Carew, Suckling, Lovelace (David Daiches)

From A Critical History of English Literature, by David Daiches.


Thomas Carew (1594/5-1640) both praised Ben Jonson for his successful spoliation of the ancient classics—

Nor think it theft, if the rich spoils so torn
From conquered authors, be as trophies worn—

 

and paid tribute to Donne as the poet who "ruled as he thought fit / The universal monarchy of wit":

The Muses' garden with pedantic weeds
O'er spread, was purg'd by thee, the lazy seeds
Of servile imitation thrown away,
And fresh invention planted.

In combining the classical influence of Jonson with the metaphysical influence of Donne, Carew produced a mixture especially suited to the atmosphere of the court of Charles I. As Sir Herbert Grierson expressed it, "in Carew's poems and Vandyke's pictures the artistic taste of Charles's court is vividly reflected, a dignified voluptuousness, an exquisite elegance, if in some of the higher qualities of man and artist Carew is as inferior to Wyatt and Spenser as Vandyke is to Holbein." This is true Cavalier poetry, polished, gay, and witty. Without the formal precision of Jonson, the adroit Roman paganizing of Herrick, or the gentlemanly ease of his younger contemporary, Sir John Suckling, Carew has his own kind of urbanity. The gallantry of his love poems does not always conceal a cynicism at the core, but the control, the restrained touch of stylization in all his best work shows a sense of style in living that truly reflects the Cavalier spirit of the time and is not unattractive. Occasionally, as in the well-known song, "Ask me no more where Jove bestows", he combines Jonson's lapidary elegance with a stately singing note as well as a touch of metaphysical ingenuity, and the combination is perfectly achieved. Sometimes he echoes Donne in the frank psychological curiosity with which he explores an emotional or a sensual situation (as in "To a Lady that desired I would love her" and, in a different way, "A Rapture"), but he has a tendency to laugh off the implications of his conceits with an elegant shrug, lacking Donne's ability to carry through to the end fusion of passion and wit. It is "wit" in Carew, too—almost in the modern sense—rather than thought. There are many echoes of Donne in his poems, but the exhibitionist quality in his conceits often derives as much from Marino as from Donne. Carew's songs were meant to be sung, and lose something when merely read. His longer poems often run into mere showiness. But he had an artistic conscience; even his showiness is carefully modulated, and he always knew what he was doing.

Another heir to both Jonson and Donne is Sir John Suckling (1609-42), though both streams are shallower now. Lively, gay, very much the worldly courtier, Suckling looks to the cynical strain in Donne's early love poems and to the lighter of Jonson's lyrics. His poem, "Oh, for some honest lover's ghost" is an altogether more superficial performance than Donne's "I long to talk with some old lover's ghost." His "Hast thou seen the down i' the air" is a flippant parody (turned to satire) of Jonson's exquisite song of compliment, "Have you seen but the white lily grow." He is at his best where he combines a colloquial ease with a neatly patterned song-stanza, as in the well-known "Why so pale and wan, fond lover?" or "I prithee send me back my heart" or "Out upon it I have loved / Three whole days together." "A Session of the Poets" is a lively trotting poem in thirty four-line stanzas with a deliberately crude accentual meter, describing himself and his fellow-poets competing for the laurel, only to see it given in the end by Apollo to an alderman on the grounds that "it was the best sign / Of good store of wit to have good store of coin." The poem is interesting in giving Suckling's views of his contemporaries. Carew's "muse was hard-bound, and th' issue of 's brain." Suckling describes himself as an amateur who "loved not the muses so well as his sport." The description is accurate enough: Suckling's poetry shows the Cavalier at play.

The true Cavalier poet is, however, Richard Lovelace (1618-58), whose gallantry has in it a truer strain of chivalry than Suckling's, a strain that links him with Sidney and Sir Walter Ralegh and the older tradition of Renaissance courtesy. The royalist ideal was indeed grounded in that older tradition, as we can see in Lovelace and, most clearly, in the few but noble lyrical utterances of the Scottish royalist, James Graham, marquis of Montrose. Lovelace's "To Althea from Prison" uses imagery that is as much Petrarchan as metaphysical, but the poem brings a new kind of idealism into the English lyric of the period. The same can be said of "To Lucasta, Going to the Wars," which has the lapidary quality of Jonson at his best as well as a simple gravity of tone that we cannot find in Suckling. More metaphysical in imagery, if classical in inspiration, is the interesting poem, "The Grasshopper" where a description of the heedless grasshopper is adroitly turned into a celebration of friendship. There is something of the strength of Wyatt in Lovelace at his best, as well as echoes of the Sidneian and Spenserian association of ideal love and beauty with honor and the good life. The seventeenth-century royalist ideal was perhaps anachronistic, and a somewhat faded neo-Platonism often lay behind it; but Lovelace at least gave it effective expression.

Of the minor Cavalier poets, mention may be made of Sidney Godolphin (1610-43), the majority of whose poems remained in manuscript until the twentieth century. He, too, has the graver note which we sometimes find in Lovelace (in Suckling's "Sessions of the Poets" Apollo advises Godolphin "not to write so strong"), together with a restrained metaphysical touch which adds just the right note of subtlety to the quiet clarity of his style. The influence of Donne and Jonson combine here most happily.

Richard Corbet, bishop of Oxford and Norwich (1582-1635), is a minor lyrist of the period whose character and poems reflect a robust joy of life which was to become one element in Cavalier opposition to the Puritans. His one famous poem, "A Proper new ballad, intituled The Fairies' Farewell, or God a Mercy Will," gives lively expression to the sense that the Puritan spirit had killed the happy superstitions of Old England:

Farewell, rewards and fairies,
    Good housewives now may say,
For now foul sluts in dairies
    Do fare as well as they.
And though they sweep the hearths no less
    Than maids were wont to do,
Yet who of late for cleanliness
    Finds sixpence in her shoe?

Lament, lament, old abbeys,
    The fairies lost command;
They did but change priests' babies,
    But some have changed your land,
And all your children sprung from thence
    Are now grown Puritans;
Who live as changelings ever since,
    For love of your demains.

"There never was a merry world since the fairies left dancing and the parson left conjuring," said John Selden in the middle of the century, and this remark, together with Corbet's poem, shows that there was much more than political or theological opinions involved in the Civil War and also helps to explain why the large majority of those interested in the arts and letters (Milton was the great exception) were on the royalist side.

Some Notes on John Donne

(from The Penguin Short History of English Literature, by Stephen Coote; 1993; "From Donne to Dryden", I)

While playwrights of the early seventeenth century were fashioning language into a supreme theatrical medium, other poets were submitting lyric, satire and elegy to a searching re-examination. The most brilliant of these figures was John Donne (1572-1631).

Donne's was a life of passionate intellectual and personal drama. Reared as a Roman Catholic in a protestant nation state, aware of being part of a group often summoned to suffering and martyrdom, Donne called the basis of his creed in doubt and read and questioned his way towards a hard-won, restless Anglicanism. Yet the man who annotated nearly fifteen hundred works of theology and argument was not a mere bookish recluse. Donne was a soldier of fortune, the author of perhaps the finest collection of love lyrics in the language and a man whose naked ambition and sheer recklessness traped him at servile hopes of court patronage. From these he was finally called to the deanery of St Paul's and emerged as one of the most popular preachers and mighty poets of Christian salvation.

Donne's early prose Paradoxes (published 1633) give an indication of the manner of his thought. When he argues that 'a wise man is known by much laughing' or proves 'the gifts of the body are better than those of the mind', Donne was writing in a long-established rhetorical tradition. The plenitude of his inventiveness however suggests a skeptical fascination with the workings of reason as these are revealed through the display of wit.

Wit as ingenuity — the creation of far-fetched arguments or conceits — was a prized rhetorical achievement, and Donne's skill earned him the highest praise from his contemporaries. For later critics such as Dryden and Dr Johnson however, men working in different modes of literary decorum, such effects supposedly revealed a lack of taste which earned Donne and his followers the misleading name of 'metaphysical'. They were accused of linking together recondite ideas, and so failing to achieve the central and classical voice of broad human experience. It took later generations of critics, first Coleridge and then T. S. Eliot, to rediscover in Donne's poetry the thought of a complex and very masculine brain, one which dwelt on the nature of its own perceptions and, by bringing a passionately critical intellect to bear on the traditions of rhetoric, revealed its force through the quality of its wit.

Such wit is often allied to worldly cynicism in Donne's Elegies and Satires, works which pay tribute to the classics by revolutionising them. The Elegies, for example, frequently surpass their Ovidian model in the sceptical analysis of base human motive, in the sheer versatility of 'The Autumnal' and, above all, in the sensual, colloquial force, the vividly re-enacted drama, of 'His Picture' and 'To his Mistress Going to Bed'. In this last work, a new style of love poetry comes to maturity as Donne re-creates the appearance of passionately articulate self-awareness:

License my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America, my new found land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned,
My mine of precious sones, my empery,
How blest am I in this discovering thee! 
To enter in these bonds, is to be free;
Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.

empery: empire

This passage is one of the great achivements of seventeenth-century erotic wit, a combination of passion and artifice that seems to re-create the wonder and excitement of sexual arousal itself. The woman is a virgin continent to be explored for her hidden wealth and 'manned'. Such puns, as in Shakespeare's Sonnets, lead to profound emotional insights. In the last line, for example, the poet in bed, naked and erect, envisages his body as a seal which, in the act of love, will validate the union of the lovers themselves. This appearance of a dramatised self — a central feature in all Donne's work — is conveyed here through a language at once knotty, colloquial and capable of supreme sensuousness. Donne's 'strong lines', as contemporaries called them, can thus be seen as a liberating force of criticism which swept away nymphs and goddesses, pining Petrarchan lovers and a melliflousness of tone that all too easily sank to servile imitation.

In the Satires, Donne was concerned to develop what some contemporaries thought they had discovered in Latin satire: the harsh tones of classical moral outrage. In Joseph Hall's Virgidemiarum (1597) and his rival John Marston's Scourge of Villanie (1598), for example, we hear the 'savage indignation' of Juvenal and what was believed to be the dense syntax of Persius. These are re-created through the 'persona' or assumed personality of the intellectually superior malcontent. Though Donne could also clothe a moral type in the foolish fashions of the day, he had an alert sense of the relative foolishness of all human activity, whether this be the teeming life of the streets and court or his own scholarship. With 'Satire III', such scepticism becomes a matter of intense personal seriousness, for this is the work to which Donne criticized the aberrations of all Christian sects in his search for 'true religion'. The tough syntax of the poem is not a literary affectation but the voice of a great intellect in turmoil:

To adore, or scorn an image, or protest,
May all be bad; doubt wisely, in strange way
To sand inquiring right, is not to stray;
To sleep, or run wrong is. On a huge hill,
Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reachher, about must, and about must go;
And what the hill's suddenness resists, win so:
Yet strive so, that before age, death's twilight,
Thy soul rest, for none can work in that night,
To will, implies delay, therefore do now.

Donne's wit is here the medium of his radical play of mind. It is the discourse of a restlessly argumentative intellect which dramatizes aspects of a complex and obsessive intelligence. Clearly, this is not the verse of Sidney's 'right popular philosopher' proceeding through formal logic and ornament to settled verities.  An acutely questioning self-awareness has intervened to make Donne's the poetry of a highly civilized small group such as that gathered round the great literary patron Lucy, Countess of Bedford (d. 1627), a coterie that was sufficiently daring to question convention in pursuit of the fresh and tougher truths of experience. It was also a group sufficiently small to subsiste on the passing of manuscripts. The greater part of Donne's poems were published posthumously by his son. They are thus the records of a poetic revolution wrought among the few.

