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Ben Jonson

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: British History
1500-1750; Writers and critics

   CAPTION: Ben Jonson

   Ben Jonson by Abraham Blyenberch, c. 1617.
       Born:      c. June 11, 1572
                  Westminster, London, England
       Died:      August 6, 1637
                  Westminster, London, England
   Occupation(s): Dramatist, poet and actor

   Benjamin Jonson ( c. June 11, 1572 – August 6, 1637) was an English
   Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor. He is best known for his plays
   Volpone and The Alchemist and his lyric poems. A man of vast reading
   and a seemingly insatiable appetite for controversy, Jonson had an
   unparalleled breadth of influence on Jacobean and Caroline playwrights
   and poets.

Biography

Early life

   Although he was born in Westminster, London, Jonson claimed his family
   was of Scottish Border country descent, and this claim may be supported
   by the fact that his coat of arms bears three spindles or rhombi, a
   device shared by a Borders family, the Johnstones of Annandale. His
   father died a month before Ben's birth, and his mother remarried two
   years later, to a master bricklayer. Jonson attended school in St.
   Martin's Lane, and was later sent to Westminster School, where one of
   his teachers was William Camden. Jonson remained friendly with Camden,
   whose broad scholarship evidently influenced his own style, until the
   latter's death in 1623. On leaving, Jonson was once thought to have
   gone on to the University of Cambridge; Jonson himself said that he did
   not go to university, but was put to a trade immediately: a legend
   recorded by Fuller indicates that he worked on a garden wall in
   Lincoln's Inn. He soon had enough of the trade, probably bricklaying,
   and spent some time in the Low Countries as a volunteer with the
   regiments of Francis Vere. Jonson reports that while in the
   Netherlands, he killed an opponent in single combat and stripped him of
   his weapons. Since the war was otherwise languishing during his
   service, this fight appears to have been the extent of his combat
   experience. Ben Jonson married some time before 1594, to a woman he
   described to Drummond as "a shrew, yet honest." His wife has not been
   decisively identified, but she is sometimes identified as the Ann Lewis
   who married a Benjamin Jonson at St Magnus-the-Martyr, near London
   Bridge. The registers of St. Martin's Church state that his eldest
   daughter Mary died in November, 1593, when she was only six months old.
   His eldest son Benjamin died of the plague ten years later (Jonson's
   epitaph to him On My First Sonne was written shortly after), and a
   second Benjamin died in 1635. For five years somewhere in this period,
   Jonson lived separate from his wife, enjoying instead the hospitality
   of Lord Aubigny.

Early career

   By the summer of 1597, Jonson had a fixed engagement in the Admiral's
   Men, then performing under Philip Henslowe's management at The Rose.
   John Aubrey reports, on uncertain authority, that Jonson was not
   successful as an actor; whatever his skills as an actor, he was
   evidently more valuable to the company as a writer.

   By this time, Jonson had begun to write original plays for the Lord
   Admiral's Men; in 1598, he was mentioned by Francis Meres in his
   Palladis Tamia as one of "the best for tragedy." None of his early
   tragedies survive, however. An undated comedy, The Case is Altered, may
   be his earliest surviving play.

   In 1597, he was imprisoned for his collaboration with Thomas Nashe in
   writing the play The Isle of Dogs. Copies of the play were destroyed,
   so the exact nature of the offense is unknown. However there is
   evidence that he satirized Lord Cobham. It was the first of several
   run-ins with the authorities.

   In 1598, Jonson produced his first great success, Every Man in his
   Humour, capitalising on the vogue for humour plays that had been begun
   by George Chapman with An Humorous Day's Mirth. William Shakespeare was
   among the first cast. This play was followed the next year by Every Man
   Out of His Humour, a pedantic attempt to imitate Aristophanes. It is
   not known whether this was a success on stage, but when published, it
   proved popular and went through several editions.

