Ben Jonson

• 1. Introduction

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  Ben Jonson killed a man in a field on the 22nd of September 1598 and walked away from the gallows by reciting a Bible verse. That single fact tells you almost everything about who he was: a man of extraordinary learning who lived at the edge of catastrophe, who bent the rules of English theatre as readily as he bent the rules of English law. The question the rest of this documentary will answer is how a bricklayer's stepson, born around the 11th of June 1572, became the figure whom one of his own admirers called "the second most important English dramatist, after William Shakespeare, during the reign of James I" - and how he spent the rest of his life making sure nobody forgot it.

• 2. A Bricklayer's Stepson

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  Jonson's father died a month before his son was born, leaving a family already shaped by religious persecution. As a Protestant under Queen Mary, the elder Jonson had lost his property and been imprisoned; only on Elizabeth's accession was he freed and able to travel to London to become a clergyman. His widow then married a master bricklayer, and so the future playwright grew up in a trade household in St Martin's Lane.

  A family friend intervened to pay for Jonson's place at Westminster School, and that act changed the direction of English literature. There, the antiquarian and historian William Camden became one of his masters. Camden's broad scholarship left a mark on Jonson's writing that lasted until Camden's death in 1623. Jonson also met the Welsh poet Hugh Holland at Westminster, forging what the sources describe as an "enduring relationship"; both men would later write preliminary poems for Shakespeare's First Folio.

  When Jonson left Westminster School in 1589, he briefly attended St John's College, Cambridge, but his stepfather's workshop pulled him back after a month. According to the churchman and historian Thomas Fuller, Jonson spent time building a garden wall at Lincoln's Inn before doing something altogether different: volunteering to soldier with Sir Francis Vere's English regiments in Flanders, where England was fighting alongside the Dutch against Spain. The Hawthornden Manuscripts record that while in Flanders, Jonson fought an enemy soldier in single combat, killed him, and took the man's weapons as trophies.

• 3. Jail, Duel, and Conversion

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  By summer 1597 Jonson had a fixed engagement with the Admiral's Men, performing at The Rose under Philip Henslowe's management. John Aubrey reports, on uncertain authority, that he was not a successful actor; whatever his skills on stage, the company valued him more as a writer. That same year a play he co-wrote with Thomas Nashe, The Isle of Dogs, was suppressed for causing great offence. Arrest warrants were issued by Queen Elizabeth I's interrogator Richard Topcliffe. Jonson was jailed in Marshalsea Prison, charged with "Leude and mutynous behaviour", while Nashe fled to Great Yarmouth.

  A year after the Marshalsea, Jonson was back in custody at Newgate Prison for killing the actor Gabriel Spenser in a duel at Hogsden Fields. Tried for manslaughter, he pleaded guilty but escaped execution through benefit of clergy, a legal device that let him gain leniency by reciting a brief Bible verse. The price was steep: he forfeited his goods and chattels and was branded with the so-called Tyburn T on his left thumb.

  It was during that Newgate imprisonment, in October 1598, that Jonson converted to Catholicism. His biographer Ian Donaldson points to Father Thomas Wright, a Jesuit priest permitted to minister to prison inmates, as the likely agent of the conversion. Donaldson notes that Jonson, facing a capital charge, may have been seeking the absolution Catholicism could offer if sentenced to death. Conviction, and not expediency alone, then sustained his faith through twelve years as a Catholic - years in which the first draft of his play Sejanus His Fall was banned for popery, and in which he and his wife appeared before the Consistory Court in January 1606 on a charge of recusancy. He paid a fine of thirteen shillings and escaped the heavier penalties. In May 1610, the assassination of Henry IV of France appears to have tipped him back toward the Church of England, which he rejoined by pointedly drinking a full chalice of communion wine at the eucharist.

• 4. The Comedy of Humours

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  Every Man in His Humour, performed in 1598, established Jonson's reputation almost overnight. William Shakespeare was among the first actors cast in it. The play capitalised on a fashion for humour comedies that George Chapman had started with An Humorous Day's Mirth. Jonson's follow-up in 1599, Every Man out of His Humour, was a more pedantic attempt to imitate Aristophanes; its stage success is unknown, but when printed it went through several editions.

  The plays of his middle career - from Eastward Ho to The Devil Is an Ass - are for the most part city comedies: London settings, themes of trickery and money, and a moral ambiguity that sits uneasily alongside Jonson's stated aim in the Prologue to Volpone to "mix profit with your pleasure". Jonson announced his programme in the prologue to the folio version of Every Man in His Humour: he promised to represent "deeds, and language, such as men do use". After his early play The Case is Altered, he renounced distant locations, noble characters, and romantic plots, focusing instead on recognisable types driven by everyday motives such as greed and jealousy.

  Coleridge, later, claimed that The Alchemist had one of the three most perfect plots in literature. Volpone and The Alchemist were immediately successful on the stage. By 1616, Jonson had produced all the plays on which his reputation as a dramatist now rests. The period between 1605 and 1620 is generally viewed as his heyday, though his financial security during those years was still not assured; he told William Drummond of Hawthornden that he had made less than two hundred pounds on all his plays together.

