) where the serene values of Virgil and Horace are juxtaposed to seventeenth-century pretenders to art.

Jonson's two surviving tragedies derive from Roman history. The first is by far the greater, though neither was a popular success. Sejanus (1603) presents the emperor Tiberius's bestial reign of terror in a Rome where, amid parasites and fearful hypocrites—people swollen to distortion with their desire for power—liberty, language and human worth are crushed in the self-destructive intricacy of machination. In Catiline (1611), Jonson shows the working of conspiracy with an even darker and self-conscious scholarship, but the play cannot be counted a dramatic success, and it is in his comedies of city life that we find Jonson's most telling portrayal of human folly. These works were profoundly influenced by classical theory. They also relate to a rich and varied native tradition which they effortlessly transcend. To this last we should briefly turn.

The rapid expansion of population and mercantile activity in London was a leading phenomenon of the age, and theatres like the Fortune produced plays designed to please the merchant classes. The immensely prolific Thomas Heywood (?1575-c. 1641), for example, wrote The Four Prentices of London (c. 1592-1600) in which the heroes are noble yet 'of city trades they have no scorn'. In the second part of If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody (1605), praise of the great merchant Sir Thomas Gresham combines with intense patriotism. Domestic virtue and moral edification are again central to Old Fortunatus (1599) by Thomas Dekker (?1572-1632) while in the same year Dekker produced The Shoemaker's Holiday in which imaginative comic prose, romance and touching marital fidelity are allied to the eternally comfortable story of an apprentice's rise to the position of Lord Major.

Dekker's seemingly unlikely collaboration with the tragedian Webster in Westward Ho! (1604) and Northward Ho! (1605) led him beyond the praise of 'a fine life, a velvet life, a careful life'. Others were actively to criticize citizen tastes in drama however, and the most lasting exposure of the works produced for this market is The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607) by Francis Beaumont (1584-1616). This piece is both a kind-hearted burlesque and a clever exercise on the idea of the play within the play. Contrasts between chivalry, modern aristocratic values and merchant ideals here centre around the sympathetic figure of Rafe, the apprentice and comic knight errant.

A more bitterly satirical humour is to be found in the comedies of George Chapman (c. 1560-1634) and John Marston (1576-1634). Cynicism is a marked tone in Chapman's work in the form, while Marston's comedies are the work of a verse satirist and reveal the aggressive and twisted syntax characteristic of that genre. Jonson himself came into collision with Marston and Dekker in the so-called 'war of the theatres'. He had already completed Nashe's The Isle of Dogs (1597) and been imprisoned for sedition as a result. Shortly after finishing the first version of Every Man in His Humour (1598, revised by 1616) he duelled with a fellow actor, killed him, and only escaped the gallows through a legal technicality. In Every Man Out of His Humour (1599)—a drama of plays within plays which discusses the problems of play writing and then satirizes the nature of satire—Jonson lightly critized Marlowe in the figure of Clove. Marston himself had recently essayed an unfortunate eulogy of Jonson in his revision of the anti-theatrical diatribe Histriomastix (c. 1599), a portrait which is in fact nearer to parody.

Marston retaliated to the figure of Clove with an open caricature of Jonson in Jack Drum's Entertainment (c. 1600). He received his rebuff in Cynthia's Revels (1600), a boys' company play satirizing the follies of the court. The work is reminiscent of Lyly, and contains the exquisite lyric 'Queen and huntress, chaste and fair.' Jonson's Poetaster, written for Paul's Boys, presents caricatures of Marston and Dekker among the pretenders to art in Augustan Rome and triumphed completely over Marston's What You Will (c. 1601). Dekker was now recruited on Marston's side with his Satiromastix (1601), but Jonson himself tried to rise above the fray with Sejanus. Then—such is the abiding nature of the literary world—he collaborated with Marston and Chapman in Eastward Ho (1605), voluntarily joining his co-authors in prison when the play was considered seditious. However, in the following year, the King's Men gave a triumphantly successful performance of Jonson's Volpone, one of the great comic masterpieces of the English stage.

All Jonson's immense energies are focused in Volpone where he deals with one of his most characteristic themes: the corruption wrought by greed on those obsessive and fantastic creatures who dupe each onther on the lunatic finges of an enterprise culture. 'This', Jonson wrote, 'is the money-get mechanic age', and Volpone's cunning scheme for getting money makes gold itself the object of a parody religion.

As a rich man without heirs, Volpone adds to his wealth through the brives offered the apparently dying man by those hoping for an advantageous mention in his will. To secure this, people will disinherit their children, pervert the law and prostitute their wives. Volpone's bedroom becomes the centre of inverted human values where money is gained without real work, innocence is all but corrupted by glittering lust, and men are reduced to the foxes, flies, vultures, ravens and crows which give them their names.

To draw his heroic caricature of materialism, Jonson turned to a wide range of sources, his classical training especially. There was nothing frigid or pedantic about this. He confined his play largely within the unities of time (twenty-four hours), place (Venice) and action (the refusal to admit material distracting from the main narrative), not because Renaissance scholars loved Aristotle had promulgated such rules as laws. He did it because these devices help concentrate the dramatic excitement. Again, Jonson did not reduce his characters to types because Terence and Plautus had done so, but because an overmastering obsession or 'humour' caricatures itself, as the anonymous writers of medieval Morality plays had been aware. If older forms helped give a framework, the foundation of Volpone is passionate observation.