   That same year, Jonson's irascibility landed him in jail. In a duel on
   September 22 in Hogsden Fields, he killed one of his fellow-actors, a
   member of the Admiral's Men named Gabriel Spenser. In prison, Jonson
   was visited by a Roman Catholic priest, and the result was his
   conversion to Catholicism, to which he adhered for twelve years. He
   escaped hanging by pleading benefit of clergy, a legal maneuver which,
   by Jonson's day, meant only that he was able to gain leniency by
   reciting a brief bible verse in Latin. The move saved his life but he
   was forced to forfeit his property and was branded on his left thumb.
   Neither the affair nor his Catholic conversion seem to have injured
   Jonson's reputation, as he was back working for Henslowe within months.

   In 1601, Jonson was employed by Henslowe to revise Thomas Kyd's The
   Spanish Tragedy; the version of the play with his additions was
   published in quarto in 1602.

   Jonson's other work for the theatre in the last years of Elizabeth I's
   reign was, unsurprisingly, marked by fighting and controversy.
   Cynthia's Revels was produced by the Children of the Chapel Royal at
   Blackfriars Theatre in 1600. It satirized both John Marston, who Jonson
   believed had accused him of lustfulness, probably in Histrio-Mastix,
   and Thomas Dekker, against whom Jonson's animus is not known. Jonson
   attacked the same two poets again in 1601's Poetaster. Dekker responded
   with Satiromastix, subtitled "the untrussing of the humorous poet." The
   final scene of this play, while certainly not to be taken at face value
   as a portrait of Jonson, offers a caricature that is recognizable from
   Drummond's report: boasting about himself and condemning other poets,
   criticizing actors' performances of his plays, and calling attention to
   himself in any available way.

   This " War of the Theatres" appears to have been concluded with
   reconciliation on all sides. Jonson collaborated with Dekker on a
   pageant welcoming James I to England in 1603, although Drummond reports
   that Jonson called Dekker a rogue. Marston dedicated The Malcontent to
   Jonson, and the two collaborated with Chapman on Eastward Ho, a 1605
   play whose anti-Scottish sentiment landed both authors in jail for a
   brief time.

   His trouble with English authorities continued. In 1603, he was
   questioned by the Privy Council about Sejanus, a politically-themed
   play about corruption in the Roman Empire. He was again in trouble for
   topical allusions in a play, now lost, in which he took part. After the
   discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, he appears to have been asked by the
   Privy Council to attempt to prevail on certain priests connected with
   the conspirators to cooperate with the government; whatever steps he
   took in this regard do not appear to have been successful (Teague,
   249).

   At the beginning of the reign of James I of England in 1603, Jonson
   joined other poets and playwrights in welcoming the reign of the new
   King. Jonson quickly adapted himself to the additional demand for
   masques and entertainments introduced with the new reign and fostered
   by both the king and his consort, Anne of Denmark.

Ben Jonson's ascendance

   Jonson flourished as a dramatist during the first decade or so of
   James's reign; by 1616, he had produced all the plays on which his
   reputation as a dramatist depends. These include the tragedy of
   Catiline (acted and printed 1611), which achieved only limited success,
   and the comedies Volpone, (acted 1605 and printed in 1607), Epicoene,
   or the Silent Woman (1609), The Alchemist (1610), Bartholomew Fair
   (1614) and The Devil is an Ass (1616). The Alchemist and Volpone appear
   to have been successful at once. Of Epicoene, Jonson told Drummond of a
   satirical verse which reported that the play's subtitle was
   appropriate, since its audience had refused to applaud the play (i.e.,
   remained silent). Yet Epicoene, along with Bartholomew Fair and (to a
   lesser extent) The Devil is an Ass have in modern times achieved a
   certain degree of recognition.

   At the same time, Jonson pursued a more prestigious career as a writer
   of masques for James' court. The Satyr (1603) and The Masque of
   Blackness (1605) are but two of the some two dozen masques Jonson wrote
   for James or for Queen Anne; the latter was praised by Swinburne as the
   consummate example of this now-extinct genre, which mingled speech,
   dancing, and spectacle. On many of these projects he collaborated, not
   always peacefully, with designer Inigo Jones. Perhaps partly as a
   result of this new career, Jonson gave up writing plays for the public
   theaters for a decade.

