BEN JONSON, 1573?-1637

[Illustration:  BEN JONSON. From the portrait by Gerard Honthorst, National Portrait Gallery.]

Life.—­About nine years after the birth of Shakespeare his greatest successor in the English drama was born in London.  Jonson outlived Shakespeare twenty-one years and helped to usher in the decline of the drama.

Ben Jonson, the son of a clergyman and the stepson of a master bricklayer, received a good education at Westminster School.  Unlike Shakespeare, Jonson learned much Latin and Greek.  In one respect Jonson’s training was unfortunate for a poet.  He was taught to write prose exercises first and then to turn them into poetry.  In this way he acquired the habit of trying to express unpoetical ideas in verse.  Art could change the prose into metrical riming lines, but art could not breathe into them the living soul of poetry.  In after times Jonson said that Shakespeare lacked art, but Jonson recognized that the author of Hamlet had the magic touch of nature.  Jonson’s pen rarely felt her all-embracing touch.

If Jonson served an apprenticeship as a bricklayer, as his enemies afterward said, he did not continue long at such work.  He crossed the Channel and enlisted for a brief time as a soldier in the Netherlands.  He soon returned to London and became a writer for the theater, and thenceforth lived the life of an author and a student.  He loved to study and translate the classics.  In fact, what a novice might think original in Jonson’s plays was often borrowed from the classics.  Of his relations to the classical writers, Dryden says, “You track him everywhere in their snow.”  Jonson was known as the most learned poet of the age, because, if his plays demanded any special knowledge, no subject was too hard, dry, or remote from common life for him to attempt to master it.  He knew the boundaries of Bohemia, and he took pleasure in saying to a friend:  “Shakespeare in a play brought in a number of men saying they had suffered shipwreck in Bohemia, where is no sea near, by some hundred miles.”

Jonson’s personal characteristics partly explain why he placed himself in opposition to the spirit of the age.  He was extremely combative.  It was almost a necessity for him to quarrel with some person or with some opinion.  He killed two men in duels, and he would probably have been hanged, if he had not pleaded benefit of clergy.  For the greater part of his life, he was often occupied with pen and ink quarrels.

When James I. ascended the throne in 1603, Jonson soon became a royal favorite.  He was often employed to write masques, a peculiar species of drama which called for magnificent scenery and dress, and gave the nobility the opportunity of acting the part of some distinguished or supernatural character.  Such work brought Jonson into intimate association with the leading men of the day.