As a result, Volpone himself throbs with something of his creator's vitality. He relishes his own play-acting, his frequent disguises and performances which eventually lead to his undoing and that of his parasite Mosca. As a result, the effect of the play is far from simple. The energy of corruption is infectious, and if we are pleased that the villain is exposed by means of his own designs, then the worthlessness of the Venetian authorities who clap him in irons gives justice itself as ironic final twist.

Epicœne, or The Silent Woman (1609) is again concerned with man as a social (or antisocial) animal. Morose tries to shelter himself from the world's din, declaring 'All discourses, but mine own, afflict me; they seem harsh, impertinent and irksome.' The world appears to justify his misanthropy. Morose tries to disinherit his nephew by marrying an apparently silent bride. She turns out, however, to be first a scold and then a boy in disguise. The comedy ends in separation rather than marriage, while its sexual ambiguities may be a taunt at the Puritans' objection to the portrayal of female roles in the theatre by boys.

The Alchemist (1610) again concerns itself with distorting dreams of gold. It is constructed in brilliant conformity to the unities and, in its earthy and imaginative richness of contemporary dialogue and folly, embodies Jonson's ideal of a comedy which employs

deeds, and language, such as men do use,
And persons, such as Comedy would choose
When she would show an image of the times,
And sport with human follies, not with crimes.

The particular follyhere is the lure of easy money: Sir Epicure Mammon's dream that through the philosopher's stone he can 'turn the age to gold'. Interestingly, it is not alchemy itself that is satirized but the attitude which sees science (which alchemy was still widely held to be) as a fulfilment of fantasy. Face, Subtle and his consort Doll Common—rogues who have employed Lovewit's house for their purpose—are adepts in manipulating vain desires in a variety of characters: Epicure Mammon himself, Abel Drugger the tobacconist, Kastril the roistering boy and the comic puritans Ananias and Tribulation Wholesome. The real transformations in The Alchemist are thus not of base metal into gold but of human folly into absurdity. When the off-stage laboratory finally blows up, fantasy explodes with it. The return of Lovewit brilliantly resolves the action but hardly restores official law and order.

A Puritan is again humiliated in Jonson' prose comedy Bartholomew Fair (1614). Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, a hypocritical creature of appetite, ends up in the stocks. The dramatic re-creation of a real fair allowed Jonson to celebrate de all-licensed, topsy-turvy world of mardi gras with great diversity of action and a matching richness of dialogue. The simple-minded Cokes is robbed, while Justice Adam Overdo, out to spy on 'enormities', also winds up in the stocks. Nonetheless, when he ends the play by inviting all to dine with him, the foolish Cokes insists they be accompanied by the puppet show which has already offered one of the best episodes in the play. The fari itself—its vitality memorably embodied in Ursula, the Pig-woman—is Jonson's image of raucuous humanity, variously hypocritical, simple, vengeful and forgiving.

The plays for the commercial theatre Jonson wrote in the later stages of his career — The Devil Is an Ass (1616), The Staple of News (1626), The New Inn (1629) and The Magnetic Lady (1632) — were harshly if not wholly inaccurately described by Dryden as his 'dotages.' A fascinating and very different aspect of Jonson's dramatic art however is revealed in the series of masques he wrote as Twelfth Night entertainments for the court of James I (1605-25). Here we see an élite drama dealing explicitly with contemporary theories of political power.

Jonson had already designed the lavish and arcane symbolism of the Scottish king's triumphal entry to his new capital, and the masques extend his exploration of James's notion of the divine right of kings: the belief that James was accountable to God alone, that his position partook of divinity and that he was endowed with supernatural wisdom. In The Golden Age Restor'd (1615), we see how classical larning, music, poetry, dance and the lavish sets of Inigo Jones (1573-1652) present James as Jove, the benevolent guide of the nation's fate. Whn the Iron Age is routed in a conventional anti-masque, Astraea or Justice heralds the return of the Golden Age. Through the Neoplatonic philosophy that underpins the Jonsonian masque, the dancing courtiers come to symbolize the completeness, harmony and peace attained by the dramatic enactment of the divine king's decrees.

The Jonsonian masque was an élite celebration of a political and cultural ideal. For many, however, these sumptuous illusions disguised a more troubled reality. Though the court encouraged the highest cultural sophistication, its moral tone was low and corruption and factionalism were rife. James's assertion of divine right gave a dangerous edge to the royal prerogative, while his reckless expenditure led to increading debt in a period of economic uncertainty and bad harvests. Further, while the king (an enthusiastic amateur theologian) failed to satisfy moderate Puritan demands for church reform, his rash creation of new titles (partly as an attempt to raise money) exacerbated a deep sense of status insecurity in a society where ancient notions of hierarchy were being eroded by the power of money and capital. This uncertainty is reflected in the work of a number of Jacobean comic writers.