   1616 saw a pension of 100 marks (about £60) a year conferred upon him,
   leading some to identify him as England's first Poet Laureate. This
   sign of royal favour may have encouraged him to publish the first
   volume of the folio collected edition of his works that year. Other
   volumes followed in 1631 and 1640.

   In 1618, Ben Jonson set out for his ancestral Scotland on foot. He
   spent over a year there, and the best-remembered hospitality which he
   enjoyed was that of the Scottish poet, Drummond of Hawthornden.
   Drummond undertook to record as much of Jonson's conversation as he
   could in his diary, and thus recorded aspects of Jonson's personality
   that would otherwise have been less clearly seen. Jonson delivers his
   opinions, in Drummond's terse reporting, in an expansive and even
   magisterial mood. In the postscript added by Drummond, he is described
   as "a great lover and praiser of himself, a contemner and scorner of
   others".

   While in Scotland, he was made an honorary citizen of Edinburgh. On
   returning to England, he was awarded an honorary Master of Arts degree
   from Oxford University.

   The period between 1605 and 1620 may be viewed as Jonson's heyday. In
   addition to his popularity on the public stage and in the royal hall,
   he enjoyed the patronage of aristocrats such as Elizabeth Sidney
   (daughter of Philip Sidney) and Lady Mary Wroth. This connection with
   the Sidney family provided the impetus for one of Jonson's most famous
   lyrics, the country house poem To Penshurst.

Decline and death

   The 1620s begin a lengthy and slow decline for Jonson. He was still
   well-known; from this time dates the prominence of the Sons of Ben or
   the " Tribe of Ben", those younger poets such as Robert Herrick,
   Richard Lovelace, and Sir John Suckling who took their bearing in verse
   from Jonson. However, a series of setbacks drained his strength and
   damaged his reputation.

   Jonson returned to writing regular plays in the 1620s, but these are
   not considered among his best. They are of significant interest for the
   study of the culture of Charles I's England. The Staple of News, for
   example, offers a remarkable look at the earliest stage of English
   journalism. The lukewarm reception given that play was, however,
   nothing compared to the dismal failure of The New Inn; the cold
   reception given this play prompted Jonson to write a poem condemning
   his audience (the Ode to Myself), which in turn prompted Thomas Carew,
   one of the "Tribe of Ben," to respond in a poem that asks Jonson to
   recognize his own decline (MacLean, 88).

   The burning of his library in 1623 was a severe blow, as his Execration
   upon Vulcan shows. In 1628 he became city chronologer of London,
   succeeding Thomas Middleton; he accepted the salary but did little work
   for the office. He had suffered a debilitating stroke that year and
   this position eventually became a sinecure. In his last years he relied
   heavily for an income on his great friend and patron, William
   Cavendish, 1st Duke of Newcastle.

   The principal factor in Jonson's partial eclipse was, however, the
   death of James and the accession of King Charles I in 1625. Justly or
   not, Jonson felt neglected by the new court. A decisive quarrel with
   Jones harmed his career as a writer of court masques, although he
   continued to entertain the court on an irregular basis. For his part,
   Charles displayed a certain degree of care for the great poet of his
   father's day: he increased Jonson's annual pension to £100 and included
   a tierce of wine.

   Despite the strokes that he suffered in the 1620s, Jonson continued to
   write. At his death in 1637 he seems to have been working on another
   play, The Sad Shepherd. Though only two acts are extant, this
   represents a remarkable new direction for Jonson: a move into pastoral
   drama.

   Jonson was buried in Westminster Abbey, with the inscription, "O Rare
   Ben Jonson," laid in the slab over his grave. It has been suggested
   that this could be read "Orare Ben Jonson" (pray for Ben Jonson), which
   would indicate a deathbed return to Catholicism.

