Ben Jonson, Britain’s first literary celebrity? | TLS 7/16/12 8:02 PM

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Ben Jonson, Britain’s first literary celebrity? Brian Vickers

I n the summer of 1619, two writers evaluated Ben Jonson’s character Ian Donaldson and career in contrasting terms. Anthony à Wood, in his biographical BEN JONSON dictionary of distinguished Oxford alumni, summarized the reasons A Life why Richard Corbett of Christ Church “and other poets of this 533pp. Oxford University Press. £25 University did in reverence for his parts” propose him for an MA (US $39.95). Degree: 978 0 19 812976 9 “His own proper industry and addiction to books, especially to ancient Published: 15 February 2012 poets and classical authors, made him a person of curious learning and judgement, and of singular excellence in the art of poetry.”

At much the same time, William Drummond, Laird of Hawthornden, near Edinburgh, having had Jonson staying with him after his epic walk from London to Scotland, noted this about his guest:

“He is a great lover and praiser of himself, a contemner and scorner of others, given rather to lose a friend than a jest, jealous of every word and action of those about him (especially after drink, which is one of the elements in which he liveth) . . . . He is passionately kind and angry, careless either to gain or keep, vindicative, but if be well answered, at himself.”

The Informations to William Drummond, never intended for publication, are the most valuable biographical source for Jonson’s life and opinions about literature. Yet they are not always reliable. Having given his guest ample quantities of wine, Drummond recorded Jonson’s obiter dicta, punchlines in a conversation which the host may have guided, as Boswell sometimes did with Dr Johnson, with a mischievous intent. Drummond asks: “What think ye of Master Shakespeare?” Jonson replies: “That Shakespeare wanted art” – quite the opposite of what he was to write in his verses for the First Folio. Drummond’s critique of Jonson’s egoism may be excessive, yet the final sentence is perceptive about Jonson’s emotional extremes (“passionately kind and angry”), his lack of concern about earning or saving money, and his “vindicative” nature, a word “used here in its more positive Latin sense, ‘eager for judgement’ on all matters, including himself”.

Ian Donaldson’s excellent new biography is the fruit of a lifetime’s study, an immersion in its subject intensified by Donaldson’s work, “over the past decade and a half”, as a co-editor of the eagerly awaited Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson. It gives the most detailed account we are likely to have of Jonson’s life, based on a mastery of primary and secondary sources, with many penetrating comments on his plays, masques and poems. From it a vivid portrait emerges of Jonson’s imposing presence, in life (he was of massive bulk, with a pock-marked face) as in his works. As Donaldson puts

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it, Jonson was always ready “to prompt and guide his audiences’ responses to his work through prologues, epilogues, choruses, inductions, epistles, and specially inserted or appended scenes: to point out beauties, novelties, precedents and authorial intentions”, a readiness to act as commentator on his own work which he shares with George Bernard Shaw. Jonson goes beyond Shaw, however, by his daunting presence at performances of his own plays. In Satiromastix, or The Untrussing of the Humorous Poet (1602), Dekker described Jonson sitting in a gallery during performances of his plays, making “vile and bad faces at every line . . . to make players afraid to take your part”. Indeed, Jonson has characters in his plays glance around apprehensively for the author: “He do not hear me, I hope”, says one, “I am looking lest the poet hear me”, says another. A prolific writer for the public theatre yet often at odds with it, Jonson called himself “Poet”.

In his turbulent career Jonson had many scrapes with the law, including prosecution for manslaughter, having killed the actor Gabriel Spencer in a duel in Hoxton Fields. Jonson escaped the gallows thanks to the old law excusing those who could read the so-called “neck-verse” from Psalm 51 as a test of literacy. In several plays, Jonson echoes his own experience with allusions to characters being “saved by the book”. Returning from his famous Scottish journey, Jonson has a character in his new masque announce that “one of our greatest poets – I know not how good a one – went to Edinburgh o’ foot, and came back”. (Donaldson, usually commendably attentive to the obsolete senses of words, fails to gloss “greatest”, which here means “largest”). In his final works, Jonson’s candour about his declining powers of invention, being “like an old bankrupt in wit”, makes his self-presentation in those plays seem rather pathetic.

In charting the arc of Jonson’s life, Donaldson draws on a wide range of historical scholarship to illuminate its varying contexts. One helpful account documents the widespread discontent at the number of Scottish courtiers surrounding James I, a ressentiment which helped fuel the Gunpowder Plot. Having long been at the centre of Jonson studies, Donaldson benefits from many recent textual discoveries, including one of three songs written for a banquet in 1607, identified in 2003 by Gabriel Heaton and James Knowles, and Knowles’s discovery in 1996 of a masque by Jonson and Inigo Jones called The Entertainment at Britain’s Burse. This was commissioned by Robert Cecil to celebrate the opening in 1609 of the New Exchange, Cecil’s grand new shopping mall in the Strand, designed to draw customers to the West End, away from Gresham’s Royal Exchange in the city. (Imagine Tom Stoppard and David Hockney collaborating on a show for the Westfield shopping centre.) Donaldson himself endorses the old theory that Jonson wrote the anonymous “Address to the Great Variety of Readers” in the Shakespeare Folio of 1623, but we shall have to wait until the supplementary electronic edition of the Cambridge Jonson is published in 2013 to see his full case.