The 'city' comedies of Thomas Middleton (?1580-1627), for example, combine the idiom of London life and its pace with deft plotting and realistic satire. Middleton is consistently ironic about the rabidly acquisitive London of his time. Merchants, usurers, idle aristocrats and an extravagant gentry are all exposed in a world where it is increasingly the cleverest rather than the most virtuous who succeed. In A Trick to Catch the Old One (1605), surface cleverness works alongside deeper moral concerns with something of the force of the exempla in contemporary Puritan sermons. A Mad World, my Masters (1605) represents the marriage of a whore to a dupe, while in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1611) sex is traded for money as the appetites and restless folly of city life controls the gulls and cheats who populate it. Philip Massinger (1583-1640) borrowed the plot of A Trick to Catch the Old One in A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1621), turning it to different and Jonsonian purposes in the humiliation of the great comic figure of Sir Giles Overreach, the loan shark. Overreach is the focus of Massinger's violent and deeply conservative satire of a corrupt Jacobean world, a world where titles are sold to the nouveaux riches and, as traditional social ties collapse, so madness looms.

....

("From Donne to Dryden", 2):

The courtiers addressed by Donne in many of his sermons were also the recipients of verses by Ben Jonson (1572-1637), and it is a measure of Jonson's stature that, in addition to being one of the leading playwrights of the age, he was also its most influential court poet.

Drawing extensively on the classics and Renaissance theorists, Jonson's non-dramatic poetry elaborates the ideals and criticizes the shortcomings of those involved in his vision of a cultured, socially responsible life of 'manners, arms and arts'. In these works, Jonson thus aspired to a seventeenth-century version of the urbane and moral gentleman of Latin literature: sociable yet self-contained, grave but unpedantic, a man in whom the virtues of the golden mean have been refeined in the fires of art and personal integrity. Jonson thereby presents himself as an arbiter of civil virtue, an English Horace.

In the prose of his Timber, or Discoveries (1640-41), and often through extensive and unacknowledged paraphrase of Vives and other scholars, Jonson showed how the classical basis of his poetry was rooted in nature, exercise, imitation, study and art. The classical rhetoricians were the masters of his particular practice. Their works were to be used only as guides however, not as commanders. What Jonson was seeking was to relate an awareness of his own time to the timeless values of the past, and to do so in a distinctive idiom. To achieve this, he perfected the rhetoric of the middle voice in which he declared: 'the language is plain, and pleasing; even without stopping, round without swelling; all well tuned, composed, elegant, and accurate'.

These qualities can be seen in Jonson's Epigrams, 'the ripest of my studies'. In pieces such as 'Inviting a Friend to Supper', the courteous social tone, tinged with fantasy, is modulated through reminiscences of Martial to create the ideal of a shared and civilized enjoyment of good food, good talk and good books. A sense of self-knowledge and self-respect, of constancy tempered by experience, is the subject of 'An Epistle Answering to One that Asked to Be Sealed of the Tribe of Ben', an informal group that numbered some of the finest intellects of the age.

A shared sense of high values is also clear in Jonson's praise of other literary and artistic men, though this was something that did not always come naturally to him. The torrential release of pent-up irritation in 'An Expostulation with Inigo Jones' vividly suggests Jonson's envy of a rival's success at court and his refusal to believe that this great architect and scene designer's skills ranked with his own poetic arts. Jonson's tribute to William Camden, his master at Westminster, achieves a moving reverence. When Jonson writes of Shakespeare however, in a poem printed in the First Folio, his lines are among the most generous of the age.

Jonson's epitaphs to his children temper contradictory feelings of grief and Christian acceptance through an art that seems to belie the emotions that sustain it. In Jonson's two odes to himself, his deep feeling for the integrity of that art is asserted against the allegedly gimcrack tastes of his age. In his few religious pieces, such art also expresses a sinner's measured awareness of his own iniquity.

A contemporary is supposed to have declared that Jonson 'never writes of love, or, if he does, does it not naturally'. This is hard but not wholly unfair. 'My Picture Left in Scotland' has a delicate, honest pathos, and Jonson was capable of both the shrewd cynicism of 'That Women Are but Men's Shadows' as well as the artifice and high compliment 'Drink to me only with thine eyes'. In 'See the chariot at hand here of Love', such artifice creates its own exotic sense of wonder:

Have you seen but a bright lily grow,
    Before rude hand hath touch'd it?
Ha' you mark'd but the fall o'the snow
    Before the soil hath smutch'd it?
Ha' you felt the wool o'the beaver?
    Or swan's down ever?
Or have smelt o'the bud of the brier?
    Or the nard in the fire?
Or have tasted the bag of the bee?
O so white! O so soft! O so sweet is she!
                                (nard: ambergris)

It is as the poet of the civilized aristocratic community however that Jonson is at his best, the mutual and by no means automatic respect of patron and poet serving to create a Roman ideal of behaviour, an aristocracy of mind as much as birth. Consequently, Jonson was a fine writer of eulogies. These, as in the excellent 'To Sir Robert Wroth', are often tempered by a moral concern for the corruptions of the city and court, a feeling for the virtues of country existence and a piety in which the classical ideal of the good life blends easily with a restrained Christian faith. Bravery, patriotism and friendship—the aristocratic life of action—are celebrated in the Pindaric ode to Cary and Morrison, but it is a tribute to the breadth of Jonson's classicism that he could also celebrate the scatological and mock-heroic exuberance of 'On the Famous Voyage'.