His Work

Drama

   Apart from two tragedies that largely failed to impress Renaissance
   audiences and have not gained much in reputation since, Jonson's work
   for the public theaters was in comedy. These plays vary in some
   respects. The minor early plays, particularly those written for the boy
   players, present somewhat looser plots and less-developed characters
   than those written later, for adult companies. His late plays or
   "dotages," particularly The Magnetic Lady and The Sad Shepherd, exhibit
   some signs of an accommodation with the romantic tendencies of
   Elizabethan comedy.

   With these exceptions noted, however, Jonson's comic style remained
   constant and easily recognizable. He announces his program in the
   prologue to the folio version of Every Man in His Humour; he promises
   to represent "deeds, and language, such as men do use." He planned to
   write comedies that revived the classical premises of Elizabethan
   dramatic theory—or rather, since all but the loosest English comedies
   could claim to have descended from Plautus and Terence, he intended to
   apply those premises with rigor (Doran, 120ff). This commitment
   entailed negations: after The Case is Altered, Jonson eschewed distant
   locations, noble characters, romantic plots, and other staples of
   Elizabethan comedy. Jonson focused instead on the satiric and realistic
   inheritance of new comedy. He sets his plays in contemporary settings,
   peoples them with recognizable types, and sets them to actions that, if
   not strictly realistic, involve everyday motives such as greed and
   jealousy. To this classical model Jonson applies the two features of
   his style which save his classical imitations from mere pedantry: the
   vividness with which he depicts the lives of his characters, and the
   intricacy of his plots. Coleridge, for instance, claimed that The
   Alchemist had one of the three most perfect plots in literature.

Poetry

   Jonson's poetry, like his drama, is informed by his classical learning.
   Some of his better-known poems are close translations of Greek or Roman
   models; all display the careful attention to form and style that often
   came naturally to those trained in classics in the humanist manner.
   Jonson, however, largely avoided the debates about rhyme and meter that
   had consumed Elizabethan classicists such as Campion and Harvey.
   Accepting both rhyme and stress, Jonson uses them to mimic the
   classical qualities of simplicity, restraint, and precision.

   “Epigrams” (published in the 1616 folio) is an entry in a genre that
   was popular among late-Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences. Jonson’s
   epigrams explore various attitudes, most of them from the satiric stock
   of the day: complaints against women, courtiers, and spies abound. The
   condemnatory poems are short and anonymous; Jonson’s epigrams of
   praise, including a famous poem to Camden and lines to Lucy Harington,
   are somewhat longer and mostly addressed to specific individuals. The
   poems of “The Forest” also appeared in the first folio. Most of the
   fifteen poems are addressed to Jonson’s aristocratic supporters, but
   the most famous are his country-house poem “To Penshurst” and the poem
   “To Celia” (“Come, my Celia, let us prove”) that appears also in
   ‘’Volpone.’’

   ‘’Underwoods,’’ published in the expanded folio of 1640, is a larger
   and more heterogeneous group of poems. It contains ‘’A Celebration of
   Charis,’’ Jonson’s most extended effort at love poetry; various
   religious pieces; encomiastic poems including the poem to Shakespeare
   and a sonnet on Mary Wroth; the ‘’Execration against Vulcanl” and
   others. The 1640 volume also contains three elegies which have often
   been ascribed to Donne (one of them appeared in Donne’s posthumous
   collected poems).

Relationship with Shakespeare

   There are many legends about Jonson's rivalry with Shakespeare, some of
   which may be true. Drummond reports that during their conversation,
   Jonson scoffed 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 reports Jonson
   saying that Shakespeare "wanted art." Whether Drummond is viewed as
   accurate or not, the comments fit well with Jonson's well-known
   theories about literature.

   In Timber, which was published posthumously and reflects his lifetime
   of practical experience, Jonson offers a fuller and more conciliatory
   comment. He recalls being told by certain actors that Shakespeare never
   blotted (i.e., crossed out) a line when he wrote. His own response,
   "Would he had blotted a thousand," was taken as malicious. However,
   Jonson explains, "He was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free
   nature, had an excellent phantasy, brave notions, and gentle
   expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility that sometimes it was
   necessary he should be stopped". Jonson concludes that "there was ever
   more in him to be praised than to be pardoned."

