Ben Jonson

James Loxley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415222273
• eBook ISBN: 9781134596508
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Next to Shakespeare, Ben Jonson is perhaps the most widely studied Renaissance dramatist. Very few students of literature or drama would not encounter Volpone or Bartholomew Fair in the course of their studies, and there has been a recent resurgence of interest in Epicoene , or the Silent Women amongst gender theorists. This volume offers the broadest range of information on Jonson and his works, from background on contexts to details of recent interpretations of his plays. A must for students of the Renaissance.

PART I: LIFE AND CONTEXTS

(a) INTRODUCTION

This section provides an account of Jonson’s life and literary career, giving details both of his personal circumstances and the development of his reputation as a writer. It draws substantially on the biographies mentioned in ‘Further reading’ for its account. We ought to note, though, that none of these biographies agree on every point, and the frequently ambiguous evidence is interpreted in conflicting ways. This section seeks to represent points of consensus, but it should be remembered that there cannot be consensus on every aspect of Jonson’s life. Readers in search of greater detail are directed to the works listed in ‘Further reading’. The section also locates Jonson in contexts which are of particular significance to his works and for the criticism they have generated. For that reason, the narrative of the poet’s life is punctuated by subsections dealing with early modern London, Renaissance humanism, the theatres of Jonson’s city, and the political structures and issues of the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods. The accompanying chronology provides a clear sequence of events for reference purposes.

(b) JONSON’S CITIES

In the last quarter of the sixteenth century London was already a thriving metropolis. The lack of anything resembling census information means that indisputable population figures will never be forthcoming, but it has been estimated that by 1550 its population stood at perhaps 50,000, many times that of any other English city. And it was growing fast. By 1565 it had 85,000 inhabitants; by 1603, perhaps as many as 180,000 in the city and its suburbs, and it continued to swell at as high or a higher rate (Porter 1994: 42). This was not, though, the result of some particularly industrious breeding – in fact, the death rate outstripped the birth rate over these years. Rather, London was a city into which immigrants from the countryside poured at a great rate, and the influx produced a radical transformation of the place to which they came. It had long since slipped the confines of its medieval walls: to the north, west and east speculative building was proceeding apace, generating new suburbs. To the south, over the Thames, Southwark was connected to the city by London Bridge and was itself becoming a place to which Londoners resorted in their thousands in search of entertainment.

In this expansion, two cities were gradually being merged. London, with the Tower at its south eastern corner and the gothic St Paul’s cathedral on a hill at its centre, had always been matched by Westminster, lying westwards and round a bend in the river, the site of an abbey, a hall in which Parliament met and increasingly the settled base of royalty. Facing it over the Thames stood Lambeth palace, the residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Over the course of the Tudor period the area immediately north of Westminster towards London had become – as Whitehall palace – the main residence of the monarch and the court during their regular spells in the capital, and as it came closer to being the constant administrative centre of the kingdom so it drew in increasing numbers of petitioners, office-seekers and servants. Further eastwards, abutting the western edge of the city itself, stood the Inns of Court, populated during the legal terms by lawyers, their dependants, and a class of young men not destined for the law but for whom the Inns functioned as a kind of finishing school. The area in between here and Whitehall, along a wide road known as the Strand, was attracting noblemen in search of impressive riverside dwellings (conveniently located close to both court and city), and a gentry prepared to settle for slightly less impressive lodgings. The sixty years around 1600 were to see intensive building in this area, including the development on the Earl of Bedford’s land at Convent (or Covent) Garden of terraced townhouses and a grand, Italianate piazza. In a variegated but unbroken sprawl, London now stretched from the docks and manufacturing industries of its eastern fringes to the grandeur of royal dwellings in the west.

The governmental structures of the city had not kept up with this rapid development. The area within the city walls, along with a few adjoining districts, fell under the jurisdiction of the Lord Mayor and his Common Council, a civic oligarchy which gave London its official voice. This voice might be heard in the street theatre of the Lord Mayor’s annual pageant, or in the civic entertainments provided periodically for the monarch, or reflected in works such as John Stow’s historical Survey of London (1598). The suburbs on both sides of the Thames, though, were not answerable to this organisation and did not contribute to this voice, and the institutions of court and church were similarly outside the purview of the city. The Reformation of the Church in the mid-Tudor period also complicated matters. Ecclesiastical property within the city limits had always been exempt from control by civic authorities; when such property was expropriated by Henry VIII, and sold on to secular owners, that exemption was sold with it. These areas – perhaps the best known was the Blackfriars, down by the Thames – were called ‘liberties’, and had the slightly dubious reputation that their marginal status might lead us to expect.