Such poems to the aristocracy suggest the great importance of patronage to the creative life of the age. When Jonson wrote in praise of his patroness the Countess of Bedford, for example, a new image of woman emerged, one that was aristocratic, liberal and educated, and allowed her to move on an equal and graceful footing with men. In 'A Farewell for a Gentlewoman', this is tempered by a stoic, Christian rejection of worldliness. In one of Jonson's finest achievements, the 'Elegy on Lady Jane Paulet', such faith creates a genuine sense of exultation.

It is in 'To Penshurst' however that such concerns combined to form Jonson's supreme evocation of Christian humanism as well as a work which inaugurated the important tradition of the country-house poem. The ancestral seat of the Sidneys here becomes the focus of all aspects of the good life. Modest yet dignified, blessed by the heritage of a great poet and rich in the bounty of nature, Penshurst is the centre of a humane community where all—peasant and poet—join in Sir Robert's courteous hospitality. Rural England is remade through the classics into an image of harmony, decency and integrity, fit and able to welcome the king and so be part of a patriotic ideal. And at the basis of this public excellence lies private virtue. The lady of the house is 'noble, fruitful, chaste withal', while the children, encouraged in rectitude by the example of their parents, are pious and keen to learn the ways of aristocratic merit. Jonson's vision is thus comprehensive and humane, Christian and classical, private and public. However we may question its political implications, it remains a noble image of a civilizing ideal.

Will Durant on Ben Jonson

—oOo—

martes, 22 de octubre de 2019

Ben Jonson - NIVEL AVANZADO

Ben Jonson: apuntes a NIVEL AVANZADO

Felix E. Schelling, Introduction to Every Man Out of His Humour— a longer introduction to Ben Jonson's life and literary career:

THE greatest of English dramatists except Shakespeare, the first literary dictator and poet-laureate, a writer of verse, prose, satire, and criticism who most potently of all the men of his time affected the subsequent course of English letters: such was Ben Jonson, and as such his strong personality assumes an interest to us almost unparalleled, at least in his age.

Ben Jonson came of the stock that was centuries after to give to the world Thomas Carlyle; for Jonson's grandfather was of Annandale, over the Solway, whence he migrated to England. Jonson's father lost his estate under Queen Mary, "having been cast into prison and forfeited." He entered the church, but died a month before his illustrious son was born, leaving his widow and child in poverty. Jonson's birthplace was Westminster, and the time of his birth early in 1573. He was thus nearly ten years Shakespeare's junior, and less well off, if a trifle better born. But Jonson did not profit even by this slight advantage. His mother married beneath her, a wright or bricklayer, and Jonson was for a time apprenticed to the trade. As a youth he attracted the attention of the famous antiquary, William Camden, then usher at Westminster School, and there the poet laid the solid foundations of his classical learning. Jonson always held Camden in veneration, acknowledging that to him he owed,

"All that I am in arts, all that I know;"

and dedicating his first dramatic success, "Every Man in His Humour," to him. It is doubtful whether Jonson ever went to either university, though Fuller says that he was "statutably admitted into St. John's College, Cambridge." He tells us that he took no degree, but was later "Master of Arts in both the universities, by their favour, not his study." When a mere youth Jonson enlisted as a soldier, trailing his pike in Flanders in the protracted wars of William the Silent against the Spanish. Jonson was a large and raw-boned lad; he became by his own account in time exceedingly bulky. In chat with his friend William Drummond of Hawthornden, Jonson told how "in his service in the Low Countries he had, in the face of both the camps, killed an enemy, and taken opima spolia from him;" and how "since his coming to England, being appealed to the fields, he had killed his adversary which had hurt him in the arm and whose sword was ten inches longer than his." Jonson's reach may have made up for the lack of his sword; certainly his prowess lost nothing in the telling. Obviously Jonson was brave, combative, and not averse to talking of himself and his doings.

In 1592, Jonson returned from abroad penniless. Soon after he married, almost as early and quite as imprudently as Shakespeare. He told Drummond curtly that "his wife was a shrew, yet honest"; for some years he lived apart from her in the household of Lord Albany. Yet two touching epitaphs among Jonson's "Epigrams," "On my first daughter," and "On my first son," attest the warmth of the poet's family affections. The daughter died in infancy, the son of the plague; another son grew up to manhood [and] little credit to his father whom he survived. We know nothing beyond this of Jonson's domestic life.