   Thomas Fuller relates stories of Jonson and Shakespeare engaging in
   debates in the Mermaid Tavern; Fuller imagines conversations in which
   Shakespeare would run rings around the more learned but more ponderous
   Jonson. That the two men knew each other personally is beyond doubt,
   not only because of the tone of Jonson's references to him but because
   Shakespeare's company produced a number of Jonson's plays, at least one
   of which ( Every Man in his Humour) Shakespeare certainly acted in.
   However, it is now impossible to tell how much personal communication
   they had, and tales of their friendship cannot be substantiated in the
   present state of knowledge.

   Jonson's most influential and revealing commentary on Shakespeare is
   the second of the two poems that he contributed to the prefatory verse
   that opens Shakespeare's First Folio. This poem, "To the memory of my
   beloved, The AUTHOR, Mr. William Shakespeare: And what he hath left
   us," did a good deal to create the traditional view of Shakespeare as a
   poet who, despite "small Latine and less Greek," had a natural genius.
   The poem has traditionally been thought to exemplify the contrast
   Jonson perceived between himself, the disciplined and erudite
   classicist, scornful of ignorance and skeptical of the masses, and
   Shakespeare, represented in the poem as a kind of natural wonder whose
   genius was not subject to any rules except those of the audiences for
   which he wrote. But the poem itself qualifies this view: "Yet must I
   not give Nature all: Thy Art, / My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a
   part." Some view this elegy as a conventional exercise, but a rising
   number of critics see it as a heartfelt tribute to the "Sweet Swan Of
   Avon," the "Soul of the Age!" It has been compellingly argued that
   Jonson helped to edit the First Folio, and he may have been inspired to
   write this poem, surely one of his greatest, by reading his fellow
   playwright's works, a number of which had been previously either
   unpublished or available in less satisfactory versions, in a relatively
   complete form.

Reception and Influence

   During most of the seventeenth century Jonson was a towering literary
   figure, and his influence was enormous. Before the civil war The Tribe
   of Ben touted his importance, and during the Restoration Jonson's
   satirical comedies and his theory and practice of "humour characters"
   (which are often misunderstood; see William Congeve's letters for
   clarification) was extremely influential, providing the blueprint for
   many Restoration comedies. Even a rather good-hearted comedy,
   Congreve's The Way of the World, arguably the greatest play by the
   greatest playwright of this age, is to a large extent a reworking of
   Jonson's Epicoene. In the eighteenth century Jonson's status began to
   decline. In the Romantic era, Jonson suffered the fate of being
   unfairly compared and contrasted to Shakespeare, as the taste for
   Jonson's type of satirical comedy decreased. Jonson was at times
   appreciated by the Romantics, but overall he was denigrated for not
   writing in a Shakespearean vein. In the twentieth century, Jonson's
   status rose significantly.

Drama

   As G. E. Bentley compellingly argues in Shakespeare and Jonson: Their
   Reputations in the Seventeenth Century Compared, Jonson was more
   respected and more influential than Shakespeare in the seventeenth
   century. After the English theatres were reopened on the Restoration of
   Charles II, Jonson's work, along with Shakespeare's and Fletcher's
   work, formed the initial core of the Restoration repertory. It was not
   until after 1710 that Shakespeare's plays (ordinarily in heavily
   revised forms) were more frequently performed than those of his
   Renaissance contemporaries. Many critics since the eighteenth century
   have ranked Jonson below only Shakespeare among English Renaissance
   dramatists. Critical judgment has tended to emphasize the very
   qualities that Jonson himself lauds in his prefaces, in Timber, and in
   his scattered prefaces and dedications: the realism and propriety of
   his language, the bite of his satire, and the care with which he
   plotted his comedies. For some critics, the temptation to contrast
   Jonson (representing art or craft) with Shakespeare (representing
   nature, or untutored genius) has seemed natural; Jonson himself may be
   said to initiate this interpretation in his poem on Shakespeare.

