Jonson in trouble again
Jonson soon passed from fortune to misfortune. With Marston and Chapman he wrote the comedy Eastward Ho, and the government arrested all three on the claim that it insulted the Scots. The prisoners came close to losing their noses and ears, but were freed unharmed, and men of standing such as Camden and Selden attended the banquet the three gave on their release.
Then on 7 November 1605, as a Catholic who might know something of the Gunpowder Plot, Jonson was called before the privy council. He had dined a month earlier with one of the chief plotters, Catesby, yet he escaped trouble. On 9 January 1606 he was summoned again, this time as a dissenter from the established church. Because he was poor and could not be heavily fined, the authorities did not press the charge. In 1610 he returned to the Anglican communion, and with such zeal that he drained the cup of wine at the sacrament.
The Alchemist and later plays
That same year he staged his most important play of the period, The Alchemist. In it he attacked not only alchemy, a wearisome pursuit, but also the crowd of swindlers and cheats who plagued London with their tricks. Sir Epicure Mammon, sure that he has found the secret of the philosopher's stone, dreams aloud of turning all his household metal into gold overnight, buying up all the lead and tin of the metalworkers and the copper of the mines, and living like Solomon in boundless luxury. Sir Epicure is a rare figure; the others are worthless people whose talk is full of repellent matter. It is a pity that Ben, with all his learning, had mastered the coarse speech of London's dirty quarters so thoroughly. The Puritans criticized him unforgivingly for such plays, and Jonson took revenge by mocking them in Bartholomew Fair.
Jonson wrote other comedies full of energy, and sometimes he rebelled against his own harsh realism. In The Sad Shepherd he let his fancy run free. The hero's steps, he writes, did not bend a blade of grass or shake the feathery dandelion from its stalk, but passed swift as the west wind, and wherever he went, the roots of flowers grew thicker, for he had planted them with perfumed feet. Yet Jonson left that play unfinished and confined his romantic sense to lovely songs scattered through his comedies, like jewels set in the slag of metal. So in The Devil Is an Ass (1616) he suddenly asks whether you have seen a bright lily before rude hands plucked it, or the falling snow before the soil defiled it, or felt the soft down of a swan; his beloved, he says, is just as white, soft and sweet. Sweeter still is the song to Celia, adapted from Philostratus, which he turned with perfect mastery into the lines drink to me only with thine eyes.
The king of the poets
After Shakespeare's death Jonson was the acknowledged head of the poets. He was England's unofficial poet laureate, and although he did not formally hold the title, the government often treated him as holder and granted him a yearly pension of 100 marks (the book's figure). A crowd of friends gathered about him at the Mermaid Tavern, finding their own natures in his sharp temper and bitter tongue, enjoying his sweet talk and treating him almost as a master, as the next century would treat his namesake Samuel Johnson. Like Samuel Johnson, Ben was a huge man and no handsomer. He himself complained of a mountain of a belly and a rough, blotched face, the result of scurvy, and he was rarely seen to visit a friend without breaking a chair under his weight.
In 1624 he moved to the Devil Tavern in Fleet Street, where the Apollo Club he had founded met regularly for food, wine and wit. Jonson had a raised seat in a corner of the room, and when he arrived he took hold of a rail and sat like a king on his throne. His followers were called the Tribe of Ben, and among them were James Shirley, Thomas Carew and Robert Herrick, who called him Saint Ben.
Poverty and death
To bear the poverty and illness of his old age, Jonson needed the patience of a saint. By his own count all his plays together had not earned him 200 pounds. He spent money fast and went hungry at leisure. He lacked Shakespeare's gift for finance, which had made the other man a shrewd investor in property. Charles I kept paying his pension, but when parliament cut the king's income it was not always paid. In 1629 Charles sent him 100 pounds, and the dean and chapter of Westminster agreed to give 50 pounds to the sick and poor Ben Jonson. His last plays did not please, his reputation waned, friends scattered, and his wife and children died. By 1629 he lived alone, bedridden with paralysis, looked after by an old woman. Yet he endured eight more years of pain and poverty. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, and John Young carved on the stone facing his grave the famous words, O rare Ben Jonson. Of that inscription time has kept only the words O and rare, but every educated Englishman can supply the rest.
The Bible of King James
At the Hampton Court Conference one of the Puritan delegates proposed a new translation of the Bible. The Bishop of London objected that the existing ones were good enough, but James overruled him. He ordered that special pains be taken for one single translation, made by the best scholars of the two universities, reviewed by the bishops, submitted to the privy council, and finally read in all churches by the king's authority, with other versions set aside. Sir Henry Savile and forty-six other scholars undertook the work, consulted the earlier versions of Wycliffe and Tyndale, and finished the new translation in seven years (1604 to 1611). This Authorized Version had an immense effect on English life, literature and speech. About a thousand fine phrases from it passed into the language. Reverence for the Bible, strong in every Protestant land, grew stronger in England, where the Puritans, then the Quakers and then the Methodists studied its text and clung to it with a devotion like that of Muslims for the Quran, according to the book. Its effect on English style was wholly good. It turned the fanciful and involved prose of the Elizabethan age into short, firm, clear and natural sentences, and put plain English words in place of foreign phrases. Although it contained thousands of scholarly errors, the books of the Old and New Testaments, written in noble Hebrew and common Greek, became the greatest monument of English prose.
Raleigh and Burton
Two other works of splendid prose belong to James's reign: Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World, of which more later, and Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. It is a vast book, and the vicar of St. Thomas's in Oxford filled its margins with learning from theology, astrology, the classics and philosophy. At first people thought him merry and witty, but he grew so melancholy and depressed that nothing cheered him except the coarse jokes of bargemen. To drive off his black humour he borrowed many books from the Bodleian Library and read them greedily. With these books, his manuscript, his clerical duties and astrology he passed his sad days and starry nights. He cast his own horoscope and predicted the day of his death so accurately that Oxford students gossiped that he had made the prediction come true.
His presence can be felt in his book. He begins by meaning to investigate melancholy and prescribe a cure, but finds digression more attractive. With a kind of humor as intricate as Rabelais's, he treats every subject in passing, like Montaigne, scatters Latin and Greek on every page, and feels that writing itself is a kind of plunder. We say nothing, he says, but what has been said; only the style and arrangement are ours. He admits too that he knows the world only through books and the news that reaches Oxford.