How soon Jonson drifted into what we now call grandly "the theatrical profession" we do not know. In 1593, Marlowe made his tragic exit from life, and Greene, Shakespeare's other rival on the popular stage, had preceded Marlowe in an equally miserable death the year before. Shakespeare already had the running to himself. Jonson appears first in the employment of Philip Henslowe, the exploiter of several troupes of players, manager, and father-in-law of the famous actor, Edward Alleyn. From entries in "Henslowe's Diary," a species of theatrical account book which has been handed down to us, we know that Jonson was connected with the Admiral's men; for he borrowed 4 pounds of Henslowe, July 28, 1597, paying back 3s. 9d. on the same day on account of his "share" (in what is not altogether clear); while later, on December 3, of the same year, Henslowe advanced 20s. to him "upon a book which he showed the plot unto the company which he promised to deliver unto the company at Christmas next." In the next August Jonson was in collaboration with Chettle and Porter in a play called "Hot Anger Soon Cold." All this points to an association with Henslowe of some duration, as no mere tyro would be thus paid in advance upon mere promise. From allusions in Dekker's play, "Satiromastix," it appears that Jonson, like Shakespeare, began life as an actor, and that he "ambled in a leather pitch by a play-wagon" taking at one time the part of Hieronimo in Kyd's famous play, "The Spanish Tragedy." By the beginning of 1598, Jonson, though still in needy circumstances, had begun to receive recognition. Francis Meres — well known for his "Comparative Discourse of our English Poets with the Greek, Latin, and Italian Poets," printed in 1598, and for his mention therein of a dozen plays of Shakespeare by title — accords to Ben Jonson a place as one of "our best in tragedy," a matter of some surprise, as no known tragedy of Jonson from so early a date has come down to us. That Jonson was at work on tragedy, however, is proved by the entries in Henslowe of at least three tragedies, now lost, in which he had a hand. These are "Page of Plymouth," "King Robert II. of Scotland," and "Richard Crookback." But all of these came later, on his return to Henslowe, and range from August 1599 to June 1602.

Returning to the autumn of 1598, an event now happened to sever for a time Jonson's relations with Henslowe. In a letter to Alleyn, dated September 26 of that year, Henslowe writes: "I have lost one of my company that hurteth me greatly; that is Gabriel [Spencer], for he is slain in Hogsden fields by the hands of Benjamin Jonson, bricklayer." The last word is perhaps Henslowe's thrust at Jonson in his displeasure rather than a designation of his actual continuance at his trade up to this time. It is fair to Jonson to remark however, that his adversary appears to have been a notorious fire-eater who had shortly before killed one Feeke in a similar squabble. Duelling was a frequent occurrence of the time among gentlemen and the nobility; it was an impudent breach of the peace on the part of a player. This duel is the one which Jonson described years after to Drummond, and for it Jonson was duly arraigned at Old Bailey, tried, and convicted. He was sent to prison and such goods and chattels as he had "were forfeited." It is a thought to give one pause that, but for the ancient law permitting convicted felons to plead, as it was called, the benefit of clergy, Jonson might have been hanged for this deed. The circumstance that the poet could read and write saved him; and he received only a brand of the letter "T," for Tyburn, on his left thumb. While in jail Jonson became a Roman Catholic; but he returned to the faith of the Church of England a dozen years later.

On his release, in disgrace with Henslowe and his former associates, Jonson offered his services as a playwright to Henslowe's rivals, the Lord Chamberlain's company, in which Shakespeare was a prominent shareholder. A tradition of long standing, though not susceptible of proof in a court of law, narrates that Jonson had submitted the manuscript of "Every Man in His Humour" to the Chamberlain's men and had received from the company a refusal; that Shakespeare called him back, read the play himself, and at once accepted it. Whether this story is true or not, certain it is that "Every Man in His Humour" was accepted by Shakespeare's company and acted for the first time in 1598, with Shakespeare taking a part. The evidence of this is contained in the list of actors prefixed to the comedy in the folio of Jonson's works, 1616. But it is a mistake to infer, because Shakespeare's name stands first in the list of actors and the elder Kno'well first in the dramatis personae, that Shakespeare took that particular part. The order of a list of Elizabethan players was generally that of their importance or priority as shareholders in the company and seldom if ever corresponded to the list of characters.

"Every Man in His Humour" was an immediate success, and with it Jonson's reputation as one of the leading dramatists of his time was established once and for all. This could have been by no means Jonson's earliest comedy, and we have just learned that he was already reputed one of "our best in tragedy." Indeed, one of Jonson's extant comedies, "The Case is Altered," but one never claimed by him or published as his, must certainly have preceded "Every Man in His Humour" on the stage. The former play may be described as a comedy modelled on the Latin plays of Plautus. (It combines, in fact, situations derived from the "Captivi" and the "Aulularia" of that dramatist). But the pretty story of the beggar-maiden, Rachel, and her suitors, Jonson found, not among the classics, but in the ideals of romantic love which Shakespeare had already popularised on the stage. Jonson never again produced so fresh and lovable a feminine personage as Rachel, although in other respects "The Case is Altered" is not a conspicuous play, and, save for the satirising of Antony Munday in the person of Antonio Balladino and Gabriel Harvey as well, is perhaps the least characteristic of the comedies of Jonson.

"Every Man in His Humour," probably first acted late in the summer of 1598 and at the Curtain, is commonly regarded as an epoch-making play; and this view is not unjustified. As to plot, it tells little more than how an intercepted letter enabled a father to follow his supposedly studious son to London, and there observe his life with the gallants of the time. The real quality of this comedy is in its personages and in the theory upon which they are conceived. 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. Jonson believed that there was a professional way of doing things which might be reached by a study of the best examples, and he found these examples for the most part among the ancients. To confine our attention to the drama, Jonson objected to the amateurishness and haphazard nature of many contemporary plays, and set himself to do something different; and the first and most striking thing that he evolved was his conception and practice of the comedy of humours.

