BEN JONSON

Ben Jonson was a dramatist, poet, scholar and writer of court masques. In his youth he joined a strolling company of players for whom he acted the part of Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy, a play for which he wrote additional scenes. He is said to have been fearless and quarrelsome, and once was charged of murder. He was probably one of the members of the Friday Street Club (one of the earliest of English Clubs) which met at the Mermaid Tavern and which included Shakespeare, Selden, Donne, Beaumont and Fletcher. (This Club was founded by Ralegh) Jonson’s first important play, with Shakespeare in its cast, was Every Man in His Humour. It was followed by Every Man Out of His Humour and Cynthia’s Revels. His first extant tragedy is Sejanus and his first court masque The Masque of Blackness written for Queen Anne who appears as a negress in the masque. At this time Jonson, along with Chapman and Marston, wrote Eastward Hoe, and Chapman and Jonson were imprisoned, for the comedy contained a passage derogatory of the Scots. Then followed his major plays— Volpone or The Fox, which contains the famous characters Mosca and Corbaccio, Epicene or The Silent Woman, which contains the characters Morose and Cutbeard, (Dryden thought this the most perfectly plotted of all comedies), The Alchemist, with characters like Dame Pliant and Lovewit, and Bartholomew Fair. His later plays—The Devil is an Ass, A Tale of a Tub (Swift has written a work of the same name), etc. show a reliance on allegory and symbolism. The genre of court–masque reached its perfection in Jonson’s hands. He introduced into it the ‘anti-masque’, an antithetical, usually disorderly, prelude to the main action which served to highlight and contrast the central theme of political and social harmony. His Pleasure Reconciled toVirtue gave Milton his idea for Comus. His non-dramatic verse includes a translation of Horace’s Ars Poetica.

Jonson was a favourite of King James I, hence his prolific output of masques]. His 2nd tragedy is Catiline. Every Man in his Humour marked an epoch in the history of drama; no comedy had ever appeared with a more self-conscious flourish. In this play, the young playwright emerged with a revolutionary manifesto, in which a new theory of comedy was put into practice. Jonson’s theory of a Comedy of Humours is expounded in the prologue to the play where a ‘humour’ is the embodiment in one of the character of some dominating individual passion. The cardinal humours, as suggested by medieval thinkers, whose balance was thought to determine a man’s nature, were blood, phlegm, choler (yellow bile) and melancholy (black bile). In the prologue Jonson criticizes romantic drama which allows the most ridiculous improbabilities of plot and scene. As a classical scholar he preferred to adhere to the unities. He was against melodrama and farce, and advocated realism which would confine comedy to an image of the times. Jonson’s theory was supported by a vigorous display of learning and reason. Yet his plays are little read or enacted, and are as good as dead except to the student of literature. This is because his method is laboriously pedantic and his characters, in whom one or the other of the humours exceed to result in a folly or affection, are highly artificial. His plays, though they laugh at the ‘humour’ of the characters, fail to amuse and lack in the shaping spirit of imagination.