“Language most shows a man. Speak that I may see thee.” — Ben Jonson

“O rare Benn Johnson.” — Jonson’s incorrectly-spelled epitaph in Westminster Abbey

It’s his birthday today.

Ben Jonson did everything. Plays, poems, satires, elegies, epigrams. His talent was wide and flexible. Everything he wrote feels inevitable. However, as Michael Schmidt writes in his wonderful Lives of the Poets: “Jonson suffers one irremediable disability: Shakespeare.”

When people have discussed him, throughout history, more often than not they do so in comparison to Shakespeare. Shakespeare is the context, Jonson is in that context’s shadow. As giant as Ben Jonson was, and he was a GIANT, he is not allowed to stand alone, because Shakespeare hovers over all. One cannot exist without consciousness of the other.

The men are placed in opposition merely because of their closeness in the timeline.

Bing Crosby once said something along these lines in re: Frank Sinatra: “Frank is a singer who comes along once in a lifetime, but why did he have to come along in my lifetime?”

One can imagine Ben Jonson thinking something similar about Shakespeare.

More beneath the jump:

There’s that great quote from Jonson about Shakespeare:

I remember, the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out line. My answer hath been, would he had blotted a thousand.

There was controversy in Jonson’s life. He was imprisoned for a play it was thought he wrote, and spent some time locked up. He converted to Roman Catholicism while in prison, although the conversion didn’t “take”. He killed someone and was almost hanged for it. He traveled widely. The publication of his “first folio” was overseen by him and was influential in the subsequent publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio seven years later. Jonson was involved in the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio as well, and, famously, wrote an elegy for Shakespeare which appears in the opening pages. There probably are not more picked-apart words in all of literature.

To the memory of my beloved,
The Author
MR. W I L L I A M S H A K E S P E A R E :
A N D
what he hath left us.

To draw no envy (Shakespeare) on thy name,
Am I thus ample to thy Booke, and Fame;
While I confesse thy writings to be such,
As neither Man, nor Muse, can praise too much.
‘Tis true, and all men’s suffrage. But these wayes
Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise;
For seeliest Ignorance on these may light,
Which, when it sounds at best, but eccho’s right;
Or blinde Affection, which doth ne’re advance
The truth, but gropes, and urgeth all by chance;
Or crafty Malice, might pretend this praise,
And thine to ruine, where it seem’d to raise.
These are, as some infamous Baud, or Whore,
Should praise a Matron. What could hurt her more?
But thou art proofe against them, and indeed
Above th’ ill fortune of them, or the need.
I, therefore will begin. Soule of the Age !
The applause ! delight ! the wonder of our Stage !
My Shakespeare, rise; I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lye
A little further, to make thee a roome :
Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe,
And art alive still, while thy Booke doth live,
And we have wits to read, and praise to give.
That I not mixe thee so, my braine excuses ;
I meane with great, but disproportion’d Muses :
For, if I thought my judgement were of yeeres,
I should commit thee surely with thy peeres,
And tell, how farre thou dist our Lily out-shine,
Or sporting Kid or Marlowes mighty line.
And though thou hadst small Latine, and lesse Greeke,
From thence to honour thee, I would not seeke
For names; but call forth thund’ring Æschilus,
Euripides, and Sophocles to us,
Paccuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead,
To life againe, to heare thy Buskin tread,
And shake a stage : Or, when thy sockes were on,
Leave thee alone, for the comparison
Of all, that insolent Greece, or haughtie Rome
Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.
Triumph, my Britaine, thou hast one to showe,
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time !
And all the Muses still were in their prime,
When like Apollo he came forth to warme
Our eares, or like a Mercury to charme !
Nature her selfe was proud of his designes,
And joy’d to weare the dressing of his lines !
Which were so richly spun, and woven so fit,
As, since, she will vouchsafe no other Wit.
The merry Greeke, tart Aristophanes,
Neat Terence, witty Plautus, now not please;
But antiquated, and deserted lye
As they were not of Natures family.
Yet must I not give Nature all: Thy Art,
My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part;
For though the Poets matter, Nature be,
His Art doth give the fashion. And, that he,
Who casts to write a living line, must sweat,
(Such as thine are) and strike the second heat
Upon the Muses anvile : turne the same,
(And himselfe with it) that he thinkes to frame;
Or for the lawrell, he may gaine a scorne,
For a good Poet’s made, as well as borne.
And such wert thou. Looke how the fathers face
Lives in his issue, even so, the race
Of Shakespeares minde, and manners brightly shines
In his well toned, and true-filed lines :
In each of which, he seemes to shake a Lance,
As brandish’t at the eyes of Ignorance.
Sweet swan of Avon! what a fight it were
To see thee in our waters yet appeare,
And make those flights upon the bankes of Thames,
That so did take Eliza, and our James !
But stay, I see thee in the Hemisphere
Advanc’d, and made a Constellation there !
Shine forth, thou Starre of Poets, and with rage,
Or influence, chide, or cheere the drooping Stage;
Which, since thy flight fro’ hence, hath mourn’d like night,
And despaires day, but for thy Volumes light.