Such qualities can be seen again in the love lyrics that make up Donne's Songs an Sonnets. These were probably written over some twenty years. None can be readily dated, and few if any should be given a precise biographical significance. Each however concentrates with a unique rhetoric the colloquial force and erotic passion of the other early works, while the testing, inclusive reference of their wit invariably dramatizes aspects of relationship. These may be cynical, sensuous, mystically celebratory, or give voice to a mournful sense of loss.

Donne's cynical lyrics vary between the flippancy of 'Go, and catch a falling star' and the more intricate worldly satire of 'Love's Alchemy' and the 'Farewell to love' with its ironic and closely observed analysis of the demystification of desire in post-coital enervation. Persuasions to love itself sometimes attain the outrageous casuistry of 'The Flea'. Here, a girl's loss of honour in surrendering her virginity is compared to the loss of blood suffered in a flea bite which, since the flea has bitten the poet too, mixes the blood of both man and woman in its shell, even as the lover's bed will join their bodies.

In 'The Ecstasy', by contrast, Donne discussed with witty yet passionate rigour the deepest relation between shared spiritual love and the natural needs of the body. United, these offer that rapture which is the subject of 'The Dream' and 'The Good Morrow'. These poems are among the great celebrations of intimacy in English literature. It is perhaps in 'The Sun Rising' however that Donne's combination of stanza form and speech rhythm, observation of the world and celebration of the idea that the lovers in their bed are the world, is most wittily yet profoundly expressed. The tradition of the aubade, or the lover's lament for the coming of dawn, is there transformed as the poet seeks to persuade the sun to irradiate a triumphant and mutual passion:

Thy beams, so reverend, and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long:
     If her eyes have not blinded thine,
     Look, and tomorrow late, tell me, 
  Whether both th'Indias of spice and mine
  Be where thou left'st them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saws'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay.

both th'Indias: the East and West Indies.

Such deep erotic satisfaction is also the subject of 'The Anniversary', 'Love's Growth' and 'The Canonization'. In these works we again see Donne as one of the supreme analysts of passion fulfilled, a man drawing on the notions of scholasticism for conceits that convey a sense of wonder all the more mireculous for the sceptical intellect that apprehends it.

Such learned references in Donne's poetry were drawn from a memory stocked with the arcana and commonplaces of science and theology, and were then juxtaposed to sharply immediate perception. By a transforming paradox, this meeting of opposites frquently 'interanimates' both, and from this flows a new awareness of the complexity of experience. In poems such as 'The Canonization', for example, the doctrine of the intercession of saints suggests how rare yet powerful is a mutual human relationship. In 'Air and Angels', adapting Aquinas's belief that God permits the heavenly hosts assume a body of condensed air in order to appear to men, Donne shows a lover's progress between a too acute sensuousness and a too ethereal idealism:

   Every thy hair for love to work upon
Is much too much, some fitter must be sought:
   For, nor in nothing, nor in things
Extreme, and scatt'ring bright, can love inhere;
   Then as an angel, face, and wings
Of air, not pure as it, yet pure doth wear,
   So thy love may be my love's sphere;
        Just such disparity 
As is 'twixt air and angels' purity,
'Twixt women's love, and men's will ever be.

Love itself is here irradiated with a sense of the divine. But if Donne's is a voice of celebration, he is occasionally a great poet of love's defeat. We see this particularly in 'Twicknam Garden' and, above all, in one of his finest works, 'A Noctural upon S. Lucy's Day, Being the Shortest Day'. Here the desolation of a love occluded by death offers a sense of universal loss, the nothingness of the bereaved and learned self as it seeks a greater darkness in which to prepare for spiritual truth:

Since she enjoys her long night's festival,
Let me preparare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year's, and the day's deep midnight is.

With the death of the beloved, the poet becomes an eremite devoted to the holy service of his departed saint.

Although such poems seem to touch an unworldly ardour, Donne was in fact very much concerned with the world at this stage of his careeer. Hence his writing of verse letters, obsequies and occasional pieces to aristocratic figures. These can sometimes seem mannered and over-ingeniously flattering when compared to his major and more popular work. Nonetheless, while it is right to see some of these verses as the poet's labours as he drudged for patronage — a necessary task in a society where advancement lay in the gift of the great — it is also important not to miss their discussion of attitudes crucial to Donne's maturing thought.

Amid the compliment and professions of friendship, for example, we are offered glimpses of a corrupt and perilous world of relative values, disillusion and vulnerability, the futility and spite of fallen man. In 'The Storm' and 'The Calm' — perhaps the most stimulating of Donne's Epistles — he also debunked the heroic pretensions of the military adventures in which he followed Essex and Ralegh. What in Hakluyt might be a chronicle of national endeavour, here becomes a re-creation of diminishingly painful experience raised to an almost surreal intensity by prodigious wit.

Such techniques are further developed in those most bizarre works The Progress of the Soul and the two Anniversaries (1611-12). These last were written to commemorate the death of Elizabeth Drury, a girl Donne had never seen, and were then printed by her influential father. Donne was later to regret this publicity both as a stain on his gentleman's amateur status and because these essays in extreme hyperbole were persistently misunderstood. What Donne was here concerned to achieve however was a contrast between the powers of Christian innocence imagined in his ideal of Elizabeth Drury and the decay of a corrupt, fallen world. The issue was thus between faith and virtue on the one hand and the toils of worlliness on the other. It is an old theme, but one examined here in the glare of new problems, in particular that scepticism which was to transform the intellectual life of the century.

At its most fundamental, the scepticism with which Donne had already approached literary convention challenged the ordered world inherited from Aquinas and the scholastics. It declared that ultimate truth cannot be approached by reason alone since, in a notion given classic formulation by Montaigne in The Apology for Raymond Sebond (c. 1576), reason works only on sense data and cannot be definitively checked. The central questions that sprang from this dilemma were whether and how one may know God — in other words, is belief a matter of faith or reason? — and whether and how one may gain a knowledge of the physical world — in other words, is fact only opinion or can some enquiries be verified?

In the Anniversaries, Donne set his face against the empirical investigation of nature that was soon to prove if not the final answer to these questions then at least their most powerful reply. He suggests that to let oneself be 'taught by sense, and Fantasy' is only to pile up useless and pedantic confusion. If the new astronomy of Galileo and Copernicus shows that the universe is not the regular, serene construct of the scholastics, then that is not a stimulus to inventing new theories, but proof that the physical world is irremediably corrupt. If the links in the great chain of being are broken, then matters are worse than ever we thought:

    new philosophy calls all in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out;
The sun is lost, and th'earth, and no mans wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confess that this world's spent,
When in the planets, and the firmament 
They seek so many new; they see that this 
Is crumbled out again to his atomies.
'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.

 Donne's answer to this predicament was 'fideism': not sharper telescopes but intenser prayer, not knowledge but virtue, not science but faith. When the soul, shot like a bullet from a rusted gun, courses through the celestial spheres, Donne shows it does not stop to question their movement but hurtles to the seat of all knowledge — the bosom of God. Meanwhile, with the removal of such inspiring virtue as Elizabeth's Drury's, the rest of mankind is left to stagger on in a dark, decaying world lit only by the ghostly memory of the heroine's worth. The intellect at its most extended can only expose its own fallacies, and we must finally admit that the mysteries of Christ 'are not to be chewed by reason, but to be swallowed by faith'. 

This last quotation comes from Donne the preacher. The sermons are the greatest of his prose works, but were preceded by a number of pieces which show Donne involved in both the personal quest for religious experience and the worldly pursuit of profitable employment. His Pseudo-Martyr  (1610) and Biathanatos — a work unpublished in his lifetime — suggest the problems this entailed. Pseudo-Martyr, for example, was designed to appeal to James I by suggesting that Roman Catholics went against the rule of nature when they refused to swear to the king's supremacy in church matters and so laide themselves open to the death penalty. As with Ignatius his Conclave (1611), the work relishes a convert's scabrous anti-Catholic satire. In the labyrinthine and sceptical paradoxes of Biathanatos, on the other hand, Donne argued for the morality of suicide with an involvement rooted in acute personal experience. 

And it is the obsession with death and the last things that characterizes Donne's mature religious works. The Devotion on Emergent Occasions (published 1624) were written when Donne's doctors had declared him too ill to read, let alone compose. The afflicted body houses a soaring mind however. Donne's emotions range over the fear of solitude and physical disintegration, the relation between sickness and sin, sin and death. The entire universe is raided for images because man himself —John Donne— is an image of the universe, an epitome, a microcosm. It is this belief that underlies the most famous passage in Donne's prose:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy frieds, or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

The moment of union is perceived but, as is appropriate for a sick-bed meditation, is perceived in the instant of its dissolution.

It is for his sermons that Donne is best known as a writer of religious prose. In the Jacobean period especially, occupied by preachers of great distinction, the pulpit gained extraordinary influence as a focus of spiritual thought and the dissemination of ideas. Led by the king, the court itself relished the finesse of religioius analysis, and connoisseurs of style and content memorized sermons and took notes on a form of literature that was both popular and learned. Donne's contributions should not be seen in isolation.

Many preachers, particularly those of a Puritan persuasion, argued for an unornamented clarity of style. Others dressed spiritual matters in the garment of learning. While Thomas Adams (c. 1583- ante 1660) combined both in a manner that is often theatrical and powerfully directed to the abuses of the time, Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626) brought his immense erudition in fifteen languages to passages of Scripture, each word and syllable of which he believed to be divinely inspired. As a result, each word and syllable is examined with the pious ardour of a philologist revealing the depths of the Word of God.

With Andrewes, human drama is often conveyed through a tiny yet telling comment in parenthesis. With Donne it moves to the centre of the stage. The immediate impact of the man, of course, is irrecoverably lost, but his devout biographer Izaak Walton (1593-1683) described Donne 'preaching to himself like an angel from a cloud' and appealing to the conscience of others 'with a most particular grace and an unexpressable addition of comeliness'.

The literary style of Donne's sermons is partly a distinctive reworking of its many sources. For example, Donne could exploit rhetorical patterning with the startling virtuosity of the sermon preached to the Earl of Carlisle in c. 1622 where he describes the agony of being 'secluded eternally, eternally, eternally from the sight of God'. From Seneca, Tacitus, and their Renaissance editor Justus Lipsius however Donne and many others derived an anti-Ciceronian style. This was carefully contrived with a dramatic, irregular immediacy to express a concern with personal experience rather than settled certainties. Sermons such as Death's Duel (published 1632) however suggest that of all the influence on Donne's sermon style the Geneva and Authorized versions of the Bible — the parallelism of the Psalms, the visionary urgency of the Prophets and the evangelical fervour of St Paul especially — were the most telling. Nonetheless, when all the influences have been traced, what finally impresses is the compelling sense of Donne's unique spiritual sensibility, the range and drama of a religious intellect for which every aspect of the world could be a metaphor of the soul's experience.

As part of this technique, the sermons frequently juxtapose macabre effects with the tremblingly numinous, decay with resurrection. On the one hand is the conviction that 'Between that excremental jelly that any body is made of at first, and that jelly which thy body dissolves to at last, there is not so noisome, so putrid a thing in nature.' In contrast is the image of the redeemed soul springing up in heaven like a lily from the red soil of its first creation. Between these experiences come the life of prayer and temptation, the imagining of the last things and, finally, an awareness of mercy.