The complexity of its governmental structures was also evident in the related organisation of London’s economic life. As was common in English towns, the medieval city had organised its many trades and industries into monopolistic institutions known as ‘guilds’. Guild membership was an essential prerequisite for anyone attempting to practise a recognised trade in the city; the guilds also oversaw both the induction, training and discipline of apprentices, and their passage into full membership. From the ranks of these ‘freemen’ came the city’s governing elite. Yet not all guild members were alike – while some were journeymen, and some managed their own craft businesses, others grew rich through their participation in trade, both national and international. Some guilds, too, were more wealthy and influential than others. Keeping the system in place required the incorporation into the guild structure of new trades made possible by technological advances. In 1557, for example, the Stationers’ Company was established to organise and control the production of printed books.

Other institutions, though, began to threaten the displacement of the system. By 1550, London was already handling 90 per cent of the nation’s trade, and the religious and political turmoil that afflicted such established international mercantile centres as Antwerp in ensuing decades provided the opportunity for the city to establish itself as northern Europe’s foremost commercial site. Hitherto, the Mercers’ Company, organising the cloth trade, had dominated such activity; but in 1555 the Russia Company was established as a joint-stock venture seeking to profit from international commerce, followed by the Levant Company (1581), the East India Company (1600), the Virginia Company (1606) and others. In 1570, the Royal Exchange – a commodities trading centre – was opened in the city, financed by the prominent merchant Thomas Gresham. London was becoming a financial centre, a place for the pursuit of the kind of commercial schemes put forward by the ‘projectors’ of the early Stuart period.

London, in other words, was getting rich. Its expansion was due in no small part to the city’s mercantile development and to Westminster ’s consolidation of its status as the kingdom’s administrative centre. The nobility and gentry who flocked to the court mingled with the city’s great merchants, each attracted to the opportunities represented by the other. To them were drawn all the service industries necessary to keep them supplied with provisions, dressed, housed, mobile and entertained. And so the city’s economic life supported those employed outside the guilds as well as masters, journeymen and apprentices, and attracted those in search of work to its ever-expanding suburbs.

This expansion was a constant source of concern both to monarch and civic authorities, and both sought in differing ways to prevent the new metropolis from coming into being. Clearly, it put the established civic institutions and infrastructures under increasing strain. The narrow streets were already crowded, the rivers and streams filling up with refuse, making this an unparalleled breeding ground for plague – which struck with monotonous but horrifying regularity – and the other diseases which helped keep the urban death rate dizzyingly high. Other ills were also the focus for the authorities’ concern. Prostitution was rife, and property crime widespread. The pamphlet literature of the period is populated by a cast of criminal types: the pimp, whore, cutpurse and conman who constitute a shadowy urban underworld. They are even credited with their own dialect, the language of ‘canting’. Yet they were not the only source of disorder. The city’s apprentices could prove a volatile crowd, especially during their annual Shrovetide festivities, as their propensity to riot against matters as diverse as high prices and foreigners demonstrated. London was also a prime centre of Protestant radicalism, sustaining artisanal, ‘Puritan’ congregations and contacts with co-religionists on the continent. These were not – or not yet – in unison with the official voices of the city, but they were nevertheless clearly audible.

This was Jonson’s London, the city of his childhood and his adult life. He was born, it is thought, on June 11 1572, the posthumous son (so he claimed, in conversation with the Scottish poet William Drummond) of a minister. Of his father no definitive trace has been found – Johnson was hardly an uncommon name, and the distinctive spelling which has marked out Benjamin for four centuries was his own doing. His mother was remarried in his infancy, to a bricklayer named Robert Brett, and Jonson’s early years were spent living in his stepfather’s household in Hartshorn Lane, off the Strand near Charing Cross. Brett was by no means an impoverished labourer, but a bricklayer could not claim the same affinity with gentility that might accrue to a clergyman. He was literate, nevertheless, and his stepson was educated from an early age: first at a private school in the nearby St Martin’s church, and then, at some point after he reached seven years of age, at the prestigious Westminster school on the other side of Whitehall palace.

(c) HUMANISM AND EDUCATION

The education Jonson received was not to be prolonged, but it was to be decisive. It served to inculcate in him the humanist culture that provided crucial resources for the political, religious and philosophical disputes of the age. At the heart of the humanist project were the writings of classical philosophers, poets, historians and statesmen, writings which had inspired influential early sixteenth century scholars such as Juan Luis Vives, Desiderius Erasmus and Sir Thomas More. These texts, some only recently rediscovered, had been fused with biblical authority in humanist writing to offer a distinctively if tentatively secularised body of knowledge through which political and ethical principles might be challenged and reorganised. Humanist learning enjoyed a complex relationship with the project of ecclesiastical Reformation which confronted the Catholic church at the same time. It provided succour to the Protestant reformers in their attacks on a hidebound and dogmatic church. Yet, the sophisticated (some said sophistical) relationship to the scriptures that Christian humanism of necessity engendered was regarded with some suspicion by many Protestants.