   John Dryden offered a similar assessment in the Essay of Dramatic
   Poesie, when he has his avatar Neander compare Shakespeare to Homer and
   Jonson to Virgil: the former represented profound creativity, the
   latter polished artifice. But "artifice" was in the seventeenth century
   almost synonymous with "art"; Jonson, for instance, used "artificer" as
   a synonym for "artist" (Discoveries, 33). For Lewis Theobald, too,
   Jonson “ow[ed] all his Excellence to his Art,” in contrast to
   Shakespeare, the natural genius. A consensus had seened to have formed:
   Jonson was the first English poet to understand classical precepts with
   much accuracy, and he was the first to apply those precepts
   successfully to contemporary life. But there were also more negative
   spins on Jonson's learned art; for instance, in the 1750s, Edward Young
   casually remarked on the way in which Jonson’s learning worked, like
   Samson’s strength, to his own detriment.

   The romantic revolution in criticism brought about an overall decline
   in the critical estimation of Jonson. Hazlitt refers dismissively to
   Jonson’s “laborious caution.” Coleridge, while more respectful,
   describes Jonson as psychologically superficial: “He was a very
   accurately observing man; but he cared only to observe what was open
   to, and likely to impress, the senses.” Coleridge placed Jonson second
   only to Shakespeare; other romantic critics were less approving. The
   early nineteenth century was the great age for recovering Renaissance
   drama. Jonson, whose reputation had survived, appears to have been less
   interesting to some readers than writers such as Middleton or Heywood,
   who were in some senses “discoveries” of the nineteenth century.
   Moreover, the emphasis the romantic writers placed on imagination, and
   their concomitant tendency to distrust studied art, lowered Jonson's
   status, if it also sharpened their awareness of the difference
   traditionally noted between Jonson and Shakespeare. In the next era
   Swinburne, who was more interested in Jonson than most Victorians,
   wrote, “The flowers of his growing have every quality but one which
   belongs to the rarest and finest among flowers: they have colour, form,
   variety, fertility, vigour: the one thing they want is fragrance”—by
   “fragrance,” Swinburne means spontaneity.

   In the twentieth century, Jonson’s body of work has been subject to a
   more varied set of analyses, broadly consistent with the interests and
   programs of modern literary criticism. In an essay printed in The
   Sacred Wood T.S. Eliot attempts to repudiate the charge that Jonson was
   an arid classicist by analyzing the role of imagination in his
   dialogue. Eliot was appreciative of Jonson's overall conception and his
   "surface," a view consonant with the modernist reaction against
   Romantic criticism, which tended to denigrate playwrights who did not
   concentrate on representations of psychological depth. Around
   mid-century, a number of critics and scholars followed Eliot’s lead,
   producing detailed studies of Jonson’s verbal style. At the same time,
   study of Elizabethan themes and conventions, such as those by E.E.
   Stoll and M. C. Bradbrook, provided a more vivid sense of how Jonson’s
   work was shaped by the expectations of his time.

   The proliferation of new critical perspectives after mid-century
   touched on Jonson inconsistently. Jonas Barish was the leading figure
   in a group of critics that was appreciative of Jonson's artistry. On
   the other hand, Jonson received less attention from the new critics
   than did some other playwrights and his work was not of programmatic
   interest to psychoanalytic critics. But Jonson’s career eventually made
   him a focal point for the revived sociopolitical criticism. Jonson’s
   work, particularly his masques and pageants, offers significant
   information regarding the relations of literary production and
   political power, as do his contacts with and poems for aristocratic
   patrons; moreover, his career at the centre of London’s emerging
   literary world has been seen as exemplifying the development of a fully
   commodified literary culture. In this respect, Jonson has been seen as
   a transitional figure, an author whose skills and ambition led him to a
   leading role both in the declining culture of patronage and in the
   rising culture of mass consumption.