This was not lightly won, and Donne's religious poetry dramatizes his spiritual conflict with great power and formal mastery. However, since distinctions in the psychology of faith are not always as easy to discern as those in Donne's love lyrics, it is important to emphasize the variety in his religious poetry. The sonnets in 'La Corona', for example, draw on the church's traditions of oral prayer to fashion a devout and accomplished celebration of the mysteries of faith that was to some extent influenced by Roman Catholic practices. 'The Litany', by contrast, while not perhaps a wholly successful poem, is an attempt to express the modest, sober delight in daily piety which is a great achievement of seventeenth-century Anglicanism, and one which finds its truest expression in the work of George Herbert and Thomas Ken (1637-1711). The personal realization of such ideas was terrifying — 'those are my best days, when I shake with fear' — and it forms the true spiritual centre of Donne's alternately defiant and submissive drama of sin and judgement. Around this centres the fear of physical decay. Sonnets such as 'Oh my black Soul!', 'At the round earth's imagin'd corners' and 'Death be not proud' contain doomsday in their small compass.

In 'Good Friday, riding westwards' Donne investigated the paradoxes of Christian faith with intensely dramatic wit, but it is in the 'Hymn to God my God, in my Sickness' and a 'Hymn to God the Father' that his relish of paradox and the strong speech rhythms of personal drama merge most tellingly with theology and faith. In these poems we watch Donne's advance towards the unity of the human and divine. In the first hymn, Donne's body is again a microcosm, a little world hurrying to decay. Yet, in its pain, it also imitates Christ's Passion and so may eventually rise like him to paradise. Finally, at the close of the second hymn, Donne hovers on the edge of death in a state at once confessional, wittily serious and almost ready to accept the extinction of his turbulent personality:

I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
    My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by thy self, that at my death thy son
    Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
        And, having done that, thou hadst done,
            I fear no more.

In the end, Donne's own name — that very personal token of self — becomes something to offer in with to God and so a means of surrendering the human to the divine.

Simon Schama's John Donne

—oOo—

Simon Schama's John Donne

 A BBC documentary on John Donne:

 

Simon Schama's John Donne from Videos on Vimeo.

 

 

William Drummond (1585-1649)

 

From  The Lives of the British Poets. By Samuel Johnson. Completed by William Hazlitt. 4 vols. in 2. London: Nathaniel Cooke, 1854. I.273-75.

 

WILLIAM DRUMMOND (1585-1649)

William Drummond, a descendant of the ancient family of Drummond of Carnock, and the son of Sir John Drummond, was born at Hawthorndean, in Scotland, 13th December, 1585. He received his education at the University of Edinburgh, where he took the degree of M.A. At the age of twenty-one he went to France, and attended lectures on the civil law, a subject on which he left sufficient documents to prove that his jugment and proficiency were uncommon.

After a residence abroad of nearly four years, he returned to Scotland in 1610, in which year his father died. Instead, however, of prosecuting the study of the law, as was expected, he thought himself sufficiently rich in the possession of his paternal estate, and devoted his time to the ancient classics, and the cultivation of his poetical genius. Whether he had composed or communicated any pieces to his friends before this period, is uncertain. It was after a recovery from a dangerous illness that he wrote a prose rhapsody, entitled Cypress Grove; and about the same time his Flowers of Zion, or Spiritual Poems; which, with the Cypress Grove, were printed in Edinburgh in 1623. A part of his sonnets, it is said, were published as early as 1616.

During his residence at Hawthornden, hecourted a young lady of the name of Cunningham,to whom he was about to be united, when she was snatched from him by a violent fever. To dissipate his grief, which every object and every thought of his retirement contributed to revive, he travelled on the continent for about eight years, visiting Germany, France, and Italy. During this time he invigorated his memory and imagination by studying the varous models of original poetry, and collected a valuable set of Latin and Greek authors, with some of which he enriched the college library of Edinburgh, and others wre deposited at Hawthorndean. The books and manuscrips which he gave to Edinburgh were arranged in a catalogue printed 1627, and introduced by a Latin preface from his pen, on the advantage and honour of libraries.

On his return to Scotland, he found the nation distracted by political and religious disputes, which combined with the same causes in England to bring on a civil war. He retired to the seat of his brother-in-law, Sir John Scot, of Scotstarvet, a man of letters and probably of congenial sentiments on public affairs. During his stay with this gentleman, he wrote his History of the Five James's, Kings of Scotland; a work so inconsistent with liberal notions of civil policy as to have added very little to his reputation, although when first published, a few years after his death, and when political opinions ran in extremes, it wa probably not without its admirers.

It is uncertain at what time he was enabled to enjoy his retirement at Hawthorndean; but it appears he was there in his forty-fifth year, when he married Elizabeth Logan (granddaughter of Sir Robert Logan, of the house of Restelrig), in whom he fancied a resemblance to his first mistress.

During the civil war, his attachment to the king and church induced him to write many pieces in support of the establishment, which involved him with the revolutionary party, who not only called him to a severe account, but compelled him to furnish his quota of men and arms to fight against the cause which he espoused. His grief for the death of his royal master is said to heve been so great as to shorten his days. He died on the 4th of December, 1649, in the sixty-fourth year of his age, and was interred in the church of Lasswade. Unambitious of riches or honours, he appears to have projected the life of a retired scholar, from which he was diverted only by the commotions that robbed his country of its tranquillity. He was highly accomplished in ancient and modern literature, and in the amusements which became a man of his rank. Among his intimate friends and learned contemporaries, he seems to have been connected with the Earl of Stirling, Drayton, and Ben Jonson. The latter, as already noted in his life, paid him a visit at Hawthorndean, and communicated to him without reserve many pariculars of his life and opinions, which Drummond committed to writing, with a sketch of Jonson's character.

As a poet he ranks among the first reformers of versification, and in elegance, harmony, and delicacy of feeling is far superior to his contemporaries. One poem lately added to his other works, entitled Polemo-Middinia, or the Battle of the Dunghill, is a good example of burlesque.

 

 

 

 

 

—oOo—

 

 

 

The Life of Poet William Blake documentary (NIVEL AVANZADO)

Some of Gray's Contemporaries (NIVEL AVANZADO)

 

Edward Young  (1683-1765)
_____. The Brothers. Tragedy.
_____. The Last Day. Poem. 1713.
_____. Love of Fame, the Universal Passion. Satirical poems. 1725-8.
_____. The Complaint: or, Night Thoughts. Poem. 1742-45.
_____. Conjectures on Original Composition. Essay. 1759.
_____. Poetical Works. 2 vols.  1741.  4 vols.  1757.

—& other poems from the "Graveyard School":

Thomas Parnell. Night-piece on Death. 1721.
Robert Blair. The Grave. Poem. 1743.
Thomas Warton. The Pleasures of Melancholy. 1747.
James Hervey. Meditations among the Tombs. 1745-46.

_____________________

Other minor poets:

 
John Dyer (1700-1758)
_____. "Grongar Hill." Poem.
_____. The Ruins of Rome.  1740.
_____. The Fleece. 1757.

Charles Churchill (1731-1764)
_____. The Rosciad.  Satire against actors.
_____. The Prophecy of Famine. Satire against Scotland.
_____. An Epistle to William Hogarth. Satire.
_____. The Author. Satire (Smollett).


Warton, Joseph.  (1722-1800).
_____. The Enthusiast: or the Lover of Nature.  Poem. 1744.
_____.  An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Mr Pope.  2 vols.  London, 1756, 1782.

Warton, Thomas (Jr.). (1728-1790).
_____. The Pleasures of Melancholy. 1747.
_____.  Observations on the Fairy Queen of Spenser.  1754. 
_____. The History of English Poetry.  3 vols.  1774 (rev. 1775), 1778, 1781.

Editors & collectors: Percy and Brooke
Percy, Thomas (Bishop) (1729-1811), ed.  Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.  1765.
Brooke, Charlotte. (1740-1793), ed. Reliques of Irish Poetry.  1789.

William Cowper (Oxford Companion)

 
From the Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble.


COWPER, William (1731-1800), elder son of the rector of Great Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, whose mother died when he was 6. He was educated at a private school (where he was bullied) and at Westminster, where he was a contemporary of Charles *Churchill and W. *Hastings. He was called to the bar in 1754. Sensitive and hypochondriac by nature as a child, he began to suffer from severe depression, and when called for examination for a disputed clerkship in the House of Lords he broke down completely and attempted suicide; his illness may have been aggravated by the failure of his hope of marrying his cousin Theodora Cowper. From this time he was subject to periods of acute melancholia which took a religious form; he felt himself cast out of God's mercy, and wrote later in his moving autobiographical Memoir (c. 1767, pub. 1816), 'conviction of sin and expectation of instant judgement never left me.' He spent some months in Dr Cotton's Collegium Insanorum at St Albans, and turned increasingly to evangelical Christianity for consolation. In 1765 he became a boarder (in his own words, 'a sort of adopted son') in the home of the Revd Morley Unwin at Huntingdon, and on Morley's death moved with Mary, his widow, to Olney.

There he came under the influence of J. *Newton, the evangelical curate, with whom he wrote Olney Hymns (1669); his contributions include 'God moves in a mysterious way' and 'Oh, for a closer walk with God'. He became engaged to Mrs Unwin, but suffered another period of severe depression and made another suicide attempt; he spent a year with the Newtons before returning to Mrs Unwin's home. A calmer period followed, during which at her suggestion he wrote his satires ('Table Talk', 'The Progress of Error', 'Truth', 'Expostulation', 'Hope', 'Charity', 'Conversation', and 'Retirement') which were published in 1782 with several shorter poems 8including 'Verses Supposed to be Written by Alexander Selkirk; see SELKIRK); in the same year he wrote 'John Gilpin' and in 1783-4 his best-known long poem The Task (1785), both subject suggested by his new friend and neighbour Lady Austen. The volume in which these appeared also contained 'Tirocinium', a vigorous attack on public schools. In 1786 he moved with Mrs Unwin to Weston Underwood, where he wrote various poems published after his death, including the unfinished 'Yardley-Oak' (admired by *Wordsworth), the verses 'On the Loss of the Royal George' ('Toll for the brave . . . '), 'To Mary', and 'The Poplar-Field'. His translation of *Homer, published in 1791, was not successful. From 1791 Mrs Unwin suffered a series of paralytic strokes; she died in1796, leaving Cowper in severe depression from which he never fully recovered.

He wrote 'The Castaway' shortly before his death; like many of his poems it deals with man's isolation and helplessness. Storms and shipwrecks recur in his work as images of the mysterious ways of God, and Cowper's search for a retired and quiet life of simple domestic and rural pleasures gave him little sense of permanent security. Yet his poems and his much admired letters (published posthumously) have been highly valued for their intimate portrait of tranquillity and for their playful and delicate wit. His sympathetic feelings for nature (expressed in the lines from The Task admired by Jane *Austen's Fanny Price, 'Ye fallen avenues! Once more I mourn, / Your fate unmerited') presage *Romanticism, and his use of blank verse links that of James *Thomson with that of *Wordsworth. He was also, like his evangelical friends, a champion of the oppressed, and wrote verses on *Wilberforce and the slave trade. Whether religion was cause or cure of his depression has been much disputed; the sense of guilt and paranoia displayed in his Memoir has much in common with that of Bunyan's *Grace Abounding. A life by his friend W. *Hayley was published 1803-4; see also The Stricken Deer (1929) by David *Cecil and a critical biography by M. Quinlan (1953). Cowper's *Letters and Prose Writings, ed. J. King and C. Ryskamp, appeared in 3 vols, 1979-82.





