English Literature
a minister. He died just before the son's birth, and two years later the
mother married a bricklayer of London. The boy was sent to a private
school, and later made his own way to Westminster School, where the
submaster, Camden, struck by the boy's ability, taught and largely
supported him. For a short time he may have studied at the university in
Cambridge; but his stepfather soon set him to learning the bricklayer's
trade. He ran away from this, and went with the English army to fight
Spaniards in the Low Countries. His best known exploit there was to fight a
duel between the lines with one of the enemy's soldiers, while both armies
looked on. Jonson killed his man, and took his arms, and made his way back
to his own lines in a way to delight the old Norman troubadours. He soon
returned to England, and married precipitately when only nineteen or twenty
years old. Five years later we find him employed, like Shakespeare, as
actor and reviser of old plays in the theater. Thereafter his life is a
varied and stormy one. He killed an actor in a duel, and only escaped
hanging by pleading "benefit of clergy";[154] but he lost all his poor
goods and was branded for life on his left thumb. In his first great play,
_Every Man in His Humour_ (1598), Shakespeare acted one of the parts; and
that may have been the beginning of their long friendship. Other plays
followed rapidly. Upon the accession of James, Jonson's masques won him
royal favor, and he was made poet laureate. He now became undoubted leader
of the literary men of his time, though his rough honesty and his hatred of
the literary tendencies of the age made him quarrel with nearly all of
them. In 1616, soon after Shakespeare's retirement, he stopped writing for
the stage and gave himself up to study and serious work. In 1618 he
traveled on foot to Scotland, where he visited Drummond, from whom we have
the scant records of his varied life. His impressions of this journey,
called _Foot Pilgrimage_, were lost in a fire before publication.
Thereafter he produced less, and his work declined in vigor; but spite of
growing poverty and infirmity we notice in his later work, especially in
the unfinished _Sad Shepherd_, a certain mellowness and tender human
sympathy which were lacking in his earlier productions. He died poverty
stricken in 1637. Unlike Shakespeare's, his death was mourned as a national
calamity, and he was buried with all honor in Westminster Abbey. On his
grave was laid a marble slab, on which the words "O rare Ben Jonson" were
his sufficient epitaph.
WORKS OF BEN JONSON. Jonson's work is in strong contrast with that of
Shakespeare and of the later Elizabethan dramatists. Alone he fought
against the romantic tendency of the age, and to restore the classic
standards. Thus the whole action of his drama usually covers only a few
hours, or a single day. He never takes liberties with historical facts, as
Shakespeare does, but is accurate to the smallest detail. His dramas abound
in classical learning, are carefully and logically constructed, and comedy
and tragedy are kept apart, instead of crowding each other as they do in
Shakespeare and in life. In one respect his comedies are worthy of careful
reading,--they are intensely realistic, presenting men and women of the
time exactly as they were. From a few of Jonson's scenes we can
understand--better than from all the plays of Shakespeare--how men talked
and acted during the Age of Elizabeth.
Jonson's first comedy, _Every Man in His Humour_, is a key to all his
dramas. The word "humour" in his age stood for some characteristic whim or
quality of society. Jonson gives to his leading character some prominent
humor, exaggerates it, as the cartoonist enlarges the most characteristic
feature of a face, and so holds it before our attention that all other
qualities are lost sight of; which is the method that Dickens used later in
many of his novels. _Every Man in His Humour_ was the first of three
satires. Its special aim was to ridicule the humors of the city. The
second, _Cynthia's Revels_, satirizes the humors of the court; while the
third, _The Poetaster_, the result of a quarrel with his contemporaries,
was leveled at the false standards of the poets of the age.
The three best known of Jonson's comedies are _Volpone, or the Fox, The
Alchemist_, and _Epicoene, or the Silent Woman. Volpone_ is a keen and
merciless analysis of a man governed by an overwhelming love of money for
its own sake. The first words in the first scene are a key to the whole
comedy:
_(Volpone)_
Good morning to the day; and next, my gold!
Open the shrine that I may see my saint.
(_Mosca withdraws a curtain and discovers piles of
gold, plate, jewels, etc._)
Hail the world's soul, and mine!
Volpone's method of increasing his wealth is to play upon the avarice of
men. He pretends to be at the point of death, and his "suitors," who know
his love of gain and that he has no heirs, endeavor hypocritically to
sweeten his last moments by giving him rich presents, so that he will leave
them all his wealth. The intrigues of these suitors furnish the story of
the play, and show to what infamous depths avarice will lead a man.
_The Alchemist_ is a study of quackery on one side and of gullibility on
the other, founded on the mediæval idea of the philosopher's stone,[155]
and applies as well to the patent medicines and get-rich-quick schemes of
our day as to the peculiar forms of quackery with which Jonson was more
familiar. In plot and artistic construction _The Alchemist_ is an almost
perfect specimen of the best English drama. It has some remarkably good
passages, and is the most readable of Jonson's plays.
_Epicoene, or the Silent Woman_, is a prose comedy exceedingly well
constructed, full of life, abounding in fun and unexpected situations. Here
is a brief outline from which the reader may see of what materials Jonson
made up his comedies.