Poetry

   If Jonson's reputation as a playwright has traditionally been linked to
   Shakespeare, his reputation as a poet has, since the early twentieth
   century, been linked to that of John Donne. In this comparison, Jonson
   represents the cavalier strain of poetry, which emphasized grace and
   clarity of expression; Donne, by contrast, epitomized the metaphysical
   school of poetry, with its reliance on strained, baroque metaphors and
   often vague phrasing. Since the critics who made this comparison (
   Herbert Grierson for example), were to varying extents rediscovering
   Donne, this comparison often worked to the detriment of Jonson's
   reputation.

   The grounds for describing Jonson as the "father" of cavalier poets are
   clear: many of the cavalier poets described themselves as his "sons" or
   his "tribe." For some of this tribe, the connection was as much social
   as poetic; Herrick describes meetings at "the Sun, the Dog, the Triple
   Tunne." All of them, including those like Herrick whose accomplishments
   in verse are generally regarded as superior to Jonson's, took
   inspiration from Jonson's revival of classical forms and themes, his
   subtle melodies, and his disciplined use of wit. In all of these
   respects, Jonson may be regarded as among the most important figures in
   the prehistory of English neoclassicism.

   Jonson's poetry continues to interest scholars for the light it sheds
   on English literary history, particularly as regards politics, systems
   of patronage, and intellectual attitudes. For the general reader,
   Jonson's reputation rests on a few lyrics that, though brief, are
   surpassed for grace and precision by very few Renaissance poems: "On
   his first son"; "To Celia"; "Drink to me only with thine eyes"; the
   poem on Penshurst; and the epitaph on boy player Solomon Pavy.

Jonson's works

Plays

     * A Tale of a Tub, comedy (ca. 1596? revised? performed 1633; printed
       1640)
     * The Case is Altered, comedy (ca. 1597-8; printed 1609), with Henry
       Porter and Anthony Munday?
     * Every Man in His Humour, comedy (performed 1598; printed 1601)
     * Every Man out of His Humour, comedy ( performed 1599; printed 1600)
     * Cynthia's Revels (performed 1600; printed 1601)
     * Poetaster, comedy (performed 1601; printed 1602)
     * Sejanus: His Fall, tragedy (performed 1603; printed 1605)
     * Eastward Ho, comedy (performed and printed 1605), a collaboration
       with John Marston and George Chapman
     * Volpone, comedy (ca. 1605-6; printed 1607)
     * Epicoene, or the Silent Woman, comedy (performed 1609; printed
       1616)
     * The Alchemist, comedy (performed 1610; printed 1612)
     * Catiline: His Conspiracy, tragedy (performed and printed 1611)
     * Bartholomew Fair, comedy (performed Oct. 31, 1614; printed 1631)
     * The Devil is an Ass, comedy (performed 1616; printed 1631)
     * The Staple of News, comedy (performed Feb. 1626; printed 1631)
     * The New Inn, or The Light Heart, comedy (licensed Jan. 19, 1629;
       printed 1631)
     * The Magnetic Lady, or Humors Reconciled, comedy (licensed Oct. 12,
       1632; printed 1641)
     * The Sad Shepherd, pastoral (ca. 1637, printed 1641), unfinished
     * Mortimer his Fall, history (printed 1641), a fragment