What is amazing about this, for me, is how personal it is. It is a “letter” to his dead friend. You can feel their relationship, the vestiges of envy, openly admitted to, and the emotion is palpable: “and what he hath left us.” Ben Jonson was a prescient man. He knew what Shakespeare was. He knew the work would last.

There is so much material to choose from, with Ben Jonson, but the following poem, written to his dead child, is heartbreaking, with two lines in particular (the first and the 10th) that pierce across time, obliterating the intervening centuries.

On My First Son

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy.
Seven years wert thou leant to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O. I could lose all father now. For why
Will man lament the state he should envy?
To have so soon ‘scaped world’s, and flesh’s, rage,
And if no other misery, yet age?
Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say here doth lie
Ben Jonson, his best piece of poetry.
For whose sake, henceforth, all his vows be such,
As what he loves may never like too much.

QUOTES:

John Dryden, 17th century critic:

I admire Jonson, but I love Shakespeare.

Edmund Bolton, 1722:

I never tasted English more to my liking, nor more smart, and put to the height of use in poetry, than in the vital, judicious, and most practicable language of Benjamin Jonson’s poems.

William Drummond, poet, Conversations with Drummond, a long list of things Ben Jonson said to him during a sleepover – lol – in 1618:

His censure of the English poets was this: that Sidney did not keep a decorum in making everyone speak as well as himself.
Spenser’s stanzas pleased him not, nor his matter, the meaning of which allegory he had delivered in papers to Sir Walter Raleigh.
Samuel Daniel was a good honest man, had no children, but no poet.
That Michael Drayton’s Poly-O[l]bion, if [he] had performed what he promised to write, the deeds of all the worthies, had been excellent. His long verses pleased him not.
That Sylvester’s translation of Du Bartas was not well done, and that he wrote his verse before it ere he understood to confer. Nor that of Fairfax his.
That the translations of Homer and Virgil in long Alexandrines were but prose.
That John Harington’s Ariosto under all translations was the worst. That when Sir John Harington desired him to tell the truth of his epigrams, he answered him that he loved not the truth, for they were narrations, and not epigrams.
That Warner, since the king’s coming to England, [h]ad marred all his Albion’s England.
That Donne’s Anniversary was profane and full of blasphemies.
That he told Mr Donne, if it had been written of the Virgin Mary it had been something; to which he answered that he described the idea of a woman, and not as she was.
That Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging.
That Shakespeare wanted art.
That Sharpham, Day, Dekker, were all rogues, and that Minsheu was one.
That Abraham Fraunce in his English hexameters was a fool.
That next himself only Fletcher and Chapman could make a masque.

Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets:

Jonson makes us guests at great houses and lets us hear the age’s mannerly speech and savor its hospitality. We hear his songs, too; and we meet, through his eyes, friends and foes as real as any in poetry. He was among the first great poets to take an active interest in publishing, to seek fortune and solace from the printing of his own work in book form. He is the grandfather, or godfather, of Grub Street.

John Aubrey, 17th century gossip:

Ben Jonson had one eie lower than t’other, and bigger, like Clun the Player; perhaps he begott Clun.

Robert Lowell, letter to Elizabeth Bishop, September 11, 1957:

Jonson has a bold steadiness and here hardly ever flinches away into parody and the cliches of exaggeration.

Michael Schmidt:

He’s the most versatile writer in the history of English poetry.

Harold Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language:

One can choose 1587 as an arbitrary date to begin the richest eighty years of poetry in English. Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine was then first performed, perhaps with Shakespeare in the audience, though we do not know when the greatest of poets first arrived in London: 1589 seems to me rather too late, even as an outward limit. The first three books of Spenser’s Faerie Queene were published in 1590. In the early 1590s, Donne wrote many of the Songs and Sonnets, to be published only posthumously. By 1595, at the latest, Shakespeare was at his first full greatness, joined by Jonson at his strongest in Volpone (1606). The Tribe of Ben–disciples of the lyric and epigrammatic Jonson–included Robert Herrick, Thomas Carew, and Richard Lovelace. Andrew Marvell, a poetic party of one, wrote his lyrics by the 1650s, coming after the posthumous publication of George Herbert’s poetry in 1633. Richard Crashaw and Henry Vaughan published by the 1650s. Milton’s Comus was composed in 1634; Paradise Lost, dictated by the blind poet, was finished by 1665, seventy-eight years after Marlowe first shattered his London audiences.

T.S. Eliot, from “Andrew Marvell”, 1921:

Marvell is no greater personality than William Morris, but he had something much more solid behind him: he had the vast and penetrating influence of Ben Jonson. Jonson never wrote anything purer than Marvell’s Horatian Ode; this ode has that same quality of wit which was diffused over the whole Elizabethan product and concentrated in the work of Jonson. And, as was said before, this wit which pervades the poetry of Marvell is more Latin, more refined, than anything that succeeded it.

Alexander Pope:

It is ever the nature of parties to be in extremes; and nothing is so probable, as that because Ben Jonson had much the more learning, it was said on the other hand that Shakespeare had none at all; and because Shakespeare had much the most wit and fancy, it was retorted on the other, that Jonson wanted both. Because Shakespeare borrowed nothing, it was said that Ben Jonson borrowed everything.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Ben Jonson’s Sejanus:

…the absurd rant and ventriloquism

Algernon Charles Swinburne:

…one of the singers who could not sing.

Ouch.

from “Time and the Garden”
By Yvor Winters
And this is like that other restlessness
To seize the greatness not yet fairly earned,
One which the tougher poets have discerned —
Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, Greville, Ralegh, Donne,
Poets who wrote great poems, one by one,
And spaced by many years, each line an act
Through which few labour, which no men retract.

William Drummond, Conversations with Drummond

A great lover and praiser of himself, a contemner and scorner of others.

Harold Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language:

Shakespeare’s influence upon the novel is larger even than that of Cervantes. The masters of the novel–from Jane Austen and Stendhal through Dickens, Tolstoy, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Henry James, Proust, Joyce, Virginia Woolf–are obliged to be Shakespearean, with violent unwillingness on the part of Tolstoy, who found King Lear loathsome and unnatural. What Tolstoy resented is what Ben Jonson resisted, until Jonson read about half of Shakespeare’s plays for the first time in helping to put together the First Folio of 1623, seven years after the death of his great friend and rival. “Nature herself was proud of his designs” is Jonson’s highest compliment, not to be bettered.

John Dryden:

…not only a professed imitator of Horace, but a learned plagiary of all others; you track him everywhere in their snow.

