Ben Jonson 1572-1637

Ben Jonson was born in 1572, as the son of a London clergyman. His father died before he was born and he was raised by his stepfather, who was a bricklayer in London. Jonson went to Westminster School in London, where he first learned about the classical Greek and Roman literature. However, due to a lack of money he had to quit school and work as a bricklayer. This was something he hated and to escape he joined the armed forces in Flanders.

When he returned from Flanders he started university and studied in Oxford and Cambridge. He worked as an actor and playwright in London. In 1597 he was imprisoned for working on, what was then thought to be, a scandalous play. In 1603 he was put in jail again because he had mocked the King in one of his plays and he was accused of popery and treason.

Later that year, Jonson was asked to provide the court with entertainment. He did this by writing masques. In 1605 he was asked to organize the Twelfth Night entertainment. For this occasion he wrote The Masque of Blackness. This was the first of 24 masques that he wrote for the court. This shows that he really worked his way up into the highest ranks of society, which was quite extraordinary for the son of a bricklayer.

Jonson’s plays and poetry had a very public and instructive character. He had a very high regard for classical notions about art and literature. As a result he had strong ideas about the poet’s role in society which he based on what classical writers like Horace and Martial had written about this. In his plays, like Volpone and Every Man In His Humour, he complies with the rule of the three unities of drama. His friend and colleague Shakespeare, on the other hand, did not take this rule so seriously.

Jonson was known to have a quarrelsome character: he liked to go into debates or pick a fight. He was close friends with Shakespeare, Donne and Bacon. Jonson also had a huge fantasy and imagination. Once he told a friend that he had spent a whole night “looking at his great toe, about which he had seen Tartars and Turks, Romans and Carthaginians fight in his imagination.”¹ In 1629 he had a stroke and became partly paralyzed. He said goodbye to “the loathed stage”² in his poem Ode to Himself. Despite the fact that he accused the public of having a bad taste in plays, he continued to write. He died in 1637 when he was working on a new play.