The chief character is Morose, a rich old codger whose humor is a horror of
noise. He lives in a street so narrow that it will admit no carriages; he
pads the doors; plugs the keyhole; puts mattresses on the stairs. He
dismisses a servant who wears squeaky boots; makes all the rest go about in
thick stockings; and they must answer him by signs, since he cannot bear to
hear anybody but himself talk. He disinherits his poor nephew Eugenie, and,
to make sure that the latter will not get any money out of him, resolves to
marry. His confidant in this delicate matter is Cutbeard the barber, who,
unlike his kind, never speaks unless spoken to, and does not even knick his
scissors as he works. Cutbeard (who is secretly in league with the nephew)
tells him of Epicoene, a rare, silent woman, and Morose is so delighted
with her silence that he resolves to marry her on the spot. Cutbeard
produces a parson with a bad cold, who can speak only in a whisper, to
marry them; and when the parson coughs after the ceremony Morose demands
back five shillings of the fee. To save it the parson coughs more, and is
hurriedly bundled out of the house. The silent woman finds her voice
immediately after the marriage, begins to talk loudly and to make reforms
in the household, driving Morose to distraction. A noisy dinner party from
a neighboring house, with drums and trumpets and a quarreling man and wife,
is skillfully guided in at this moment to celebrate the wedding. Morose
flees for his life, and is found perched like a monkey on a crossbeam in
the attic, with all his nightcaps tied over his ears. He seeks a divorce,
but is driven frantic by the loud arguments of a lawyer and a divine, who
are no other than Cutbeard and a sea captain disguised. When Morose is past
all hope the nephew offers to release him from his wife and her noisy
friends if he will allow him five hundred pounds a year. Morose offers him
anything, everything, to escape his torment, and signs a deed to that
effect. Then comes the surprise of the play when Eugenie whips the wig from
Epicoene and shows a boy in disguise.
It will be seen that the _Silent Woman_, with its rapid action and its
unexpected situations, offers an excellent opportunity for the actors; but
the reading of the play, as of most of Jonson's comedies, is marred by low
intrigues showing a sad state of morals among the upper classes.
Besides these, and many other less known comedies, Jonson wrote two great
tragedies, _Sejanus_ (1603) and _Catiline_ (1611), upon severe classical
lines. After ceasing his work for the stage, Jonson wrote many masques in
honor of James I and of Queen Anne, to be played amid elaborate scenery by
the gentlemen of the court. The best of these are "The Satyr," "The
Penates," "Masque of Blackness," "Masque of Beauty," "Hue and Cry after
Cupid," and "The Masque of Queens." In all his plays Jonson showed a strong
lyric gift, and some of his little poems and songs, like "The Triumph of
Charis," "Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes," and "To the Memory of my
Beloved Mother," are now better known than his great dramatic works. A
single volume of prose, called _Timber, or Discoveries made upon Men and
Matter_, is an interesting collection of short essays which are more like
Bacon's than any other work of the age.
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. The work of these two men is so closely interwoven
that, though Fletcher outlived Beaumont by nine years and the latter had no
hand in some forty of the plays that bear their joint names, we still class
them together, and only scholars attempt to separate their works so as to
give each writer his due share. Unlike most of the Elizabethan dramatists,
they both came from noble and cultured families and were university
trained. Their work, in strong contrast with Jonson's, is intensely
romantic, and in it all, however coarse or brutal the scene, there is
still, as Emerson pointed out, the subtle "recognition of gentility."
Beaumont (1584-1616) was the brother of Sir John Beaumont of
Leicestershire. From Oxford he came to London to study law, but soon gave
it up to write for the stage. Fletcher (1579-1625) was the son of the
bishop of London, and shows in all his work the influence of his high
social position and of his Cambridge education. The two dramatists met at
the Mermaid tavern under Ben Jonson's leadership and soon became
inseparable friends, living and working together. Tradition has it that
Beaumont supplied the judgment and the solid work of the play, while
Fletcher furnished the high-colored sentiment and the lyric poetry, without
which an Elizabethan play would have been incomplete. Of their joint plays,
the two best known are _Philaster_, whose old theme, like that of
_Cymbeline_ and _Griselda_, is the jealousy of a lover and the faithfulness
of a girl, and _The Maid's Tragedy_. Concerning Fletcher's work the most
interesting literary question is how much did he write of Shakespeare's
_Henry VIII_, and how much did Shakespeare help him in _The Two Noble
Kinsmen_.
JOHN WEBSTER. Of Webster's personal history we know nothing except that he
was well known as a dramatist under James I. His extraordinary powers of
expression rank him with Shakespeare; but his talent seems to have been
largely devoted to the blood-and-thunder play begun by Marlowe. His two
best known plays are _The White Devil_ (pub. 1612) and _The Duchess of
Malfi_ (pub. 1623). The latter, spite of its horrors, ranks him as one of
the greatest masters of English tragedy. It must be remembered that he
sought in this play to reproduce the Italian life of the sixteenth century,
and for this no imaginary horrors are needed. The history of any Italian
court or city in this period furnishes more vice and violence and dishonor
than even the gloomy imagination of Webster could conceive. All the