A poor boy and a great teacher
Ben Jonson was born in Westminster in 1573, a month after his father died. His mother, a minister's widow, later married a bricklayer. The family was poor, and Ben could attend Westminster School only through the kindness of a generous friend. There he had the good fortune to fall under the influence of William Camden, the historian and antiquary. He took in the classics with less zeal than one might expect, yet he came to know Cicero, Seneca, Livy, Tacitus and Quintilian, and later claimed that he knew more Greek and Latin than any other English poet. Only his excitable temper and the clamor of London life kept his learning from smothering his art.
After school he went to Cambridge but, according to one biographer, lacked the money to stay more than a few weeks. His stepfather wanted him to learn the bricklayer's trade, and we can picture Ben sweating and sulking over his bricks while composing verses in his head. Then he suddenly went off to war and served for a time in the Netherlands, where he fought a duel with an enemy soldier, killed him, took his arms, and came home to tell tall tales. He married, had several children, buried three or four of them, quarreled with his wife, left her alone for five years, then rejoined her and lived with her in hard poverty until her death. How he fed his family is a puzzle, and it deepens when we learn that he also became an actor (1597). Yet his head was full of fine ideas and lively verse, and he could not stay content with other men's thoughts.
Prison and the first comedies
When Thomas Nashe invited him to help write The Isle of Dogs, Jonson gladly agreed. The privy council found the play seditious and slanderous, ordered it stopped, the theatre closed and its authors arrested. Nashe, who knew such troubles, vanished to Yarmouth, but Jonson went to prison. Since prison custom made him pay for his own food, lodging and fetters, he borrowed 4 pounds (the book's figure) from Philip Henslowe, and on his release joined Henslowe's theatre company (and Shakespeare's, according to the book).
The next year he wrote his first famous comedy, Every Man in His Humour, and at the Globe he saw Shakespeare act in it. The great dramatist may not have liked its preface, which, unlike the usual fashion, urged that the classical unities of action, time and place be kept, rather than showing a swaddled child turned into a bearded man who dies at sixty. Jonson wished for a play in which choruses would not carry us over the seas and no creaking throne would descend for the children's amusement; he asked for deeds and speech fit for men, and for persons through whom comedy could show the image of the age and laugh at human follies rather than human crimes.
So Jonson turned his back on the aristocratic jesting of Shakespeare's early comedies and on the marvelous geography and adventures of romantic drama. He brought the seedy quarters of London onto the stage and hid his learning under imitations of the speech and habits of the lower classes. His characters are caricatures rather than strange philosophical creatures, but they live. Like Webster's they are worthless and mean-minded, yet they are human, and they are not murderers.
The comedy of humours
The ancient physicians, following Hippocrates, held that the body contains four humours: blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. When one of them overpowered the others, a man was called sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic or choleric. Jonson stated his idea thus: when some particular quality so rules a man that all his feelings, spirits and powers run in one direction, that may truly be called a humour. He applied it in a comic portrait of Bobadil, a braggart soldier in the line of Plautus's boastful captain. This man had his own unconscious humour: he was brave except in danger and ready to fight except when challenged, a swaggerer through and through.
The play was a success, and Ben could indulge himself. Self-confident in the manner of proud poets, he spoke to nobles without cringing, stuck to his opinions, enjoyed blunt talk and rough company, and led a free life. Later he gave up acting and lived by his pen, writing court entertainments in which the players wore masks. His simple, fanciful lines suited the scenes that Inigo Jones designed.
Quarrels, a brand and a patron's help
Quick-tempered Jonson quarreled with everyone. Soon after his first success he fought another duel, with the actor Gabriel Spenser, killed him and was jailed. In prison he turned Catholic, which made things harder for him. Still, he was tried fairly and allowed the benefit of clergy, which put clerics and the literate under church law, because he could read a Latin psalm like a clerk. The letter T was branded on his thumb so that he could easily be recognized if he killed again, and he was set free. For the rest of his life he was a branded man.
After a year of freedom he was jailed again for debt. Henslowe got him out once more, and in 1600 Jonson wrote Every Man Out of His Humour and earned enough to pay what he owed. He dressed it up with classical touches and added three characters who served as a commenting chorus. He attacked the Puritans, who made a show of religion in their clothes and kept their hair shorter than their eyebrows, and he mocked dramatists who ignored the unities of Aristotle. Instead of false stories about nobles, he proposed to hold up to the public a mirror as big as the stage on which they played, so that people might see how boldly the diseased body of the age was dissected.
The play brought him enemies rather than income, and nobody recommends reading it today. Dissatisfied with the rowdy audience of the Globe, Jonson wrote another comedy, Cynthia's Revels, for boy actors and a better public at Blackfriars. Dekker and Marston felt he had criticized them in it. In 1602 the Chamberlain's company, angry at the Blackfriars rivals, answered with Satiromastix, which described Jonson as short, pockmarked, a killer, a bricklayer, a pedant and a conceited man. The quarrel ended with praise on both sides, and for a time fortune smiled on him. A well-known judge took him into his house, and the Earl of Pembroke sent him 20 pounds to buy books.
Sejanus and Volpone
Thus encouraged, Jonson wrote a tragedy about Sejanus, the odious favorite of Tiberius. He built the story carefully on Tacitus, Suetonius, Dio Cassius and Juvenal, but audiences were wearied by long speeches and sermons from lifeless figures, and the play was withdrawn. Jonson printed it with the classical sources and Latin notes in the margin. Lord D'Aubigny, impressed, kept the gloomy poet at his house for five years.
Then Jonson wrote his greatest play and returned to the stage. In Volpone, or the Fox he attacked the greed of Londoners for money. As in the old comedies, a servant drives the plot. Mosca (Italian for fly) brings in a procession of would-be heirs, Voltore (vulture), Corbaccio (crow) and Corvino (raven), to the bed of his miserly master, who pretends to be mortally ill. Hoping to be named heir, they bring considerable gifts. The fox accepts every offering, however shameful, with a greedy reluctance. At last Mosca tricks Volpone himself and persuades him to name Mosca his only heir. But Bonario, the honest man, exposes the trick, and the Venetian senate sends nearly everyone to prison. The play finally won over the Globe's audience to Jonson.