Masques

     * The Coronation Triumph, or The King's Entertainment (performed
       March 15, 1604; printed 1604); with Thomas Dekker
     * A Private Entertainment of the King and Queen on May-Day (The
       Penates) (May 1, 1604; printed 1616)
     * The Entertainment of the Queen and Prince Henry at Althorp (The
       Satyr) (June 25, 1603; printed 1604)
     * The Masque of Blackness (Jan. 6, 1605; printed ca. 1608)
     * Hymenaei (Jan. 5, 1606; printed 1606)
     * The Entertainment of the Kings of Great Britain and Denmark (The
       Hours) (July 24, 1606; printed 1616)
     * The Masque of Beauty (Jan. 10, 1608; printed ca. 1608)
     * The Masque of Queens (Feb. 2, 1609; printed 1609)
     * Hue and Cry after Cupid, or The Masque at Lord Haddington's
       Marriage (Feb. 9, 1608; printed ca. 1608)
     * The Speeches at Prince Henry's Barriers, or The Lady of the Lake
       (Jan. 6, 1610; printed 1616)
     * Oberon, the Faery Prince (Jan. 1, 1611; printed 1616)
     * Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly (Feb. 3, 1611; printed 1616)
     * Love Restored (Jan. 6, 1612; printed 1616)
     * A Challenge at Tilt, at a Marriage (Dec. 27, 1613/Jan. 1, 1614;
       Printed 1616)
     * The Irish Masque at Court (Dec. 29, 1613; printed 1616)
     * Christmas, his Masque (Christmas 1616; printed 1641)
     * The Vision of Delight (Jan. 6, 1617; printed 1641)
     * Lovers Made Men, or The Masque of Lethe, or The Masque at Lord
       Hay's (Feb. 22, 1617; printed 1617)
     * Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (Jan. 6, 1618; printed 1641) The
       masque was a failure; Jonson revised it by placing the anti-masque
       first, turning it into:
     * For the Honour of Wales (Feb. 17, 1618; printed 1641)
     * News from the New World Discovered in the Moon (Jan. 7, 1620:
       printed 1641)
     * The Entertainment at Blackfriars, or The Newcastle Entertainment
       (May 1620?; MS)
     * Pan's Anniversary, or The Shepherds' Holy-Day (June 19, 1620?;
       printed 1641)
     * The Gypsies Metamorphosed (Aug 3 and 5, 1621; printed 1640)
     * The Masque of Augurs (Jan. 6, 1622; printed 1622)
     * Time Vindicated to Himself, and to his Honours (Jan. 19, 1623;
       printed 1623)
     * Neptune's Triumph for the Return of Albion (Jan. 26, 1624; printed
       1624)
     * The Masque of Owls at Kenilworth (Aug. 19, 1624; printed 1641)
     * The Fortunate Isles and their Union (Jan. 9, 1625; printed 1625)
     * Love's Triumph Through Callipolis (Jan. 9, 1631; printed 1631)
     * Chloridia: Rites to Chloris and Her Nymphs (Feb. 22, 1631; printed
       1631)
     * The King's Entertainment at Welbeck in Nottinghamshire (May 21,
       1633; printed 1641)
     * Love's Welcome at Balsover ( July 30, 1634; printed 1641)

Other Works

     * Epigrams (1612)
     * The Forest (1616), including To Penshurst
     * A Discourse of Love (1618)
     * Barclay's Argenis, translated by Jonson (1623)
     * The Execration against Vulcan with Epigrams (1640)
     * Horace's Art of Poetry, Englished by Jonson (1640)
     * Underwoods (1640)
     * Timber, or Discoveries, a commonplace book.

   As with other English Renaissance dramatists, a portion of Ben Jonson's
   literary output has not survived. In addition to The Isle of Dogs
   (1597), the records suggest these lost plays as wholly or partially
   Jonson's work: Richard Crookback (1602); Hot Anger Soon Cold (1598),
   with Porter and Henry Chettle; Page of Plymouth (1599), with Dekker;
   and Robert II, King of Scots (1599), with Chettle and Dekker. Several
   of Jonson's masques and entertainments also are not extant: The
   Entertainment at Merchant Taylors (1607); The Entertainment at
   Salisbury House for James I (1608); The Entertainment at Britain's
   Burse for James I (1609); and The May Lord (1613-19).

   Finally, there are questionable or borderline attributions. Jonson may
   have had a hand in Rollo, Duke of Normandy, or The Bloody Brother, a
   play in the canon of John Fletcher and his collaborators.The comedy The
   Widow was printed in 1652 as the work of Thomas Middleton, Fletcher and
   Jonson, though scholars have been intensely skeptical about Jonson's
   presence in the play. A few attributions of anonymous plays, like The
   London Prodigal, have been ventured by individual researchers, but have
   met with cool responses.

Note

    1. ^ Logan and Smith, pp. 82-92.

Biographies of Ben Jonson

     * Ben Jonson: His Life and Work by Rosalind Miles
     * Ben Jonson: His Craft and Art by Rosalind Miles

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