Among the deepest concerns of figures such as Vives and Erasmus were the educational programmes of their own societies. One of the crucial motifs they took from their reading of Roman sources such as Cicero, was the integration of learning and public life, the insistence that knowledge should be responsible. And this public life, for them, was not simply the province of the church: learning was not just for clerics. So they placed great emphasis on pedagogical provision beyond ecclesiastical parameters and purposes, and their followers undertook to reform and reinvigorate education wherever they could. The sixteenth century in England saw just such a humanist-inspired revision of institutions and syllabuses, and the establishment of new foundations capable of delivering the requisite schooling. The accomplishment that was the initial goal of all such teaching was a familiarity with Latin, the language not only of the classical authorities but also of much contemporary intellectual debate, and this goal dominated the curricula of the grammar schools. From an early age boys were required to read their way through selected classical texts (this was an education aimed at boys only; since girls were not expected to participate in public life when they grew up, providing such an education for them would by most have been thought superfluous), or through the kind of textbooks which not only provided examples of Latin usage but also, in their thematic content, introduced their readership to the ethos of Christian humanism. As they progressed, so the difficulty of the texts they read and the complexity of the tasks they were required to perform increased. Eventually, they would be expected to conduct grammatically and rhetorically exacting debating exercises, as well as being proficient in translation. And since Greek was the language of some classical literature and (especially) philosophy, texts that the Roman authorities cited as their own authorities, so a familiarity with Greek formed an important element in the curriculum of older boys.

(d) 1572–1597

It was this curriculum that Jonson followed at Westminster, his fees paid by a patron whose identity we do not know. He was taught by the school’s then second master, William Camden, a hugely respected teacher and writer, who in 1586 (during Jonson’s time at his school) published his great work Britannia, a region-by-region history of England, Scotland and Ireland. Jonson was later to claim that to Camden he owed ‘All that I am in arts, all that I know’ (Epigrams 14, 2), and, even allowing for hyperbole here, his influence was clearly crucial. Under his tutelage the young ‘town-boy’ (as the day students were known) encountered works which were to stay with him for the rest of his life, forming a reservoir on which his own work drew exhaustively. In his biographical study of Jonson’s work, David Kay has outlined the list of texts to be studied, drawn up when the school’s statutes were revised in 1560 (Kay 1995: 3). In their first years at the school pupils would have been reading Erasmus’ compilation of extracts, as well as Aesop’s Fables and the works of the Roman comic dramatist Terence (whose plotting and character types, like those of his contemporary Plautus, provided a model for Jonson’s earliest comedies [43]). In subsequent years, they would have read Cicero’s treatises and orations, the Roman histories of Sallust (both central to Jonson’s Roman tragedy Catiline [61]; Cicero’s De Officiis, [On Duty] provided a discourse on ethical obligation which finds frequent echoes in Jonson’s verse), the poetry of Horace, Virgil and Ovid (all invoked in Poetaster [54]; Horace was to be Jonson’s enduring poetic ideal), among many other works. Their notebooks would have been filled with extracts and examples, translated and in the original Latin.

In fact, the humanist techniques of learning that Jonson acquired here not only helped to furnish the content of his later writing, but also informed its structure, as a work such as Timber, or Discoveries strikingly reveals [113]. Translating, copying out and memorising passages were staple methods of mastering the text, and in so doing of becoming a vir civilis [civilised man], attuned to the responsibilities of public life; where Jonson’s own works translate, paraphrase or incorporate classical authorities (which is often), or call attention to their affinity with such humanist educational techniques (which is also often), they are not necessarily displaying a merely – as we would say – academic learning. Instead, they are negotiating a relationship with the processes of producing responsible knowledge. Jonson’s classicism, in other words, is not the enemy of his relevance but the means by which it is claimed. It shapes crucial critical debates about the possibility and nature of any political work his texts might have performed then – or, indeed, be able to perform now [131].

Jonson told Drummond that he was ‘taken from’ his education, ‘and put to another craft’ (196). Biographers have disagreed over the date of this interruption, but it may not mean that he was forced to leave school much or at all before the age at which this stage of his education would have anyway come to an end (see Kay 1995: 6). What seems certain is that he did not go on to study at university. Instead, he found himself apprenticed to his stepfather, working as a bricklayer – for a time, according to seventeenth century accounts, on the walls of Lincoln’s Inn near Holborn. The apprenticeship was itself interrupted before Jonson had completed his full eight year term, though, and at some time before late 1594 he had a spell as a soldier in the Netherlands. He probably served in one of three towns garrisoned by English soldiers during the conflict between Protestant states and the Catholic Spanish, whose rule in this area was now under continuous challenge. To Drummond, he spun an unlikely tale of a single combat ‘in the face of both the camps’ (199–200) in which he killed his enemy.