As Donaldson shows, Jonson moved in an “unusual range of communities”, “religious, scholarly, theatrical, poetic, legal, parliamentary, civic, aristocratic”. He told Drummond that he had been converted to Roman Catholicism when awaiting trial in Newgate prison for the killing of Gabriel Spencer “by a priest who visited him in prison. Thereafter he was twelve years a papist”. Like many English Catholics, Jonson was frequently in trouble with the authorities on charges of recusancy. Although existing within several communities, Jonson could not be bound by them. An entry in Donaldson’s admirable index, “Troubles with the law”, lists six plays which also got Jonson into trouble. In 1597, he collaborated with Nashe on The Isle of Dogs, which was soon denounced to the authorities as a “seditious play”, presumably for its libelling of people in public life. Nashe fled to Great Yarmouth, but Jonson, together with Robert Shaa and Gabriel Spencer, two fellow players from Pembroke’s Men (which collapsed soon after), were arrested in August and placed in Marshalsea Prison until they were released in October, no charges having been pressed. More seriously, in 1605 Jonson collaborated with Marston and Chapman on Eastward Ho, which included some jokes against Scottish courtiers. Jonson and Chapman spent two months in prison, writing desperate letters to the authorities. Jonson got into further trouble for questionable allusions to powerful contemporary figures in 1601, with The Poetaster; in 1603, with Sejanus (when he was summoned before the Privy Council on charges of “Popery and treason”); in 1616, with The Devil Is an Ass, and in 1632, with The Magnetic Lady. Donaldson notes that all of Jonson’s plays were “remarkably attuned to the contemporary world”: sometimes too closely for his own good. As Sir Walter Ralegh wrote in the preface in his History of the World (1612), “Whosoever in writing a modern History, shall follow Truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth”.

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Donaldson so often illuminates the links between Jonson’s life and works that it seems ungrateful to complain, but some interpretations seem far-fetched. He suggests that in Cynthia’s Revels the famous song “To Diana”, “Queen and huntress, chaste and fair” (its metre irremediably transformed in my ear by Britten’s setting of it in his Serenade for Tenor, Strings and Horn, converting its four beats per line into seven), the line “Hesperus entreats thy light” is a coded appeal to Elizabeth to forgive her former favourite Essex, whom Donaldson also identifies with “the flying hart” Actaeon. Later, we are told that Cynthia’s reference to Actaeon’s “fatal doom” was inserted at the last moment before Essex’s execution on January 6, 1601 “as a stern reminder of his downfall”. But Jonson can hardly be both pleading for Essex and saying that he deserved what he got. Donaldson suggests that “the society that Jonson depicts in Sejanus closely resembles that of Catholic communities in London . . . intimidated by the constant threat of surveillance, forced to maintain silence or communicate in whispers”; but in a later chapter he offers the same interpretation for Morose in Epicene, who has a pathological dislike of noise. Surely both parallels are illusory. Donaldson’s scholarship is generally reliable, but not always. Francis Bacon never served as a secretary to Essex. It is not true that “the title and location of the dramatic scene were customarily displayed onstage in Elizabethan times, for literate members of the audience to read”. Donaldson observes, rather tentatively, that “Jonson appears to have been familiar” with Calvin’s theology. But so were most educated men and women in the Jacobean period, as Nicholas Tyacke and the late Patrick Collinson showed. In any case, Jonson’s belief that poetry and drama should present the battle of virtue against vice goes back to Roman models.

These few quibbles apart, Donaldson’s new biography paints a vivid picture of Jonson at all stages of his life, including some strange bodily positions he got himself into. In 1598, having claimed the benefit of clergy for killing his adversary, Jonson was “branded with a hot iron on the fleshy part of the right hand thumb, probably with the letter M (for manslayer) . . . . Such a brand, immediately visible when the right hand was lifted up again in a courtroom, ensured that the benefit could be claimed only once”. In 1606, one of the masques that Jonson contrived with Inigo Jones, creating spectacles rivalling a Busby Berkeley musical, included a microcosm or globe which rotated magically, it seemed, “for no axle was seen to support it”: it was actually turned by Jonson himself, half-concealed behind a Roman altar. In 1612 Jonson agreed to travel abroad for a year as tutor to the nineteen-year-old Wat Ralegh, whose father was still imprisoned in the Tower. That “high spirited pupil” got his tutor dead drunk, stretched him out on a cart (weighing some 20 stone, Ben would have been a suitable model for Lucian Freud’s late work) and wheeled him about Paris, telling the citizens that this was “a more lively image of the crucifix than any they had”. When Jonson re-converted to Anglicanism – probably in 1610, following the assassination of Henri IV, a deed that caused James to bring in more stringent measures to control Catholics – Jonson told Drummond that “at his first communion, in token of true reconciliation, he drank out all the full cup of wine”. (An excusable gesture, we are told, if he was the only communicant.) Finally, and most oddly, after his death in 1637 Jonson was buried in Westminster Abbey. But in 1823, when his grave was opened to make room for other corpses, his body was found to have been buried in a vertical position, “with the head downwards and the back turned towards the east, the feet sticking upwards to within a few inches of the Abbey floor”. Another excavation in 1849 confirmed that the coffin had been placed in the upright position, a choice that gives a new meaning to the inscription originally placed nearby on “a pavement square of blue marble”, as John Aubrey recorded: “O RARE BEN JONSON”.

Ian Donaldson describes Jonson as “Britain’s first literary celebrity”, and “the dominant literary figure of his day”. He is the first biographer to do justice to the range and complexity of his life, an achievement that will be difficult to surpass.

Brian Vickers is Director of the Advisory Board for The Oxford Francis Bacon and General Editor of The Collected Works of John Ford, the first volume of which appeared last year.

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