Michael Schmidt:

In the plays the proximity of Shakespeare does Jonson most harm, though he writes plays so different from his friend’s that they seem distinct in kind and period. Part of that difference is Jonson’s poetic balance, deliberate artistry: he knows what he wants to say and has the means of saying it, no more or less. He reaches a conclusion and stops; no discovery leads him beyond his destination. He speaks for his age, while Shakespeare speaks for himself. Jonson’s art is normative, Shakespeare’s radical and exploratory. In Jonson there’s structure and gauged variegation, in Shakespeare movement and warmth…At times Jonson’s words, unlike Shakespeare’s tend to separate out and stand single, rather than coalesce, as though he had attended to each individual word. His mind is busy near the surface.

Harold Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language:

Subtle and stoical, Jonson was also melancholic, and fought bravely against his own self-recognitions and tendency to despair. He compared himself to a broken compass, unable to complete the circle, and his life was frequently difficult. Art, for him, was hard work. To be Shakespeare’s personal friend and rival poet-playwright was not an easy fate.

John Dryden:

[He] did a little too much to Romanise our tongue, leaving the words he translated almost as much Latin as he found them.

John Aubrey:

‘Twas an ingeniose remarque of my Lady Hoskins, that B.J. never writes of Love, or if he does, does it not naturally.

Harold Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language:

Ben Jonson, born in the same year as Donne, survived him by six years, and divided with Donne the formative influence upon the next generation of poets, until the advent of John Milton. For us, now, Jonson lives in his three great comedies for the stage–Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair–and as a lyrical and reflective poet. His frequently beautiful court masques tend now to be neglected, but the best of the twenty-eight read beautifully. The masques were, in a sense collaborations with Inigo Jones, superb scenic designer and architect, whose showmanship frequently made Jonson unhappy.

Michael Schmidt on Ben Jonson:

The more we read Jonson the more we see him as an enabling figure comparable to Pound. Clarity of expression is matched by intellectual and perceptual rigor.

Harold Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language:

Jonson had called John Donne “the first poet in the world in some things,” but then had prophesied that Donne” for not being understood, would perish.” That prophecy has not been fulfilled. Is it only an irony that Jonson, for being understood, has perished, except for his scholars?

To John Donne
BY BEN JONSON

Donne, the delight of Phoebus and each Muse
Who, to thy one, all other brains refuse;
Whose every work of thy most early wit
Came forth example, and remains so yet;
Longer a-knowing than most wits do live;
And which no affection praise enough can give!
To it, thy language, letters, arts, best life,
Which might with half mankind maintain a strife.
All which I meant to praise, and yet I would;
But leave, because I cannot as I should!

William Drummond, Conversations with Drummond

[He] excelleth only in a translation.

Elizabeth Hardwick, “Memoirs, Conversations, and Diaries”, 1953

Even if we did not know Jonson to be a great and lovable genius, a profound and generous critic elsewhere, we could say at least that his remarks [as reported by William Drummond] have a quality dear to us, honesty.

Harold Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language:

Jonson, in every respect that most matters, is about as unlike Donne as could be: most classical when most personal, and so always taking on the role of the poet proper, speaking or singing the ethical concerns of humankind to whoever is qualified to listen and to understand.

Part of Drury-lane Prologue Spoken by Mr. Garrick at the Opening of the Theatre in Drury-Lane, 1747
BY SAMUEL JOHNSON

When Learning’s triumph o’er her barb’rous foes
First rear’d the stage, immortal Shakespear rose;
Each change of many-colour’d life he drew,
Exhausted worlds, and then imagin’d new:
Existence saw him spurn her bounded reign,
And panting Time toil’d after him in vain:
His pow’rful strokes presiding Truth impress’d,
And unresisted Passion storm’d the breast.

Then Jonson came, instructed from the school,
To please in method, and invent by rule;
His studious patience, and laborious art,
By regular approach essay’d the heart;
Cold Approbation gave the ling’ring bays,
For those who durst not censure, scarce could praise.
A mortal born he met the general doom,
But left, like Egypt’s kings, a lasting tomb….

 
 
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