The Task, a poem in six books by Cowper, published 1785.

When Cowper's friend Lady Austen (whom he met in 1781) suggested to him the sofa in his room as the subject of a poem in blank verse, the poet set about 'the task'. Its six books are entitled 'The Sofa', 'The Time-Piece', 'The Garden', 'The Winter Evening', 'The Winter Morning Walk', and 'The Winter Walk at Noon'. Cowper opens with a mock-heroic account of the evolution of the sofa ('I sing the sofa') and thence digresses to description, reflection, and opinion. The poem stresses the delights of a retired life ('God made the country, and man made the town'), Bk I, 749); describes the poet's own search for peace ('I was a stricken deer, that left the herd', Bk III, 108), and evokes the pleasures of gardening, winter evenings by the fire, etc. The moral passages condemn blood sports, cards, and other diversions; the poet manifests tenderness not only for his pet hare but even for worms and snails.The poem was extremely popular: *Burns found it 'a glorious poem' that expressed 'the Religion of God and Nature', and it helped to create and supply the growing demand for natural description and tender emotion that found a fuller expression in Wordsworth's *Prelude, a poem which contains many echoes of Cowpar.





'The Castaway', a poem by Cowper, written 1799, published 1803. It is based on an incident from *Anson's Voyage Round the World. Cowper depicts with tragic power the suffering of a seaman swept overboard and awaiting death by drowning. Mr Ramsay in V. Woolf's *To the Lighthouse is given to declaiming its last lines: 'We perish'd, each alone: / But I beneath a rougher sea, / And whelm'd in deeper gulphs than he.'

Pope, Alexander

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble. Paragraph separations added:

Pope, Alexander (1688-1744), the son of a Roman Catholic linen draper of London. His health was ruined and his growth stunted by a severe illness at the age of 12 (probably Pott's disease, a tubercular affection of the spine). He lived with his parents at Binfield in Windsor Forest and was largely self-educated. 

He showed his precocious metrical skill in his 'Pastorals' written, according to himself, when he was 16, and published in *Tonson's Miscellany (vol. vi) in 1709. (For Pope's quarrel with Ambrose Philips on this subject see under PHILIPS, A.). He became intimate with *Wycherley, who introduced him to London life. His *Essay on Criticism (1711) made him known to Addison's circle, and his *'Messiah' was published in the Spectator in 1712. *The Rape of the Lock appeared in Lintot's Miscellanies in the same year and was republished, enlarged, in 1714. His Ode for Music on St Cecilia's Day (1713), one of his rare attempts at lyric, shows that his gifts did not lie in this direction. 

In 1713 he also published *Windsor Forest, which appealed to the Tories by its references to the Peace of Utrecht, and won him the friendship of *Swift. He drifted away from Addison's 'little senate' and became a member of the *Scriblerus Club, an association that included Swift, *Gay, *Arbuthnot, and others. He issued in 1715 the first volume of his translation in heroic couplets of Homer's *Iliad. This work, completed in 1720, is more *Augustan than Homeric in spirit and diction, but has nevertheless been much admired. *Coleridge thought it an 'astonishing product of matchless talent and ingenuity'. It was supplemented in 1725-6 by a translation of the *Odyssey, in which he was assisted by William Broome and Elijah Fenton. The two translations brought him financial independence. He moved in 1718 with his mother to Twickenham, where he spent the rest of his life, devoting much time to his garden and grotto; he was keenly interested in *landscape gardening and committed to the principle 'Consult the Genius of the Place in all'.

In 1717 had appeared a collection of his works containing two poems dealing, alone among his works, with the passion of love. They are 'Verses to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady', an elegy on a fictitious lady who had killed herself through hopeless love, and *'Eloisa to Abelard', in which Eloisa describes her inner conflicts after the loss of her lover. About this time he became strongly attached to Martha *Blount, with whom his friendship continued throughout his life, and to Lady Mary Wortley *Montagu, whom in later years he assailed with bitterness. Lady Mary left for Turkey in July 1716 and Pope sent her 'Eloisa to Abelard' with a letter suggesting that he was passionately grieved by her absence.

Pope assisted Gray in writing the comedy Three Hours after Marriage (1717) but made no other attempt at drama. In 1723, four years after Addison's death, appeared (in a miscellany called Cytherea) Pope's portrait of *Atticus, a satire on Addison written in 1715. An extended version appeared as 'A Fragment of a Satire' in a 1727 volume of Miscellanies (by Pope, Swift, Arbuthot, and Gay)., and took its final form in An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot (1735). 

In the same Miscellanies volume Pope published his prose treatise *Peri Bathous, or The Art of Sinking in Poetry, ridiculing among others Ambrose Philips, *Theobald, and John *Dennis. In 1725 Pope published an edition of Shakespeare, the errors in which were pointed out in a pamphlet by Theobald, Shakespeare Restored (1726). This led to Pope's selection of Theobald as hero of his *Dunciad, a satire on Dullness in three books, on which he had been at work for some time: the first volume appeared anonymously in 1728. Swift, who spent some months with Pope in Twickenham in 1726, provided much encouragement for this work, of which a further enlarged edition was published in 1729. An additional book, The New Dunciad, was published in 1742, prompted this time, it appears, by *Warburton. The complete Dunciad in four books, in which Colley Cibber replaces Theobald as hero, appeared in 1743.

Influenced in part by the philosophy of his friend *Bolingbroke, Pope published a series of moral and philosophical poems, *Essay on Man (1733-34), consisting of four Epistles; and *Moral Essays (1731-5), four in number: Of the Knowledge and Characters of Men, Of the Characters of Women, and two on the subject Of the Use of Riches. A fifth epistle was added, addressed to Addison, occasioned by his dialogue on medals. This was originally written in Addison's lifetime, c. 1716. In 1733 Pope published the first of his miscellaneous satires, Imitations of Horace, entitled 'Satire I', a paraphrase of the first satire of the second book of Horace, in the form of a dialogue between the poet and William Fortescue, the lawyer. In it Pope defends himself against the charge of Malignity, and professes to be inspired only by love of virtue. He inserts, however, a gross attack on his former friend Lady Mary Wortley Montagu as 'Sappho'. He followed this up with his Imitations of Horace's Satires 2.2 and 1.2 ('Sober Advice from Horace'), in 1734, and of Epistles 1.6; 2.2; 2.1; and 1.1, in 1737.  Horace's Epistle 1.7 and the latter part of Satire 2.6 'imitated in the manner of Dr Swift', appeared in 1738. The year 1735 saw the appearance of the Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, the prologue to the above Satires, one of Pope's most brilliant pieces of irony and invective, mingled with autobiography. It contains the famous portraits of Addison (ll. 193-214) and Lord *Hervey, and lashes his minor critics, Dennis, Cibber, *Curll, Theobald, etc. In 1738 appeared One Thousand Seven Hundred and Thirty Eight, two satirical dialogues. These satires, and the 'Satires (2 and 4) of Dr Donne Versified' (1735), with the New Dunciad, closed his literary career.

He was partly occupied during his later years with the publication of his earlier correspondence, which he edited and amended in such a manner as to misrepresent the literary history of the time. He also employed discreditable artifices to make it appear that it was published against his wish. Thus he procured the publication by Curll of his 'Literary Correspondence' in 1735, and then endeavored to disavow him.

With the growth of *Romanticism Pope's poetry was increasingly seen as artificial; Coleridge commented that Pope's thoughts were 'translated into the language of poetry'. *Hazlitt called him 'the poet not of nature but of art', and W. L. Bowles compared his work to 'a game of cards'; *Byron, however, was highly laudatory: 'Pope's pure strain / Sought the rapt soul to charm, nor sought in vain.' Matthew *Arnold's famous comment, 'Dryden and Pope are not classics of our poetry, they are classics of our prose' (Essays in Criticism, 1880), summed up much 19th-cent. opinion, and it was not until *Leavis and *Empson that a serious attempt was made to rediscover Pope's richness, variety, and complexity.

Minor works that deserve mention are:

Verse: the Epistles 'To a Young Lady (Miss Blount) with the Works of Voiture' (1712), to the same 'On her Leaving the town after the Coronation' (1717); 'To Mr Jervas with Dryden's Translation of Fresony's Art of Painting' (1716) and 'To Robert, Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer' (1721); 'Vertumnus and Pomona' , 'Sappho to Phaon', and 'The Fable of Dryope', translations from *Ovid (1712); *'January and May', 'The Wife of Bath, her Prologue', and The Temple of Fame, from *Chaucer (1709, 1714, 1715).

Prose: The Narrative of Dr Robert Norris (1713), a satirical attack on Dennis; A Full and True Account of a Horrid and Barbarous Revenge by Poison, on . . . Mr Edmund Curll (1716), an attack on Curll (to whom he had secretly administered an emetic).

The standard edn. of Pope's poetry is the Twickenham Edition, under the general editorship of J. Butt 811 vols. plus Index, 1940-69); see also G. Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope (1949); P.
*Quennell, Alexander Pope: The Education of a Genius (1968), M. Mack, The Garden and the City (1969) and Alexander Pope: A Life (1985); Morris R. Brownell, Alexander Pope and the Arts of Georgian England (1978).

The Rape of the Lock, a poem by *Pope, in two cantos, published in Linto's Miscellany 172 as "The Rape of the Locke"; subsequently enlarged to five cantos and thus published 1714.

When Lord Petre forcibly cut off a lock of Miss Arabella Fermor's hair, the incident gave rise to a quarrel between the families. With the idea of allaying this, Pope treated the subject in a playful *mock-heroic poem, on the model of *Boileau's Le Lutrin. He presents Belinda at her toilet, a game of ombre, the snipping of the lock while Belinda sips her coffee, the wrath of Belinda and her demand that the lock be restored, the final wafting of the lock, as a new star, to adorn the skies. The poem was published in its original form with Miss Fermor's permission. Pope then expanded the sketch by introducing the machinery of sylphs and gnomes, adapted from a light erotic French work, Le Comte de Gabalis, a series of five discourses by the Abbé de Montfaucon de Villars, which appeared in English in 1680; in his dedication he credits both Gabalis and the *Rosicrucians. (See also PARACELSUS). One of Pope's most brilliant performances, it has also been one of his most popular: Dr.*Johnson called it 'the most attractive of all ludicrous compositions', in which 'New things are made familiar and familiar things are made new'.



Essay on Man, a philosophical poem in heroic couplets by *Pope, published 1733-34, part of a larger poem projected but not completed.

It consists of four epistles addressed to *Bolingbroke, and perhaps to some extent inspired by his fragmentary philosophical writings. Its objective is to vindicate the ways of God to man; to prove that the scheme of the universe is the best of all possible schemes, in spite of appearances of evil, and that our failure to see the perfection of the whole is due to our limited vision. 'Partial Ill' is 'universal Good', and 'self-love and social' are directed to the same end; 'All are but parts of one stupenduous whole / Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.' The epistles deal with man's relations to the universe, to himself as an individual, to society, and to happiness. D. *Stewart thought the Essay 'the noblest specimen of philosophical poetry our language affords' (Active and Moral Powers, 1828), but Dr *Johnson commented, 'Never were penury of knowledge and vulgarity of sentiment so happily disguised.' Pope's attempts to prove that 'Whatever is, is right' anticipate the efforts of Pangloss in *Voltaire's Candide.



