Title:  Sejanus:  His Fall

Author:  Ben Jonson

Release Date:  March, 2004 [EBook #5232] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on June 10, 2002]

Edition:  10

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

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Sejanus:  His Fall

by Ben Jonson

Transcriber’s note:  This play is based on events that happend a millenia and a half before Jonson wrote it.  Jonson added 247 scholarly footnotes to this play; all were in Latin (except for a scattering of Greek).  They, and the Greek quotation which forms Tiberius Caesar’s tag line in Scene ii, Act ii, have been elided.

INTRODUCTION

The greatest of English dramatists except Shakespeare, the first literary dictator and poet-laureate, a writer of verse, prose, satire, and criticism who most potently of all the men of his time affected the subsequent course of English letters:  such was Ben Jonson, and as such his strong personality assumes an interest to us almost unparalleled, at least in his age.

Ben Jonson came of the stock that was centuries after to give to the world Thomas Carlyle; for Jonson’s grandfather was of Annandale, over the Solway, whence he migrated to England.  Jonson’s father lost his estate under Queen Mary, “having been cast into prison and forfeited.”  He entered the church, but died a month before his illustrious son was born, leaving his widow and child in poverty.  Jonson’s birthplace was Westminster, and the time of his birth early in 1573.  He was thus nearly ten years Shakespeare’s junior, and less well off, if a trifle better born.  But Jonson did not profit even by this slight advantage.  His mother married beneath her, a wright or bricklayer, and Jonson was for a time apprenticed to the trade.  As a youth he attracted the attention of the famous antiquary, William Camden, then usher at Westminster School, and there the poet laid the solid foundations of his classical learning.  Jonson always held Camden in veneration, acknowledging that to him he owed,

“All that I am in arts, all that I know:”