As Jonson has been much misrepresented in this matter, let us quote his own words as to "humour." A humour, according to Jonson, was a bias of disposition, a warp, so to speak, in character by which

     "Some one peculiar quality
     Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw
     All his affects, his spirits, and his powers,
     In their confluctions, all to run one way."

But continuing, Jonson is careful to add:

     "But that a rook by wearing a pied feather,
     The cable hat-band, or the three-piled ruff,
     A yard of shoe-tie, or the Switzers knot
     On his French garters, should affect a humour!
     O, it is more than most ridiculous."

Jonson's comedy of humours, in a word, conceived of stage personages on the basis of a ruling trait or passion (a notable simplification of actual life be it observed in passing); and, placing these typified traits in juxtaposition in their conflict and contrast, struck the spark of comedy. Downright, as his name indicates, is "a plain squire"; Bobadill's humour is that of the braggart who is incidentally, and with delightfully comic effect, a coward; Brainworm's humour is the finding out of things to the end of fooling everybody: of course he is fooled in the end himself. But it was not Jonson's theories alone that made the success of "Every Man in His Humour." The play is admirably written and each character is vividly conceived, and with a firm touch based on observation of the men of the London of the day. Jonson was neither in this, his first great comedy (nor in any other play that he wrote), a supine classicist, urging that English drama return to a slavish adherence to classical conditions. He says as to the laws of the old comedy (meaning by "laws," such matters as the unities of time and place and the use of chorus): "I see not then, but we should enjoy the same licence, or free power to illustrate and heighten our invention as they [the ancients] did; and not be tied to those strict and regular forms which the niceness of a few, who are nothing but form, would thrust upon us." "Every Man in His Humour" is written in prose, a novel practice which Jonson had of his predecessor in comedy, John Lyly. Even the word "humour" seems to have been employed in the Jonsonian sense by Chapman before Jonson's use of it. Indeed, the comedy of humours itself is only a heightened variety of the comedy of manners which represents life, viewed at a satirical angle, and is the oldest and most persistent species of comedy in the language. None the less, Jonson's comedy merited its immediate success and marked out a definite course in which comedy long continued to run. To mention only Shakespeare's Falstaff and his rout, Bardolph, Pistol, Dame Quickly, and the rest, whether in "Henry IV." or in "The Merry Wives of Windsor," all are conceived in the spirit of humours. So are the captains, Welsh, Scotch, and Irish of "Henry V.," and Malvolio especially later; though Shakespeare never employed the method of humours for an important personage. It was not Jonson's fault that many of his successors did precisely the thing that he had reprobated, that is, degrade the humour: into an oddity of speech, an eccentricity of manner, of dress, or cut of beard. There was an anonymous play called "Every Woman in Her Humour." Chapman wrote "A Humourous Day's Mirth," Day, "Humour Out of Breath," Fletcher later, "The Humourous Lieutenant," and Jonson, besides "Every Man Out of His Humour," returned to the title in closing the cycle of his comedies in "The Magnetic Lady or Humours Reconciled."

With the performance of "Every Man Out of His Humour" in 1599, by Shakespeare's company once more at the Globe, we turn a new page in Jonson's career. Despite his many real virtues, if there is one feature more than any other that distinguishes Jonson, it is his arrogance; and to this may be added his self-righteousness, especially under criticism or satire. "Every Man Out of His Humour" is the first of three "comical satires" which Jonson contributed to what Dekker called the poetomachia or war of the theatres as recent critics have named it. This play as a fabric of plot is a very slight affair; but as a satirical picture of the manners of the time, proceeding by means of vivid caricature, couched in witty and brilliant dialogue and sustained by that righteous indignation which must lie at the heart of all true satire — as a realisation, in short, of the classical ideal of comedy — there had been nothing like Jonson's comedy since the days of Aristophanes. "Every Man in His Humour," like the two plays that follow it, contains two kinds of attack, the critical or generally satiric, levelled at abuses and corruptions in the abstract; and the personal, in which specific application is made of all this in the lampooning of poets and others, Jonson's contemporaries. The method of personal attack by actual caricature of a person on the stage is almost as old as the drama. Aristophanes so lampooned Euripides in "The Acharnians" and Socrates in "The Clouds," to mention no other examples; and in English drama this kind of thing is alluded to again and again. What Jonson really did, was to raise the dramatic lampoon to an art, and make out of a casual burlesque and bit of mimicry a dramatic satire of literary pretensions and permanency. With the arrogant attitude mentioned above and his uncommon eloquence in scorn, vituperation, and invective, it is no wonder that Jonson soon involved himself in literary and even personal quarrels with his fellow-authors. The circumstances of the origin of this 'poetomachia' are far from clear, and those who have written on the topic, except of late, have not helped to make them clearer. The origin of the "war" has been referred to satirical references, apparently to Jonson, contained in "The Scourge of Villainy," a satire in regular form after the manner of the ancients by John Marston, a fellow playwright, subsequent friend and collaborator of Jonson's. On the other hand, epigrams of Jonson have been discovered (49, 68, and 100) variously charging "playwright" (reasonably identified with Marston) with scurrility, cowardice, and plagiarism; though the dates of the epigrams cannot be ascertained with certainty. Jonson's own statement of the matter to Drummond runs: "He had many quarrels with Marston, beat him, and took his pistol from him, wrote his "Poetaster" on him; the beginning[s] of them were that Marston represented him on the stage."*