 

Análisis del discurso: Gramáticas, contextos, conversaciones, estilos

Dr Kat and the Earl of Rochester (NIVEL AVANZADO)

An introduction to the Earl of Rochester, with some additional poems:

 

Henry Vaughan - a 17th century Welsh poet

Henry Vaughan, "I Walk'd the Other Day".

Ben Jonson

BEN JONSON     (1572-1637)


1590s
_____.  Every Man in his Humour. Comedy. 1596, 1598.
_____. The Isle of Dogs. Drama. 1597. (With Nashe and others, Lost).


1600s
_____. Cynthia's Revels. Drama.  1600.
_____. Every Man Out of His Humour. Comedy. 1600.
_____. The Poetaster. Comedy. Acted at Blackfriars, 1601.
_____. Sejanus His Fall. Tragedy. 1603.
_____. The Masque of Blackness. Acted 1605.
_____. Eastward Ho! Comedy. 1605. (With Marston and Chapman)
_____. Hymenaei. Masque. First performed 1606.
_____. Volpone. Comedy. 1606.
_____. The Masque of Whiteness. c. 1607.
_____. Masque of Beauty. 1608.
_____. Britain's Burse. Drama. 1609.
_____. Epicoene: Or, The Silent Woman. Comedy. 1609-10.
_____. The Masque of Queens. 1609.

1610s
_____. The Alchemist. Comedy. c. 1610.
_____. Oberon the Fairy Prince. Masque. 1611.
_____. Catiline His Conspiracy. Tragedy. Pub. 1611.
_____. Love Restored. Masque. 1612.
_____. The Devil is an Ass. Drama. 1616.
_____. Lovers Made Men. Masque. 1617.
_____. Bartholomew Fair. Comedy. 1614.
_____. The Workes of Beniamin Jonson.  1616.  (Folio; Contains: Comedies, Tragedies, Masques,  Epigrams, and The Forest poems; esp. "To Penshurst").
_____. Conversations with Drummond. 1619.

1620s
_____.  The Gipsies Metamorphosed. Masque. 1621.
_____. Time Vindicated. 1623.
_____. "To the Memory of my Beloved, The Author, Mr. William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us." In Mr. William Shakespeares  Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. (First Folio). London,1623.
_____. The Fortunate Isles. 1625.
_____. The Staple of Newes. Comedy. 1626.

1630s
Jonson, Ben. The New Inn. Comedy. 1630.
_____. Chloridia. Masque. 1631.
_____. The Magnetic Lady. Comedy. 1632.
_____. Tale of a Tub. Drama. 1633.

1640s
Jonson, Ben. The English Grammar. Ed. James Howell. 1640.
_____. The Underwood. In Jonson, (Works, Second folio). 1640.9.*
_____. An Execration against Vulcan. 1640.
_____. Works. 2nd ed. 1640. (Including: Timber: Or, Discoveries).
   

More on Ben Jonson, here (NIVEL AVANZADO).


Muchos de los argumentos dramáticos de Jonson se basan en la estructura del intrigante descubierto, o el plan perfecto que fracasa. Aquí un comentario sobre este tipo de estructura dramática / narrativa: La historia del fracaso del plan.




Some notes on Ben Jonson: 



(From Margaret Drabble's Oxford Companion to English Literature):


Ben[jamin] Jonson (1572-1637). Dramatist, poet, scholar, and writer of court masques. He was of Border descent, but was born in or near London, the posthumous son of a clergyman. He was educated at Westminster School under Camden. During the early 1590s he worked as a bricklayer in his stepfather's employ, saw military service in Flanders, where he killed an enemy champion in single combat, and joined a strolling company of players for whom he acted the part of Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy, a play for which he wrote additional scenes in 1601-2. In 1597 he began to work for Henslowe's companies as a player and playwright, and was imprisoned for his share in The Isle of Dogs, a satire now lost 'containing very seditious and slandrous matter' (See Swan Theatre). In 1598 he killed a fellow actor in a duel, but escaped hanging by pleading benefit of clergy, being branded instead as a felon. He became a Roman Catholic during his imprisonment, but returned to Anglicanism 15 years later. His first important play, Every Man in His Humour, with Shakespeare in the cast, was performed by the Lord Chamberlain's Company at the Curtain in 1598, and Every Man Out of His Humour at the Globe in 1599. Cynthia's Revels (1600) and Poetaster (1600-1, attacking Dekker and Marston) were performed by the Children of the Queen's Chapel. His first extant tragedy, Sejanus, was given at the Globe by Shakespeare's company, 1603; his first court masque, The Masque of Blackness, written to accomodate Queen Anne's desire to appear a a Negress, was given on Twelfth Night, 1605. In that year he was imprisoned and in danger of having his nose and ears slit, for his share in Eastward Hoe, and gave evidence to the Privy Council concerning the Gunpowder Plot. Then followed the period of his major plays: Volpone, acted at both the Globe and the two universities, 1605-6, Epicene, or The Silent Woman, 1609-10; The Alchemist, 1610; and Bartholomew Fair (1614). In 1612-13 he was in France as tutor to Ralegh's son, and in 1618-19 journeyed on foot to Scotland, where he stayed with Drummond of Hawthornden, who recorded their conversation.

Though not formally appointed the first poet laureate, the essentials of the position were conferred on Jonson in 1616, when a pension was granted to him by James I. In the same year he published a folio edition of his Works, which raised the drama to a new level of literary respectability, received an honorary MA from Oxford University, and about this date became lecturer in rhetoric at Gresham College in London. He was elected chronologer of London in 1628. After The Devil Is an Ass (1616), he abandoned the public stage for ten years, and his later plays, The Magnetic Lady (1631) and A Tale of a Tub (1633), show a relatively unsuccessful reliance on allegory and symbolism. Dryden called them his 'dotages'. From 1605 onwards Jonson was constantly producing masques for the court, with scenery by Inigo Jones. This form of entertainment reached its highest elaboration in Jonson's hands. He introduced into it the 'antimasque', an antithetical, usually disorderly, prelude to the main action which served to highlight by contrast the central theme of political and social harmony. There are examples of this in The Masque of Queens (1609), Love Restored (1612), Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists at Court (1616), Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (1618, which gave Milton his idea for Comus), and Neptune's Triumph for the Return of Albion (1624). After Chloridia (1631), his collaboration with Jones ended in a famous quarrel, which Jonson treated in several vituperative poems, concerning the relative priority of verbal and thematic content and spectacle. His last masques were produced in 1633-4. His non-dramatic verse includes Epigrammes and The Forest, printed in the Folio of 1616: notable among his epigrams are two tender and moving epitaphs, Nos. xxii and xlv, 'On My First Daughter' (c. 1595) and 'On His First Sonne' (1603) ('Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy'). The Underwood and a translation of Horace's Ars Poetica were printed in 1640. His chief prose works are The English Grammar and Timber, or Discoveries, printed in 1640.

During the reign of James I Jonson's literary prestige and influence were unrivalled. He presided over a literary circle which met at the Mermaid Tavern, and later in the Apollo Room of the Devil and St Dunstan Tavern, where his leges conviviales or 'social rules' were inscribed over the mantlepiece. His friends included Shakespeare, whom he loved 'on this side idolatry', Donne, F. Bacon, George Chapman, Beaumont, Fletcher, Cotton, and Selden, and among the younger writers (who styled themselves the 'sons' or 'tribe of Ben' R. Brome, Carew, Cartwright, Sir K. Digby, Lord Falkland, Herrick, Nabbes, Randolph, and Suckling. His chief patrons were the Sidney family, the earl of Pembroke, the countess of Bedford, and the duke and duchess of Newcastle. Jonson suffered a stroke in 1628, after which he was perhaps permanently bedridden until his death in August 1637. He was buried in Westminster Abbey under a tombstone bearing the inscription 'O rare Ben Jonson', and celebrated in a collection of elegies entitled Jonsonus Virbius (1638). As a man Jonson was arrogant and quarrelsome, but fearless, warm-hearted, and intellectually honest. His reputation declined sharply from about 1700, as Shakespeare's, with whom he was inevitably compared, increased, but in this century it has revived, thanks partly to the comprehensive edition of C. H. Herford and P. and E. Simpson (11 vols, 1925-52), vols. i and ii of which contain the standard biography.
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- Un audio sobre la vida de BEN JONSON.


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Ben Jonson: NIVEL AVANZADO


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JONSON, Ben

 

(From Margaret Drabble's Oxford Companion to English Literature):


Ben[jamin] Jonson (1572-1637). Dramatist, poet, scholar, and writer of court masques. He was of Border descent, but was born in or near London, the posthumous son of a clergyman. He was educated at Westminster School under Camden. During the early 1590s he worked as a bricklayer in his stepfather's employ, saw military service in Flanders, where he killed an enemy champion in single combat, and joined a strolling company of players for whom he acted the part of Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy, a play for which he wrote additional scenes in 1601-2. In 1597 he began to work for Henslowe's companies as a player and playwright, and was imprisoned for his share in The Isle of Dogs, a satire now lost 'containing very seditious and slandrous matter' (See Swan Theatre). In 1598 he killed a fellow actor in a duel, but escaped hanging by pleading benefit of clergy, being branded instead as a felon. He became a Roman Catholic during his imprisonment, but returned to Anglicanism 15 years later. His first important play, Every Man in His Humour, with Shakespeare in the cast, was performed by the Lord Chamberlain's Company at the Curtain in 1598, and Every Man Out of His Humour at the Globe in 1599. Cynthia's Revels (1600) and Poetaster (1600-1, attacking Dekker and Marston) were performed by the Children of the Queen's Chapel. His first extant tragedy, Sejanus, was given at the Globe by Shakespeare's company, 1603; his first court masque, The Masque of Blackness, written to accomodate Queen Anne's desire to appear a a Negress, was given on Twelfth Night, 1605. In that year he was imprisoned and in danger of having his nose and ears slit, for his share in Eastward Hoe, and gave evidence to the Privy Council concerning the Gunpowder Plot. Then followed the period of his major plays: Volpone, acted at both the Globe and the two universities, 1605-6, Epicene, or The Silent Woman, 1609-10; The Alchemist, 1610; and Bartholomew Fair (1614). In 1612-13 he was in France as tutor to Ralegh's son, and in 1618-19 journeyed on foot to Scotland, where he stayed with Drummond of Hawthornden, who recorded their conversation.

