In an age of remarkable men and women, Ben Jonson (1572-1637 ) stood out. Not only was he friend and rival of Shakespeare, he was also a brilliant poet and playwright. He was also wayward, obstinate, bad-tempered, and only survived the gallows after killing a man in a duel by proving he could read and write. Thereafter he bore on his right thumb a branded 'T', for Tyburn, so that if caught next time, he would hang.
Almost alone among Shakespeare's contemporaries – Marlowe is the other exception – Jonson's plays - The Alchemist, Volpone, Bartholomew Fair, The New Inn, and the Poetaster – are still staged. And he is still studied in university English courses. Many of the plays are set recognisably in the world of late Elizabethan England, with lots of local colour and knowing references that would have been instantly caught by those who first watched them, though are sometimes baffling to us.
Jonson also wrote prose, some collected in a book called Timber. Here we find this greatly opinionated man passing judgment on everyone from the Greek and Roman authors he admired (and to whom he felt himself equal ), the fads and follies of his day, and also some sharp remarks on other writers, to whom he felt – with the sole exception of Shakespeare – vastly superior. One of his remarks on Shakespeare clearly refers to The Tempest: “He said further to Drummond [a poet], Shakespeare wanted art, and sometimes sense; for in one of his plays he brought in a number of men, saying they had been shipwrecked in Bohemia, where is no sea near by a hundred miles.”
Dspite his occasional bluster, Jonson was a sensitive man, and rejection hurt him and made him bitter. And it must have been hard on him to realise that, unlike the plays he pinned his hopes on, he was more successful writing masques, those curious courtly entertainments that anticipate opera. Usually perfomed to commemorate some duke or earl or royal marriage, they took a mythological theme – say, Cupid and Psyche – and, with the aid of elaborate stage sets and music, were intended to charm a group of lords and ladies between courses.
Jonson wrote dozens of them and, despite the often silly plots, they prompted some of his finest lyric poetry.
‘Queen and huntress, chaste and fair,
Now the sun is laid to sleep,
seated on thy silver chair,
state in wonted manner keep.
Hesperus entreats thy light,
Goddess excellently bright.’
‘Earth, let not thy envious shade
Dare itself to interpose;
Cynthia's shining orb was made
Heaven to clear when day did close:
Bless us then with wished sight,
Goddess excellently bright.’
In this exquisite song from Cynthia's Revels, Jonson weaves his verbal music round the image of the shining moon which, in another verse, he says,“mak'st a day of night”. Here is poetry to ravish the senses, yet firmly under the control of a guiding intelligence. The same qualities are found in ‘Still to be Nea’t, ‘That Love's a Bitter Sweet’, ‘Though Beauty Be the Mark of Praise’, and ‘To Heaven’.
In later life, Jonson held court at The Mermaid Tavern, a pub in Cheapside, not far from St Paul's Cathedral, where gathered round him a group of admiring young men – including John Donne and John Milton - calling themselves the 'Tribe of Ben', who shared the drinking and the sparkling conversation.
Thomas Fuller provides an account of an evening with Jonson and Shakespeare, that seems to carry a breeze from the wind that, only a few years earlier, had destroyed the Spanish Armada:
“ … I beheld like a Spanish great Gallion and an English man of War: Master Jonson (like the former ) was built far higher in learning; solid but slow in his performances. Shakespeare, with the English man of War, lesser in bulk but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his Wit and Invention”.
‘On my First Son’, written after his child's early death, is one of Jonson's finest and most moving poems. It shows again that mastery of technical control and powerful feeling that made him an inspiration to his younger contemporaries.
‘Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, lov'd boy,
Seven years tho'wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O, could I lose all father, now …
Rest in soft peace, and, ask'd, say here doth lye
Ben. Jonson, his best piece of poetry,
For whose sake, henceforth, all his vows be such,
As what he loves may never like as much.’
Barnaby ffrench