[footnote] *The best account of this whole subject is to be found in the edition of "Poetaster" and "Satiromastix" by J. H. Penniman in "Belles Lettres Series" shortly to appear. See also his earlier work, "The War of the Theatres," 1892, and the excellent contributions to the subject by H. C. Hart in "Notes and Queries," and in his edition of Jonson, 1906.

Here at least we are on certain ground; and the principals of the quarrel are known. "Histriomastix," a play revised by Marston in 1598, has been regarded as the one in which Jonson was thus "represented on the stage"; although the personage in question, Chrisogonus, a poet, satirist, and translator, poor but proud, and contemptuous of the common herd, seems rather a complimentary portrait of Jonson than a caricature. As to the personages actually ridiculed in "Every Man Out of His Humour," Carlo Buffone was formerly thought certainly to be Marston, as he was described as "a public, scurrilous, and profane jester," and elsewhere as the grand scourge or second untruss [that is, satirist], of the time (Joseph Hall being by his own boast the first, and Marston's work being entitled "The Scourge of Villainy"). Apparently we must now prefer for Carlo a notorious character named Charles Chester, of whom gossipy and inaccurate Aubrey relates that he was "a bold impertinent fellow...a perpetual talker and made a noise like a drum in a room. So one time at a tavern Sir Walter Raleigh beats him and seals up his mouth (that is his upper and nether beard) with hard wax. From him Ben Jonson takes his Carlo Buffone ['i.e.', jester] in "Every Man in His Humour" ['sic']." Is it conceivable that after all Jonson was ridiculing Marston, and that the point of the satire consisted in an intentional confusion of "the grand scourge or second untruss" with "the scurrilous and profane" Chester?

We have digressed into detail in this particular case to exemplify the difficulties of criticism in its attempts to identify the allusions in these forgotten quarrels. We are on sounder ground of fact in recording other manifestations of Jonson's enmity. In "The Case is Altered" there is clear ridicule in the character Antonio Balladino of Anthony Munday, pageant-poet of the city, translator of romances and playwright as well. In "Every Man in His Humour" there is certainly a caricature of Samuel Daniel, accepted poet of the court, sonneteer, and companion of men of fashion. These men held recognised positions to which Jonson felt his talents better entitled him; they were hence to him his natural enemies. It seems almost certain that he pursued both in the personages of his satire through "Every Man Out of His Humour," and "Cynthia's Revels," Daniel under the characters Fastidious Brisk and Hedon, Munday as Puntarvolo and Amorphus; but in these last we venture on quagmire once more. Jonson's literary rivalry of Daniel is traceable again and again, in the entertainments that welcomed King James on his way to London, in the masques at court, and in the pastoral drama. As to Jonson's personal ambitions with respect to these two men, it is notable that he became, not pageant-poet, but chronologer to the City of London; and that, on the accession of the new king, he came soon to triumph over Daniel as the accepted entertainer of royalty.

"Cynthia's Revels," the second "comical satire," was acted in 1600, and, as a play, is even more lengthy, elaborate, and impossible than "Every Man Out of His Humour." Here personal satire seems to have absorbed everything, and while much of the caricature is admirable, especially in the detail of witty and trenchantly satirical dialogue, the central idea of a fountain of self-love is not very well carried out, and the persons revert at times to abstractions, the action to allegory. It adds to our wonder that this difficult drama should have been acted by the Children of Queen Elizabeth's Chapel, among them Nathaniel Field with whom Jonson read Horace and Martial, and whom he taught later how to make plays. Another of these precocious little actors was Salathiel Pavy, who died before he was thirteen, already famed for taking the parts of old men. Him Jonson immortalised in one of the sweetest of his epitaphs. An interesting sidelight is this on the character of this redoubtable and rugged satirist, that he should thus have befriended and tenderly remembered these little theatrical waifs, some of whom (as we know) had been literally kidnapped to be pressed into the service of the theatre and whipped to the conning of their difficult parts. To the caricature of Daniel and Munday in "Cynthia's Revels" must be added Anaides (impudence), here assuredly Marston, and Asotus (the prodigal), interpreted as Lodge or, more perilously, Raleigh. Crites, like Asper-Macilente in "Every Man Out of His Humour," is Jonson's self-complaisant portrait of himself, the just, wholly admirable, and judicious scholar, holding his head high above the pack of the yelping curs of envy and detraction, but careless of their puny attacks on his perfections with only too mindful a neglect.