Though not formally appointed the first poet laureate, the essentials of the position were conferred on Jonson in 1616, when a pension was granted to him by James I. In the same year he published a folio edition of his Works, which raised the drama to a new level of literary respectability, received an honorary MA from the Oxford University, and about this date became lecturer in rhetoric at Gresham College in London. He was elected chronologer of London in 1628. After The Devil Is an Ass (1616), he abandoned the public stage for ten years, and his later plays, The Magnetic Lady (1631) and A Tale of a Tub (1633), show a relatively unsuccessful reliance on allegory and symbolism. Dryden called them his 'dotages'. From 1605 onwards Jonson was constantly producing masques for the court, with scenery by Inigo Jones. This form of entertainment reached its highest elaboration in Jonson's hands. He introduced into it the 'antimasque', an antithetical, usually disorderly, prelude to the main action which served to highlight by contrast the central theme of political and social harmony. There are examples of this in The Masque of Queens (1609), Love Restored (1612), Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists at Court (1616), Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (1618, which gave Milton his idea for Comus), and Neptune's Triumph for the Return of Albion (1624). After Chloridia (1631), his collaboration with Jones ended in a famous quarrel, which Jonson treated in several vituperative poems, concerning the relative priority of verbal and thematic content and spectacle. His last masques were produced in 1633-4. His non-dramatic verse includes Epigrammes and The Forest, printed in the Folio of 1616: notable among his epigrams are two tender and moving epitaphs, Nos. xxii and xlv, 'On My First Daughter' (c. 1595) and 'On His First Sonne' (1603) ('Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy'). The Underwood and a translation of Horace's Ars Poetica were printed in 1640. His chief prose works are The English Grammar and Timber, or Discoveries, printed in 1640.

During the reign of James I Jonson's literary prestige and influence were unrivalled. He presided over a literary circle which met at the Mermaid Tavern, and later in the Apollo Room of the Devil and St Dunstan Tavern, where his leges conviviales or 'social rules' were inscribed over the mantlepiece. His friends included Shakespeare, whom he loved 'on this side idolatry', Donne, F. Bacon, George Chapman, Beaumont, Fletcher, Cotton, and Selden, and among the younger writers (who styled themselves the 'sons' or 'tribe of Ben' R. Brome, Carew, Cartwright, Sir K. Digby, Lord Falkland, Herrick, Nabbes, Randolph, and Suckling. His chief patrons were the Sidney family, the earl of Pembroke, the countess of Bedford, and the duke and duchess of Newcastle. Jonson suffered a stroke in 1628, after which he was perhaps permanently bedridden until his death in August 1637. He was buried in Westminster Abbey under a tombstone bearing the inscription 'O rare Ben Jonson', and celebrated in a collection of elegies entitled Jonsonus Virbius (1638). As a man Jonson was arrogant and quarrelsome, but fearless, warm-hearted, and intellectually honest. His reputation declined sharply from about 1700, as Shakespeare's, with whom he was inevitably compared, increased, but in this century it has revived, thanks partly to the comprehensive edition of C. H. Herford and P. and E. Simpson (11 vols, 1925-52), vols. i and ii of which contain the standard biography.


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Felix E. Schelling, Introduction to Every Man Out of His Humour— a longer introduction to Ben Jonson's life and literary career:



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;" 

and dedicating his first dramatic success, "Every Man in His Humour," to him. It is doubtful whether Jonson ever went to either university, though Fuller says that he was "statutably admitted into St. John's College, Cambridge." He tells us that he took no degree, but was later "Master of Arts in both the universities, by their favour, not his study." When a mere youth Jonson enlisted as a soldier, trailing his pike in Flanders in the protracted wars of William the Silent against the Spanish. Jonson was a large and raw-boned lad; he became by his own account in time exceedingly bulky. In chat with his friend William Drummond of Hawthornden, Jonson told how "in his service in the Low Countries he had, in the face of both the camps, killed an enemy, and taken opima spolia from him;" and how "since his coming to England, being appealed to the fields, he had killed his adversary which had hurt him in the arm and whose sword was ten inches longer than his." Jonson's reach may have made up for the lack of his sword; certainly his prowess lost nothing in the telling. Obviously Jonson was brave, combative, and not averse to talking of himself and his doings. 

In 1592, Jonson returned from abroad penniless. Soon after he married, almost as early and quite as imprudently as Shakespeare. He told Drummond curtly that "his wife was a shrew, yet honest"; for some years he lived apart from her in the household of Lord Albany. Yet two touching epitaphs among Jonson's "Epigrams," "On my first daughter," and "On my first son," attest the warmth of the poet's family affections. The daughter died in infancy, the son of the plague; another son grew up to manhood [and] little credit to his father whom he survived. We know nothing beyond this of Jonson's domestic life. 

How soon Jonson drifted into what we now call grandly "the theatrical profession" we do not know. In 1593, Marlowe made his tragic exit from life, and Greene, Shakespeare's other rival on the popular stage, had preceded Marlowe in an equally miserable death the year before. Shakespeare already had the running to himself. Jonson appears first in the employment of Philip Henslowe, the exploiter of several troupes of players, manager, and father-in-law of the famous actor, Edward Alleyn. From entries in "Henslowe's Diary," a species of theatrical account book which has been handed down to us, we know that Jonson was connected with the Admiral's men; for he borrowed 4 pounds of Henslowe, July 28, 1597, paying back 3s. 9d. on the same day on account of his "share" (in what is not altogether clear); while later, on December 3, of the same year, Henslowe advanced 20s. to him "upon a book which he showed the plot unto the company which he promised to deliver unto the company at Christmas next." In the next August Jonson was in collaboration with Chettle and Porter in a play called "Hot Anger Soon Cold." All this points to an association with Henslowe of some duration, as no mere tyro would be thus paid in advance upon mere promise. From allusions in Dekker's play, "Satiromastix," it appears that Jonson, like Shakespeare, began life as an actor, and that he "ambled in a leather pitch by a play-wagon" taking at one time the part of Hieronimo in Kyd's famous play, "The Spanish Tragedy." By the beginning of 1598, Jonson, though still in needy circumstances, had begun to receive recognition. Francis Meres — well known for his "Comparative Discourse of our English Poets with the Greek, Latin, and Italian Poets," printed in 1598, and for his mention therein of a dozen plays of Shakespeare by title — accords to Ben Jonson a place as one of "our best in tragedy," a matter of some surprise, as no known tragedy of Jonson from so early a date has come down to us. That Jonson was at work on tragedy, however, is proved by the entries in Henslowe of at least three tragedies, now lost, in which he had a hand. These are "Page of Plymouth," "King Robert II. of Scotland," and "Richard Crookback." But all of these came later, on his return to Henslowe, and range from August 1599 to June 1602. 

Returning to the autumn of 1598, an event now happened to sever for a time Jonson's relations with Henslowe. In a letter to Alleyn, dated September 26 of that year, Henslowe writes: "I have lost one of my company that hurteth me greatly; that is Gabriel [Spencer], for he is slain in Hogsden fields by the hands of Benjamin Jonson, bricklayer." The last word is perhaps Henslowe's thrust at Jonson in his displeasure rather than a designation of his actual continuance at his trade up to this time. It is fair to Jonson to remark however, that his adversary appears to have been a notorious fire-eater who had shortly before killed one Feeke in a similar squabble. Duelling was a frequent occurrence of the time among gentlemen and the nobility; it was an impudent breach of the peace on the part of a player. This duel is the one which Jonson described years after to Drummond, and for it Jonson was duly arraigned at Old Bailey, tried, and convicted. He was sent to prison and such goods and chattels as he had "were forfeited." It is a thought to give one pause that, but for the ancient law permitting convicted felons to plead, as it was called, the benefit of clergy, Jonson might have been hanged for this deed. The circumstance that the poet could read and write saved him; and he received only a brand of the letter "T," for Tyburn, on his left thumb. While in jail Jonson became a Roman Catholic; but he returned to the faith of the Church of England a dozen years later. 

On his release, in disgrace with Henslowe and his former associates, Jonson offered his services as a playwright to Henslowe's rivals, the Lord Chamberlain's company, in which Shakespeare was a prominent shareholder. A tradition of long standing, though not susceptible of proof in a court of law, narrates that Jonson had submitted the manuscript of "Every Man in His Humour" to the Chamberlain's men and had received from the company a refusal; that Shakespeare called him back, read the play himself, and at once accepted it. Whether this story is true or not, certain it is that "Every Man in His Humour" was accepted by Shakespeare's company and acted for the first time in 1598, with Shakespeare taking a part. The evidence of this is contained in the list of actors prefixed to the comedy in the folio of Jonson's works, 1616. But it is a mistake to infer, because Shakespeare's name stands first in the list of actors and the elder Kno'well first in the dramatis personae, that Shakespeare took that particular part. The order of a list of Elizabethan players was generally that of their importance or priority as shareholders in the company and seldom if ever corresponded to the list of characters. 

"Every Man in His Humour" was an immediate success, and with it Jonson's reputation as one of the leading dramatists of his time was established once and for all. This could have been by no means Jonson's earliest comedy, and we have just learned that he was already reputed one of "our best in tragedy." Indeed, one of Jonson's extant comedies, "The Case is Altered," but one never claimed by him or published as his, must certainly have preceded "Every Man in His Humour" on the stage. The former play may be described as a comedy modelled on the Latin plays of Plautus. (It combines, in fact, situations derived from the "Captivi" and the "Aulularia" of that dramatist). But the pretty story of the beggar-maiden, Rachel, and her suitors, Jonson found, not among the classics, but in the ideals of romantic love which Shakespeare had already popularised on the stage. Jonson never again produced so fresh and lovable a feminine personage as Rachel, although in other respects "The Case is Altered" is not a conspicuous play, and, save for the satirising of Antony Munday in the person of Antonio Balladino and Gabriel Harvey as well, is perhaps the least characteristic of the comedies of Jonson. 

"Every Man in His Humour," probably first acted late in the summer of 1598 and at the Curtain, is commonly regarded as an epoch-making play; and this view is not unjustified. As to plot, it tells little more than how an intercepted letter enabled a father to follow his supposedly studious son to London, and there observe his life with the gallants of the time. The real quality of this comedy is in its personages and in the theory upon which they are conceived. Ben Jonson had theories about poetry and the drama, and he was neither chary in talking of them nor in experimenting with them in his plays. This makes Jonson, like Dryden in his time, and Wordsworth much later, an author to reckon with; particularly when we remember that many of Jonson's notions came for a time definitely to prevail and to modify the whole trend of English poetry. First of all Jonson was a classicist, that is, he believed in restraint and precedent in art in opposition to the prevalent ungoverned and irresponsible Renaissance spirit. Jonson believed that there was a professional way of doing things which might be reached by a study of the best examples, and he found these examples for the most part among the ancients. To confine our attention to the drama, Jonson objected to the amateurishness and haphazard nature of many contemporary plays, and set himself to do something different; and the first and most striking thing that he evolved was his conception and practice of the comedy of humours. 

As Jonson has been much misrepresented in this matter, let us quote his own words as to "humour." A humour, according to Jonson, was a bias of disposition, a warp, so to speak, in character by which 

     "Some one peculiar quality
     Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw
     All his affects, his spirits, and his powers,
     In their confluctions, all to run one way."

But continuing, Jonson is careful to add: 

     "But that a rook by wearing a pied feather,
     The cable hat-band, or the three-piled ruff,
     A yard of shoe-tie, or the Switzers knot
     On his French garters, should affect a humour!
     O, it is more than most ridiculous."

