The most remarkable of the dramatists contemporary with Shakespeare was Ben Jonson, whose robust figure is in striking contrast with the other’s gracious impersonality.  Jonson was nine years younger than Shakespeare.  He was educated at Westminster School, served as a soldier in the low countries, became an actor in Henslowe’s company, and was twice imprisoned—­once for killing a fellow-actor in a duel, and once for his part in the comedy of Eastward Hoe, which gave offense to King James.  He lived down to the time of Charles I (1635), and became the acknowledged arbiter of English letters and the center of convivial wit combats at the Mermaid, the Devil, and other famous London taverns.

                    What things have we seen
  Done at the Mermaid; heard words that have been
  So nimble and so full of subtle flame,
  As if that every one from whom they came
  Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,
  And had resolved to live a fool the rest
  Of his dull life.[22]

The inscription on his tomb in Westminster Abbey is simply

  O rare Ben Jonson!

[Footnote 22:  Francis Beaumont. Letter to Ben Jonson.]

Jonson’s comedies were modeled upon the vetus comaedia of Aristophanes, which was satirical in purpose, and they belonged to an entirely different school from Shakspere’s.  They were classical and not romantic, and were pure comedies, admitting no admixture of tragic motives.  There is hardly one lovely or beautiful character in the entire range of his dramatic creations.  They were comedies not of character, in the high sense of the word, but of manners or humors.  His design was to lash the follies and vices of the day, and his dramatis personae consisted for the most part of gulls, impostors, fops, cowards, swaggering braggarts, and “Pauls men.”  In his first play, Every Man in his Humor (acted in 1598), in Every Man Out of his Humor, Bartholomew Fair, and, indeed, in all of his comedies, his subject was the fashionable affectations, the whims, oddities, and eccentric developments of London life.  His procedure was to bring together a number of these fantastic humorists, and “squeeze out the humor of such spongy souls,” by playing them off upon each other, involving them in all manner of comical misadventures, and rendering them utterly ridiculous and contemptible.  There was thus a perishable element in his art, for manners change; and, however effective this exposure of contemporary affectations may have been before an audience of Jonson’s day, it is as hard for a modern reader to detect his points as it will be for a reader two hundred years hence to understand the satire upon the aesthetic craze in such pieces of the present day as Patience, or the Colonel.  Nevertheless, a patient reader, with the help of copious footnotes, can gradually put together for himself an image of that world of obsolete humors in which Jonson’s comedy dwells,