This military career did not last, however, and we can be sure that he had returned to London by the end of 1594, for on 14 November that year evidence suggests that he married a woman called Anne Lewis. Nothing is known of her save Jonson’s dismissive comment to Drummond that she was ‘a shrew yet honest’ (208). The latter was not an epithet that could be applied to her husband, who also confessed to Drummond that he was ‘in his youth given to venery’ and ‘thought the use of a maid nothing in comparison to the wantonness of a wife’ (238–9). How many children the marriage produced is unknown: his eldest son and daughter, Benjamin and Mary, are elegised in the Epigrams [108], a second son named Joseph was christened in 1599, and a third boy, also named Benjamin, was born in early 1608. To these four could perhaps be added Elisabeth and another Benjamin, both baptised within two weeks of each other at different ends of the city in the spring of 1610, and both credited to a man of the poet’s name in the respective parish registers. It is just about plausible that these might be twins, or else born to different women, but the fact that Jonson’s name (spelling apart, and that in a time of orthographic uncertainty) was not particularly uncommon means that his paternity is likely to remain unproved in these cases. What we do know is that all his offspring predeceased him, most probably in early childhood. Such misfortune aside (and his elegies for his eldest children suggest that their deaths were keenly felt), his marriage may not have been a happy one. To support this suggestion we have not only the unflattering description of Anne quoted above but also his statement, again to Drummond in 1618/19, that he had not ‘bedded with her’ (209) for a period of five years (when exactly this might have been is uncertain), and the suggestion of an ongoing separation between them in legal depositions of 1606.

Married, with very young children, Jonson’s prospects cannot have looked too good: his marriage, as well as his military adventure, had left him in breach of his apprenticeship. Nonetheless, it seems that he joined the Tylers and Bricklayers company in 1595 (presumably by buying his freedom), and was still paying his dues as late as 1611 – a much longer connection with this ‘other craft’ than might have been expected. But at this time, too, his involvement in the theatre also begins, though once again the details are somewhat sketchy. He probably began as an actor, perhaps touring with the not overly successful Pembroke’s Men as early as 1595/6. By 1597 he had clearly also begun to write for the company, perhaps first penning The Case Is Altered [43] for them. But the definitive evidence of his involvement comes from surviving records of a brush with the law that led the company into a catastrophic dissolution and put Jonson in jail.

(e) THEATRE, COMMERCE, AND THE LAW

The simultaneous development of the Royal Exchange and the first dedicated, professional theatres has been thought noteworthy since the time of their construction. Both have been taken to be indicative of London’s emergence as a modern commercial centre – and it is clear that the growing population and wealth of the city produced a ready market for the kind of specialised leisure industry that theatre on this scale was to become. Prior to the construction of the first purpose-built arena or amphitheatre in 1567, commercial theatre had by and large been confined to the innyards of the city; it was perhaps the civic authorities’ attempts at prohibition in 1559 and 1574 that fostered the theatres’ development, as they were all built on land outside their jurisdiction. Over the next forty or so years entrepreneurs including Richard Burbage and Philip Henslowe were responsible for the construction of such celebrated playing spaces as the Rose and the Globe, both of these on the south of the Thames at Bankside. This was already home to popular entertainments like bear-baiting, and although the earliest arenas were constructed to the north and east of the city, this convenient riverside site became the customary locale for this kind of theatre after the 1580s.

The arenas were outdoor theatres, circular galleried buildings constructed round a stage which jutted out into a central space open to the elements. The largest of them could accommodate 3,000 spectators, who by the turn of the century were flocking to daily, afternoon performances of a large and ever-changing repertoire. The players were organised into separate companies, under the nominal patronage of a member of the aristocracy (later of the royal family), leasing the theatres in which they played. They were customarily run by a group of principal actors, ‘sharers’, who jointly owned the company and all its properties (including the rights to plays), and who hired other actors and musicians as necessary. Shakespeare made a very good living out of his share in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, for whom he wrote and acted exclusively; Jonson, on the other hand, was never a sharer. While the players may have had different levels of investment in the structures of the companies, they had their gender in common. Only in foreign companies visiting London were actress...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• THE COMPLETE CRITICAL GUIDE TO BEN JONSON
• THE COMPLETE CRITICAL GUIDE TO ENGLISH LITERATURE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS AND REFERENCING
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: LIFE AND CONTEXTS
• PART II: WORK
• PART III: CRITICISM
• CHRONOLOGY
• BIBLIOGRAPHY