Jonson's comedy of humours, in a word, conceived of stage personages on the basis of a ruling trait or passion (a notable simplification of actual life be it observed in passing); and, placing these typified traits in juxtaposition in their conflict and contrast, struck the spark of comedy. Downright, as his name indicates, is "a plain squire"; Bobadill's humour is that of the braggart who is incidentally, and with delightfully comic effect, a coward; Brainworm's humour is the finding out of things to the end of fooling everybody: of course he is fooled in the end himself. But it was not Jonson's theories alone that made the success of "Every Man in His Humour." The play is admirably written and each character is vividly conceived, and with a firm touch based on observation of the men of the London of the day. Jonson was neither in this, his first great comedy (nor in any other play that he wrote), a supine classicist, urging that English drama return to a slavish adherence to classical conditions. He says as to the laws of the old comedy (meaning by "laws," such matters as the unities of time and place and the use of chorus): "I see not then, but we should enjoy the same licence, or free power to illustrate and heighten our invention as they [the ancients] did; and not be tied to those strict and regular forms which the niceness of a few, who are nothing but form, would thrust upon us." "Every Man in His Humour" is written in prose, a novel practice which Jonson had of his predecessor in comedy, John Lyly. Even the word "humour" seems to have been employed in the Jonsonian sense by Chapman before Jonson's use of it. Indeed, the comedy of humours itself is only a heightened variety of the comedy of manners which represents life, viewed at a satirical angle, and is the oldest and most persistent species of comedy in the language. None the less, Jonson's comedy merited its immediate success and marked out a definite course in which comedy long continued to run. To mention only Shakespeare's Falstaff and his rout, Bardolph, Pistol, Dame Quickly, and the rest, whether in "Henry IV." or in "The Merry Wives of Windsor," all are conceived in the spirit of humours. So are the captains, Welsh, Scotch, and Irish of "Henry V.," and Malvolio especially later; though Shakespeare never employed the method of humours for an important personage. It was not Jonson's fault that many of his successors did precisely the thing that he had reprobated, that is, degrade the humour: into an oddity of speech, an eccentricity of manner, of dress, or cut of beard. There was an anonymous play called "Every Woman in Her Humour." Chapman wrote "A Humourous Day's Mirth," Day, "Humour Out of Breath," Fletcher later, "The Humourous Lieutenant," and Jonson, besides "Every Man Out of His Humour," returned to the title in closing the cycle of his comedies in "The Magnetic Lady or Humours Reconciled." 

With the performance of "Every Man Out of His Humour" in 1599, by Shakespeare's company once more at the Globe, we turn a new page in Jonson's career. Despite his many real virtues, if there is one feature more than any other that distinguishes Jonson, it is his arrogance; and to this may be added his self-righteousness, especially under criticism or satire. "Every Man Out of His Humour" is the first of three "comical satires" which Jonson contributed to what Dekker called the poetomachia or war of the theatres as recent critics have named it. This play as a fabric of plot is a very slight affair; but as a satirical picture of the manners of the time, proceeding by means of vivid caricature, couched in witty and brilliant dialogue and sustained by that righteous indignation which must lie at the heart of all true satire — as a realisation, in short, of the classical ideal of comedy — there had been nothing like Jonson's comedy since the days of Aristophanes. "Every Man in His Humour," like the two plays that follow it, contains two kinds of attack, the critical or generally satiric, levelled at abuses and corruptions in the abstract; and the personal, in which specific application is made of all this in the lampooning of poets and others, Jonson's contemporaries. The method of personal attack by actual caricature of a person on the stage is almost as old as the drama. Aristophanes so lampooned Euripides in "The Acharnians" and Socrates in "The Clouds," to mention no other examples; and in English drama this kind of thing is alluded to again and again. What Jonson really did, was to raise the dramatic lampoon to an art, and make out of a casual burlesque and bit of mimicry a dramatic satire of literary pretensions and permanency. With the arrogant attitude mentioned above and his uncommon eloquence in scorn, vituperation, and invective, it is no wonder that Jonson soon involved himself in literary and even personal quarrels with his fellow-authors. The circumstances of the origin of this 'poetomachia' are far from clear, and those who have written on the topic, except of late, have not helped to make them clearer. The origin of the "war" has been referred to satirical references, apparently to Jonson, contained in "The Scourge of Villainy," a satire in regular form after the manner of the ancients by John Marston, a fellow playwright, subsequent friend and collaborator of Jonson's. On the other hand, epigrams of Jonson have been discovered (49, 68, and 100) variously charging "playwright" (reasonably identified with Marston) with scurrility, cowardice, and plagiarism; though the dates of the epigrams cannot be ascertained with certainty. Jonson's own statement of the matter to Drummond runs: "He had many quarrels with Marston, beat him, and took his pistol from him, wrote his "Poetaster" on him; the beginning[s] of them were that Marston represented him on the stage."* 

[footnote] *The best account of this whole subject is to be found in the edition of "Poetaster" and "Satiromastix" by J. H. Penniman in "Belles Lettres Series" shortly to appear. See also his earlier work, "The War of the Theatres," 1892, and the excellent contributions to the subject by H. C. Hart in "Notes and Queries," and in his edition of Jonson, 1906. 

Here at least we are on certain ground; and the principals of the quarrel are known. "Histriomastix," a play revised by Marston in 1598, has been regarded as the one in which Jonson was thus "represented on the stage"; although the personage in question, Chrisogonus, a poet, satirist, and translator, poor but proud, and contemptuous of the common herd, seems rather a complimentary portrait of Jonson than a caricature. As to the personages actually ridiculed in "Every Man Out of His Humour," Carlo Buffone was formerly thought certainly to be Marston, as he was described as "a public, scurrilous, and profane jester," and elsewhere as the grand scourge or second untruss [that is, satirist], of the time (Joseph Hall being by his own boast the first, and Marston's work being entitled "The Scourge of Villainy"). Apparently we must now prefer for Carlo a notorious character named Charles Chester, of whom gossipy and inaccurate Aubrey relates that he was "a bold impertinent fellow...a perpetual talker and made a noise like a drum in a room. So one time at a tavern Sir Walter Raleigh beats him and seals up his mouth (that is his upper and nether beard) with hard wax. From him Ben Jonson takes his Carlo Buffone ['i.e.', jester] in "Every Man in His Humour" ['sic']." Is it conceivable that after all Jonson was ridiculing Marston, and that the point of the satire consisted in an intentional confusion of "the grand scourge or second untruss" with "the scurrilous and profane" Chester? 

We have digressed into detail in this particular case to exemplify the difficulties of criticism in its attempts to identify the allusions in these forgotten quarrels. We are on sounder ground of fact in recording other manifestations of Jonson's enmity. In "The Case is Altered" there is clear ridicule in the character Antonio Balladino of Anthony Munday, pageant-poet of the city, translator of romances and playwright as well. In "Every Man in His Humour" there is certainly a caricature of Samuel Daniel, accepted poet of the court, sonneteer, and companion of men of fashion. These men held recognised positions to which Jonson felt his talents better entitled him; they were hence to him his natural enemies. It seems almost certain that he pursued both in the personages of his satire through "Every Man Out of His Humour," and "Cynthia's Revels," Daniel under the characters Fastidious Brisk and Hedon, Munday as Puntarvolo and Amorphus; but in these last we venture on quagmire once more. Jonson's literary rivalry of Daniel is traceable again and again, in the entertainments that welcomed King James on his way to London, in the masques at court, and in the pastoral drama. As to Jonson's personal ambitions with respect to these two men, it is notable that he became, not pageant-poet, but chronologer to the City of London; and that, on the accession of the new king, he came soon to triumph over Daniel as the accepted entertainer of royalty. 

"Cynthia's Revels," the second "comical satire," was acted in 1600, and, as a play, is even more lengthy, elaborate, and impossible than "Every Man Out of His Humour." Here personal satire seems to have absorbed everything, and while much of the caricature is admirable, especially in the detail of witty and trenchantly satirical dialogue, the central idea of a fountain of self-love is not very well carried out, and the persons revert at times to abstractions, the action to allegory. It adds to our wonder that this difficult drama should have been acted by the Children of Queen Elizabeth's Chapel, among them Nathaniel Field with whom Jonson read Horace and Martial, and whom he taught later how to make plays. Another of these precocious little actors was Salathiel Pavy, who died before he was thirteen, already famed for taking the parts of old men. Him Jonson immortalised in one of the sweetest of his epitaphs. An interesting sidelight is this on the character of this redoubtable and rugged satirist, that he should thus have befriended and tenderly remembered these little theatrical waifs, some of whom (as we know) had been literally kidnapped to be pressed into the service of the theatre and whipped to the conning of their difficult parts. To the caricature of Daniel and Munday in "Cynthia's Revels" must be added Anaides (impudence), here assuredly Marston, and Asotus (the prodigal), interpreted as Lodge or, more perilously, Raleigh. Crites, like Asper-Macilente in "Every Man Out of His Humour," is Jonson's self-complaisant portrait of himself, the just, wholly admirable, and judicious scholar, holding his head high above the pack of the yelping curs of envy and detraction, but careless of their puny attacks on his perfections with only too mindful a neglect. 

The third and last of the "comical satires" is "Poetaster," acted, once more, by the Children of the Chapel in 1601, and Jonson's only avowed contribution to the fray. According to the author's own account, this play was written in fifteen weeks on a report that his enemies had entrusted to Dekker the preparation of "Satiromastix, the Untrussing of the Humorous Poet," a dramatic attack upon himself. In this attempt to forestall his enemies Jonson succeeded, and "Poetaster" was an immediate and deserved success. While hardly more closely knit in structure than its earlier companion pieces, "Poetaster" is planned to lead up to the ludicrous final scene in which, after a device borrowed from the "Lexiphanes" of Lucian, the offending poetaster, Marston-Crispinus, is made to throw up the difficult words with which he had overburdened his stomach as well as overlarded his vocabulary. In the end Crispinus with his fellow, Dekker-Demetrius, is bound over to keep the peace and never thenceforward "malign, traduce, or detract the person or writings of Quintus Horatius Flaccus [Jonson] or any other eminent man transcending you in merit." One of the most diverting personages in Jonson's comedy is Captain Tucca. "His peculiarity" has been well described by Ward as "a buoyant blackguardism which recovers itself instantaneously from the most complete exposure, and a picturesqueness of speech like that of a walking dictionary of slang." 

It was this character, Captain Tucca, that Dekker hit upon in his reply, "Satiromastix," and he amplified him, turning his abusive vocabulary back upon Jonson and adding "an immodesty to his dialogue that did not enter into Jonson's conception." It has been held, altogether plausibly, that when Dekker was engaged professionally, so to speak, to write a dramatic reply to Jonson, he was at work on a species of chronicle history, dealing with the story of Walter Terill in the reign of William Rufus. This he hurriedly adapted to include the satirical characters suggested by "Poetaster," and fashioned to convey the satire of his reply. The absurdity of placing Horace in the court of a Norman king is the result. But Dekker's play is not without its palpable hits at the arrogance, the literary pride, and self-righteousness of Jonson-Horace, whose "ningle" or pal, the absurd Asinius Bubo, has recently been shown to figure forth, in all likelihood, Jonson's friend, the poet Drayton. Slight and hastily adapted as is "Satiromastix," especially in a comparison with the better wrought and more significant satire of "Poetaster," the town awarded the palm to Dekker, not to Jonson; and Jonson gave over in consequence his practice of "comical satire." Though Jonson was cited to appear before the Lord Chief Justice to answer certain charges to the effect that he had attacked lawyers and soldiers in "Poetaster," nothing came of this complaint. It may be suspected that much of this furious clatter and give-and-take was pure playing to the gallery. The town was agog with the strife, and on no less an authority than Shakespeare ("Hamlet," ii. 2), we learn that the children's company (acting the plays of Jonson) did "so berattle the common stages...that many, wearing rapiers, are afraid of goose-quills, and dare scarce come thither." 

