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IV. Ben Jonson (1573-1637)
Life
Ben Jonson was born on June 11, 1572. His father was a churchman, and died a
month before Jonson was born. His stepfather was a builder. The young Jonson
went to Westminster School, a strict, classics-minded grammar school. One of
his teachers was
William Camden, the historian. Jonson later wrote him as
“once my teacher, always my friend”.
Jonson did not go to university, probably because he was too
poor. He worked as a bricklayer in his stepfather's trade. However, in the
1590s he became a soldier in the Low Countries. In that place English troops
were involved in the wars between the Dutch and the Spanish. From these
wars, young Englishmen got the chance to become heroes and make advancement.
At the same time, they paid for these, for they might be killed during the
war. Jonson survived. And later he was very proud because he had killed a
man in a war in Holland.
Jonson's first plays that are kept until now are the comedies The Case is
Altered and Every Man In His Humour. They were written in the late 1590s.
However, his career nearly came to a sudden end in 1598. He fought a duel
with another actor, Gabriel Spencer, and killed him. Duels were illegal, and Jonson found that he might be sentenced to death. But he was able to escape
because of the “benefit of clergy”. According to this rule, an educated
person, able to read and translate a Latin poem from the Bible, had the
right not to be killed. But all his wealth would be taken away from him. And
a mark was burnt into his thumb to prevent him fighting a second time. Jonson changed into Catholicism while he was in prison waiting for the
sentence.
His next play, Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), was generally a "humours
comedy". The idea of the play is that dramatic characters could be created
around a single leading "humour", whether it was a mood or a goal. The
writing-style in Every Man Out of His Humour is that the play starts with humour and all
the characters are driven out of the humour. The play is new and important,
because it explicitly and metadramatically thinks about what good comedy
should consist of. Compared with this, its development of the "humour"
convention is not that important. Mitis and Cordatus, the on-stage audience
of Every Man Out of His Humour, keep up a running, quarrelling commentary.
They compared the play to old Greek and Latin plays. They approved that the
play was "neere, and familiarly allied to the time"—that is, specific and
topical—and they give the play the new generic label "comical satire".
Jonson's next play, Sejanus (1603), was a political tragedy. It was heavily
influenced by the classical literature, which he valued so highly. Once
again, the play got Jonson into trouble because of the serious picture of
real politics in action. However, even this could not be compared with
Eastward Ho (1605). He wrote this one together with
George Chapman and
John Marston, who used to be Jonson’s rival. While they developed its
citizen comedy plot, they satirized the Scottish followers that James had
brought with him from Edinburgh. Jonson was put into prison with his
colleagues, and threatened once again with bodily punishment. This time his
ears and nose would be cut off. Thanks to the help of
Robert Cecil,
Jonson was set free in September or October in 1605. And at that time
the
Gunpowder Plot took place. The exact nature of Jonson's familiarity with the
Plotters isn't clear. After
Guy Fawkes was captured on November 5, 1605,
Jonson certainly helped the authorities with their questions. Jonson offered
the “service” to intermediate between Cecil and a Catholic priest who could
offer helpful information. Jonson was of course Catholic at this time.
Jonson's career now started to follow two different ways. For the public
stage he wrote the comic works for which he is best known: Volpone (1606),
Epicoene (1609), The Alchemist (1610), and Bartholomew Fair (1614).
Volpone
is a satire on legacy-hunters set in Renaissance Venice. In The Alchemist,
three men set themselves up as alchemists, and cheat many fools by making
use of their greed and stupidity. Epicoene deals with marriages and
inheritances. It is also about that men attempt to control women, and they
want to seek a wife who will never disturb him by making any noise.
Bartholomew Fair uses the summer London fair. The title refers to a gallery,
where many fools and evil men are displayed. All these four develop Jonson's
distinctive comic style. The characters are so exaggerated as to be almost
peculiar. The plots of intrigue and counter-intrigue are complex and well
made. The characters’ speech patterns are colloquial and also artificially
complex.
During these years Jonson also had other experiment in tragedy, Catiline
(1611), set like Sejanus in Ancient Rome.
While Jonson was writing and staging these works for the public theatre, he
was also working on court drama. He had the experience of writing
“entertainments” and he used it to develop a new form: the court masque.
Masques were multimedia entertainments, which could be played only once.
They were designed to celebrate particular court occasions. Different from
his earlier entertainments, the parts were often taken by members of the
court themselves, not by professional actors. A masque spent most of the
money on costumes, elaborate scenery and special effects. And the famous
architect Inigo Jones designed the effects in his masques. Jonson had a long
and uneasy cooperation with him. Jonson's masques include The Masque of
Blackness (1605), designed to satisfy Queen Anne's desire to pretend to be
black, Oberon the Fairy Prince (1611), and The Irish Masque (1613).
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