• 5. The Court and the Masque

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  When James VI of Scotland became James I of England in 1603, Jonson moved swiftly to align himself with the new court. He joined other poets in welcoming the king and adapted readily to the demand for masques and royal entertainments that both James and his consort Anne of Denmark introduced. His connection with the aristocratic Sidney family - through Elizabeth Sidney, daughter of Sir Philip Sidney, and Lady Mary Wroth - provided the impetus for his famous country-house poem To Penshurst.

  Over roughly two dozen masques written for James or for Queen Anne, Jonson often collaborated with the designer Inigo Jones, not always peacefully. Jones designed the scenery for Jonson's masque Oberon, the Faery Prince, performed at Whitehall on the 1st of January 1611, in which Prince Henry, the eldest son of James I, appeared in the title role. Algernon Charles Swinburne later praised The Masque of Blackness, performed in January 1605, as the consummate example of a now-extinct genre that mingled speech, dancing, and spectacle. In July 1607, Jonson performed a poem at the great banquet given for the king by the Merchant Taylors' Company, earning a fee of £20.

  In 1616 Jonson received a yearly pension of 100 marks - roughly £60 - leading some to identify him as England's first Poet Laureate, though the royal family never formally granted him the title. That sign of royal favour may have encouraged him to publish the first collected folio edition of his works that same year, a move that was in itself a statement: English playwrights did not typically publish their plays as serious literature. Further volumes appeared in 1640-41 and 1692.

• 6. Walking to Edinburgh

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  On the 8th of July 1618, Jonson set out from Bishopsgate in London on foot, heading for Edinburgh. He arrived in Scotland's capital on the 17th of September, having followed the Great North Road for most of the journey and received lavish welcomes in towns and country houses along the way. On arrival he lodged with John Stuart, a cousin of King James, in Leith, and was made an honorary burgess of Edinburgh at a civic dinner on the 26th of September.

  The visit that most shaped how we understand Jonson as a person was his stay with the Scottish poet William Drummond of Hawthornden, whose house stood on the River Esk. Drummond recorded as much of Jonson's conversation as he could. The resulting Hawthornden Manuscripts show Jonson in an expansive, even magisterial mood, delivering opinions on literature, people, and himself. Drummond noted that Jonson was "a great lover and praiser of himself, a contemner and scorner of others".

  On his return to England around 1619, Oxford University awarded him an honorary Master of Arts degree.

• 7. Rivalry and Reverence

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  Jonson's relationship with Shakespeare was one of the most commented-on in English literary history. Drummond recorded Jonson scoffing at two apparent absurdities in Shakespeare's plays: a nonsensical line in Julius Caesar and the setting of The Winter's Tale on the non-existent seacoast of Bohemia. Drummond also reported Jonson's remark that Shakespeare "wanted art" - meaning lacked skill. Thomas Fuller relates stories of the two men debating at the Mermaid Tavern, imagining conversations in which Shakespeare would run rings around the more learned but more ponderous Jonson.

  Yet the posthumously published essay "De Shakespeare Nostrat" in Timber gives a fuller picture. Jonson recalls being told that Shakespeare never crossed out a line when writing; his own response was "Would he had blotted a thousand!" But Jonson then describes Shakespeare as "honest, and of an open, and free nature: had an excellent Phantsie; brave notions and gentle expressions", and concludes that "there was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned." When Shakespeare died, Jonson said "He was not of an age, but for all time."

  The poem Jonson contributed to the prefatory verse of Shakespeare's First Folio - "To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare and What He Hath Left Us" - did more than almost any other text to shape the traditional view of Shakespeare as a writer of natural genius who, despite "small Latine, and lesse Greeke", transcended learned rules. It has been argued that Jonson helped to edit the First Folio itself.

• 8. Decline and Westminster

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  Jonson's productivity began to slip in the 1620s. A fire in 1623 destroyed many of his books, papers, and writings. One of his strokes in the late 1620s left him paralyzed; the courtier Sir Tom Badger sent him a pet fox to help with his recovery. He became City Chronologer of London in 1628. The plays he resumed writing from 1626 onward are not considered among his best, though they offer real interest as portraits of Charles I's England. The Staple of News provides a remarkable early look at English journalism. The cold reception given to The New Inn prompted Jonson to write a poem condemning his audience - An Ode to Himself - which in turn prompted Thomas Carew, one of the younger poets who called themselves the "Tribe of Ben", to write a poem asking Jonson to acknowledge his own decline.

  King Charles I increased Jonson's annual pension to £100 and added a tierce of wine and beer, a sign of some care for the great poet of his father's reign even as the court moved on. Jonson died on the 18th of August 1637 in London. His funeral the next day was attended by "all or the greatest part of the nobility then in town".

  He was buried in the north aisle of the nave in Westminster Abbey, standing upright - an arrangement that reflected his reduced circumstances at death, though one account holds that he asked the king for a grave exactly 18 inches square and received an upright plot to fit the space. The inscription cut into the slab above him reads "O Rare Ben Johnson" - with a sic, because the stonemason misspelt his name. John Aubrey records that the inscription was paid for on impulse by a passing stranger, John Young of Great Milton in Oxfordshire, who gave a workman eighteen pence to carve it. A monument erected around 1723 by the Earl of Oxford in Poets' Corner carries the same words, along with a portrait medallion, ensuring that the misspelt tribute has followed Jonson's name ever since.