Several other plays have been thought to bear a greater or less part in the war of the theatres. Among them the most important is a college play, entitled "The Return from Parnassus," dating 1601-02. In it a much-quoted passage makes Burbage, as a character, declare: "Why here's our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down; aye and Ben Jonson, too. O that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow; he brought up Horace, giving the poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him bewray his credit." Was Shakespeare then concerned in this war of the stages? And what could have been the nature of this "purge"? Among several suggestions, "Troilus and Cressida" has been thought by some to be the play in which Shakespeare thus "put down" his friend, Jonson. A wiser interpretation finds the "purge" in "Satiromastix," which, though not written by Shakespeare, was staged by his company, and therefore with his approval and under his direction as one of the leaders of that company. 

The last years of the reign of Elizabeth thus saw Jonson recognised as a dramatist second only to Shakespeare, and not second even to him as a dramatic satirist. But Jonson now turned his talents to new fields. Plays on subjects derived from classical story and myth had held the stage from the beginning of the drama, so that Shakespeare was making no new departure when he wrote his "Julius Caesar" about 1600. Therefore when Jonson staged "Sejanus," three years later and with Shakespeare's company once more, he was only following in the elder dramatist's footsteps. But Jonson's idea of a play on classical history, on the one hand, and Shakespeare's and the elder popular dramatists, on the other, were very different. Heywood some years before had put five straggling plays on the stage in quick succession, all derived from stories in Ovid and dramatised with little taste or discrimination. Shakespeare had a finer conception of form, but even he was contented to take all his ancient history from North's translation of Plutarch and dramatise his subject without further inquiry. Jonson was a scholar and a classical antiquarian. He reprobated this slipshod amateurishness, and wrote his "Sejanus" like a scholar, reading Tacitus, Suetonius, and other authorities, to be certain of his facts, his setting, and his atmosphere, and somewhat pedantically noting his authorities in the margin when he came to print. "Sejanus" is a tragedy of genuine dramatic power in which is told with discriminating taste the story of the haughty favourite of Tiberius with his tragical overthrow. Our drama presents no truer nor more painstaking representation of ancient Roman life than may be found in Jonson's "Sejanus" and "Catiline his Conspiracy," which followed in 1611. A passage in the address of the former play to the reader, in which Jonson refers to a collaboration in an earlier version, has led to the surmise that Shakespeare may have been that "worthier pen." There is no evidence to determine the matter. 

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 of broad comedy which, at court as well as in the city, was not the least element of Jonson's contemporary popularity. 

But Jonson had by no means given up the popular stage when he turned to the amusement of King James. In 1605 "Volpone" was produced, "The Silent Woman" in 1609, "The Alchemist" in the following year. These comedies, with "Bartholomew Fair," 1614, represent Jonson at his height, and for constructive cleverness, character successfully conceived in the manner of caricature, wit and brilliancy of dialogue, they stand alone in English drama. "Volpone, or the Fox," is, in a sense, a transition play from the dramatic satires of the war of the theatres to the purer comedy represented in the plays named above. Its subject is a struggle of wit applied to chicanery; for among its dramatis personae, from the villainous Fox himself, his rascally servant Mosca, Voltore (the vulture), Corbaccio and Corvino (the big and the little raven), to Sir Politic Would-be and the rest, there is scarcely a virtuous character in the play. Question has been raised as to whether a story so forbidding can be considered a comedy, for, although the plot ends in the discomfiture and imprisonment of the most vicious, it involves no mortal catastrophe. But Jonson was on sound historical ground, for "Volpone" is conceived far more logically on the lines of the ancients' theory of comedy than was ever the romantic drama of Shakespeare, however repulsive we may find a philosophy of life that facilely divides the world into the rogues and their dupes, and, identifying brains with roguery and innocence with folly, admires the former while inconsistently punishing them. 

"The Silent Woman" is a gigantic farce of the most ingenious construction. The whole comedy hinges on a huge joke, played by a heartless nephew on his misanthropic uncle, who is induced to take to himself a wife, young, fair, and warranted silent, but who, in the end, turns out neither silent nor a woman at all. In "The Alchemist," again, we have the utmost cleverness in construction, the whole fabric building climax on climax, witty, ingenious, and so plausibly presented that we forget its departures from the possibilities of life. In "The Alchemist" Jonson represented, none the less to the life, certain sharpers of the metropolis, revelling in their shrewdness and rascality and in the variety of the stupidity and wickedness of their victims. We may object to the fact that the only person in the play possessed of a scruple of honesty is discomfited, and that the greatest scoundrel of all is approved in the end and rewarded. The comedy is so admirably written and contrived, the personages stand out with such lifelike distinctness in their several kinds, and the whole is animated with such verve and resourcefulness that "The Alchemist" is a new marvel every time it is read. Lastly of this group comes the tremendous comedy, "Bartholomew Fair," less clear cut, less definite, and less structurally worthy of praise than its three predecessors, but full of the keenest and cleverest of satire and inventive to a degree beyond any English comedy save some other of Jonson's own. It is in "Bartholomew Fair" that we are presented to the immortal caricature of the Puritan, Zeal-in-the-Land Busy, and the Littlewits that group about him, and it is in this extraordinary comedy that the humour of Jonson, always open to this danger, loosens into the Rabelaisian mode that so delighted King James in "The Gipsies Metamorphosed." Another comedy of less merit is "The Devil is an Ass," acted in 1616. It was the failure of this play that caused Jonson to give over writing for the public stage for a period of nearly ten years. 

"Volpone" was laid as to scene in Venice. Whether because of the success of "Eastward Hoe" or for other reasons, the other three comedies declare in the words of the prologue to "The Alchemist": 

"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 he had been some time gathering, was printed in 1640, bearing in its various parts dates ranging from 1630 to 1642. It included all the plays mentioned in the foregoing paragraphs, excepting "The Case is Altered;" the masques, some fifteen, that date between 1617 and 1630; another collection of lyrics and occasional poetry called "Underwoods", including some further entertainments; a translation of "Horace's Art of Poetry" (also published in a vicesimo quarto in 1640), and certain fragments and ingatherings which the poet would hardly have included himself. These last comprise the fragment (less than seventy lines) of a tragedy called "Mortimer his Fall," and three acts of a pastoral drama of much beauty and poetic spirit, "The Sad Shepherd." There is also the exceedingly interesting "English Grammar" "made by Ben Jonson for the benefit of all strangers out of his observation of the English language now spoken and in use," in Latin and English; and "Timber, or Discoveries" "made upon men and matter as they have flowed out of his daily reading, or had their reflux to his peculiar notion of the times." The "Discoveries," as it is usually called, is a commonplace book such as many literary men have kept, in which their reading was chronicled, passages that took their fancy translated or transcribed, and their passing opinions noted. Many passages of Jonson's "Discoveries" are literal translations from the authors he chanced to be reading, with the reference, noted or not, as the accident of the moment prescribed. At times he follows the line of Macchiavelli's argument as to the nature and conduct of princes; at others he clarifies his own conception of poetry and poets by recourse to Aristotle. He finds a choice paragraph on eloquence in Seneca the elder and applies it to his own recollection of Bacon's power as an orator; and another on facile and ready genius, and translates it, adapting it to his recollection of his fellow-playwright, Shakespeare. To call such passages — which Jonson never intended for publication — plagiarism, is to obscure the significance of words. To disparage his memory by citing them is a preposterous use of scholarship. Jonson's prose, both in his dramas, in the descriptive comments of his masques, and in the "Discoveries," is characterised by clarity and vigorous directness, nor is it wanting in a fine sense of form or in the subtler graces of diction. 

When Jonson died there was a project for a handsome monument to his memory. But the Civil War was at hand, and the project failed. A memorial, not insufficient, was carved on the stone covering his grave in one of the aisles of Westminster Abbey: 

"O rare Ben Jonson." 

FELIX E. SCHELLING.
THE COLLEGE,
PHILADELPHIA, U.S.A.

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The following is a complete list of his published works: — 


DRAMAS:

     Every Man in his Humour, 4to, 1601;
     The Case is Altered, 4to, 1609;
     Every Man out of his Humour, 4to, 1600;
     Cynthia's Revels, 4to, 1601;
     Poetaster, 4to, 1602;
     Sejanus, 4to, 1605;
     Eastward Ho (with Chapman and Marston), 4to, 1605;
     Volpone, 4to, 1607;
     Epicoene, or the Silent Woman, 4to, 1609 (?), fol., 1616;
     The Alchemist, 4to, 1612;
     Catiline, his Conspiracy, 4to, 1611;
     Bartholomew Fayre, 4to, 1614 (?), fol., 1631;
     The Divell is an Asse, fol., 1631;
     The Staple of Newes, fol., 1631;
     The New Sun, 8vo, 1631, fol., 1692;
     The Magnetic Lady, or Humours Reconcild, fol., 1640;
     A Tale of a Tub, fol., 1640;
     The Sad Shepherd, or a Tale of Robin Hood, fol., 1641;
     Mortimer his Fall (fragment), fol., 1640.

To Jonson have also been attributed additions to Kyd's Jeronymo, and collaboration in The Widow with Fletcher and Middleton, and in the Bloody Brother with Fletcher. 


POEMS:    Epigrams, The Forrest, Underwoods, published in fols., 1616, 1640; Selections: Execration against Vulcan, and Epigrams, 1640; G. Hor. Flaccus his art of Poetry, Englished by Ben Jonson, 1640; Leges Convivialis, fol., 1692. Other minor poems first appeared in Gifford's edition of Works. 


PROSE:    Timber, or Discoveries made upon Men and Matter, fol., 1641; The English Grammar, made by Ben Jonson for the benefit of Strangers, fol., 1640.
Masques and Entertainments were published in the early folios. 


WORKS:   

     Fol., 1616, volume. 2, 1640 (1631-41);
     fol., 1692, 1716-19, 1729;
     edited by P. Whalley, 7 volumes., 1756;
     by Gifford (with Memoir), 9 volumes., 1816, 1846;
     re-edited by F. Cunningham, 3 volumes., 1871;
     in 9 volumes., 1875;
     by Barry Cornwall (with Memoir), 1838;
     by B. Nicholson (Mermaid Series), with Introduction by
     C. H. Herford, 1893, etc.;
     Nine Plays, 1904;
     ed. H. C. Hart (Standard Library), 1906, etc;
     Plays and Poems, with Introduction by H. Morley (Universal
     Library), 1885;
     Plays (7) and Poems (Newnes), 1905;
     Poems, with Memoir by H. Bennett (Carlton Classics), 1907;
     Masques and Entertainments, ed. by H. Morley, 1890.

SELECTIONS:   

     J. A. Symonds, with Biographical and Critical Essay,
     (Canterbury Poets), 1886;
     Grosart, Brave Translunary Things, 1895;
     Arber, Jonson Anthology, 1901;
     Underwoods, Cambridge University Press, 1905;
     Lyrics (Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher), the Chap Books,
     No. 4, 1906;
     Songs (from Plays, Masques, etc.), with earliest known
     setting, Eragny Press, 1906.

LIFE:   

     See Memoirs affixed to Works;
     J. A. Symonds (English Worthies), 1886;
     Notes of Ben Jonson Conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden;
     Shakespeare Society, 1842;
     ed. with Introduction and Notes by P. Sidney, 1906;
     Swinburne, A Study of Ben Jonson, 1889.

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To the Memory of Shakespeare

—oOo—