Volpone; Or, The Fox
"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