The third and last of the "comical satires" is "Poetaster," acted, once more, by the Children of the Chapel in 1601, and Jonson's only avowed contribution to the fray. According to the author's own account, this play was written in fifteen weeks on a report that his enemies had entrusted to Dekker the preparation of "Satiromastix, the Untrussing of the Humorous Poet," a dramatic attack upon himself. In this attempt to forestall his enemies Jonson succeeded, and "Poetaster" was an immediate and deserved success. While hardly more closely knit in structure than its earlier companion pieces, "Poetaster" is planned to lead up to the ludicrous final scene in which, after a device borrowed from the "Lexiphanes" of Lucian, the offending poetaster, Marston-Crispinus, is made to throw up the difficult words with which he had overburdened his stomach as well as overlarded his vocabulary. In the end Crispinus with his fellow, Dekker-Demetrius, is bound over to keep the peace and never thenceforward "malign, traduce, or detract the person or writings of Quintus Horatius Flaccus [Jonson] or any other eminent man transcending you in merit." One of the most diverting personages in Jonson's comedy is Captain Tucca. "His peculiarity" has been well described by Ward as "a buoyant blackguardism which recovers itself instantaneously from the most complete exposure, and a picturesqueness of speech like that of a walking dictionary of slang."

It was this character, Captain Tucca, that Dekker hit upon in his reply, "Satiromastix," and he amplified him, turning his abusive vocabulary back upon Jonson and adding "an immodesty to his dialogue that did not enter into Jonson's conception." It has been held, altogether plausibly, that when Dekker was engaged professionally, so to speak, to write a dramatic reply to Jonson, he was at work on a species of chronicle history, dealing with the story of Walter Terill in the reign of William Rufus. This he hurriedly adapted to include the satirical characters suggested by "Poetaster," and fashioned to convey the satire of his reply. The absurdity of placing Horace in the court of a Norman king is the result. But Dekker's play is not without its palpable hits at the arrogance, the literary pride, and self-righteousness of Jonson-Horace, whose "ningle" or pal, the absurd Asinius Bubo, has recently been shown to figure forth, in all likelihood, Jonson's friend, the poet Drayton. Slight and hastily adapted as is "Satiromastix," especially in a comparison with the better wrought and more significant satire of "Poetaster," the town awarded the palm to Dekker, not to Jonson; and Jonson gave over in consequence his practice of "comical satire." Though Jonson was cited to appear before the Lord Chief Justice to answer certain charges to the effect that he had attacked lawyers and soldiers in "Poetaster," nothing came of this complaint. It may be suspected that much of this furious clatter and give-and-take was pure playing to the gallery. The town was agog with the strife, and on no less an authority than Shakespeare ("Hamlet," ii. 2), we learn that the children's company (acting the plays of Jonson) did "so berattle the common stages...that many, wearing rapiers, are afraid of goose-quills, and dare scarce come thither."

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's company 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 of broad 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 mortal 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 Humour" 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 pounds 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 similitude, 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 matched in 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 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 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 passages 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.

POEMS: Epigrams, The Forrest, Underwoods, published in fols., 1616, 1640; Selections: Execration against Vulcan, and Epigrams, 1640; G. Hor. Flaccus his art of Poetry, Englished by Ben Jonson, 1640; Leges Convivialis, fol., 1692. Other minor poems first appeared in Gifford's edition of Works.

PROSE: Timber, or Discoveries made upon Men and Matter, fol., 1641; The English Grammar, made by Ben Jonson for the benefit of Strangers, fol., 1640.
Masques and Entertainments were published in the early folios.

WORKS:

     Fol., 1616, volume. 2, 1640 (1631-41);
     fol., 1692, 1716-19, 1729;
     edited by P. Whalley, 7 volumes., 1756;
     by Gifford (with Memoir), 9 volumes., 1816, 1846;
     re-edited by F. Cunningham, 3 volumes., 1871;
     in 9 volumes., 1875;
     by Barry Cornwall (with Memoir), 1838;
     by B. Nicholson (Mermaid Series), with Introduction by
     C. H. Herford, 1893, etc.;
     Nine Plays, 1904;
     ed. H. C. Hart (Standard Library), 1906, etc;
     Plays and Poems, with Introduction by H. Morley (Universal
     Library), 1885;
     Plays (7) and Poems (Newnes), 1905;
     Poems, with Memoir by H. Bennett (Carlton Classics), 1907;
     Masques and Entertainments, ed. by H. Morley, 1890.

SELECTIONS:

     J. A. Symonds, with Biographical and Critical Essay,
     (Canterbury Poets), 1886;
     Grosart, Brave Translunary Things, 1895;
     Arber, Jonson Anthology, 1901;
     Underwoods, Cambridge University Press, 1905;
     Lyrics (Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher), the Chap Books,
     No. 4, 1906;
     Songs (from Plays, Masques, etc.), with earliest known
     setting, Eragny Press, 1906.

LIFE:

     See Memoirs affixed to Works;
     J. A. Symonds (English Worthies), 1886;
     Notes of Ben Jonson Conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden;
     Shakespeare Society, 1842;
     ed. with Introduction and Notes by P. Sidney, 1906;
     Swinburne, A Study of Ben Jonson, 1889.

To the Memory of Shakespeare

—oOo—

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