In 1605, we find Jonson in active collaboration with Chapman and Marston in the admirable comedy of London life entitled “Eastward Hoe.”  In the previous year, Marston had dedicated his “Malcontent,” in terms of fervid admiration, to Jonson; so that the wounds of the war of the theatres must have been long since healed.  Between Jonson and Chapman there was the kinship of similar scholarly ideals.  The two continued friends throughout life.  “Eastward Hoe” achieved the extraordinary popularity represented in a demand for three issues in one year.  But this was not due entirely to the merits of the play.  In its earliest version a passage which an irritable courtier conceived to be derogatory to his nation, the Scots, sent both Chapman and Jonson to jail; but the matter was soon patched up, for by this time Jonson had influence at court.

With the accession of King James, Jonson began his long and successful career as a writer of masques.  He wrote more masques than all his competitors together, and they are of an extraordinary variety and poetic excellence.  Jonson did not invent the masque; for such premeditated devices to set and frame, so to speak, a court ball had been known and practised in varying degrees of elaboration long before his time.  But Jonson gave dramatic value to the masque, especially in his invention of the antimasque, a comedy or farcical element of relief, entrusted to professional players or dancers.  He enhanced, as well, the beauty and dignity of those portions of the masque in which noble lords and ladies took their parts to create, by their gorgeous costumes and artistic grouping and evolutions, a sumptuous show.  On the mechanical and scenic side Jonson had an inventive and ingenious partner in Inigo Jones, the royal architect, who more than any one man raised the standard of stage representation in the England of his day.  Jonson continued active in the service of the court in the writing of masques and other entertainments far into the reign of King Charles; but, towards the end, a quarrel with Jones embittered his life, and the two testy old men appear to have become not only a constant irritation to each other, but intolerable bores at court.  In “Hymenaei,” “The Masque of Queens,” “Love Freed from Ignorance,” “Lovers made Men,” “Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue,” and many more will be found Jonson’s aptitude, his taste, his poetry and inventiveness in these by-forms of the drama; while in “The Masque of Christmas,” and “The Gipsies Metamorphosed” especially, is discoverable that power ofbroad comedy which, at court as well as in the city, was not the least element of Jonson’s contemporary popularity.