man, this side idolatry’; he also mentioned his ‘small Latin and less Greek’ and his
carelessness. Ben Jonson was given a ferocious education at Westminster School
under the antiquarian William Camden (1551–1623), author ofBrittania (1587). He
then worked with his step-father, a bricklayer, and served as a soldier in the Low
Countries, killing an enemy champion in single combat. In 1598 he killed a fellow-
player in self-defence. Converted in prison, he was ‘twelve years a Papist’. He played
Hieronimo in Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy in 1601. Questioned about the Gunpowder Plot
in 1605,in 1606 he and his wife were charged with recusancy, refusing to submit to
the claims of the Church of England. After the publication of his Folio Works in
1616,James I gave him a pension. We know Jonson through his moral satire, criti-
cism, social verse and self-portraits. He tells us of ‘my mountain belly and my rockie
face’; and that he weighed nearly twenty stone (170 kilos). In 1618–19 he walked to
Scotland to win a bet; his table-talk there was recorded by his host, Drummond of
Hawthornden. He wrote plays, verse and court masques, and died in 1637.
Jonson’s education gave him a classical idea of literature, valuing sanity, concision
and integrity. He took the old masters as ‘guides, not commanders’, which, as Oscar
Wilde remarked, ‘made the poets of Greece and Rome terribly modern’. But those
poets are not known now as they were to Wilde; and terrible modernity is not obvious
in Jonson’s sombre Sejanus (1603) and Catiline (1611). These Roman tragedies are less
alive than Shakespeare’s; the toga can hide the topicality of their political satire.
Satire is the motive of Jonson’s comedy also:Every Man in His Humour (1598) is
set in Florence (Shakespeare is listed in the cast), and Volpone (1605) in Venice; but
London is the scene ofEpicœne, or the Silent Woman (1609),The Alchemist (1610),
Bartholomew Fair (1614) and other plays. Jonson’s ridicule of the deformations of
contemporary life is ferocious but farcical: although he held that comedy does not
derive from laughter, we laugh more, and harder, at his comedies than at
Shakespeare’s. Jonson has the Renaissance idea that comedy laughs us out of vices
and follies. ‘Comedy is an imitation of the common errors of our life, which he
representeth in the most ridiculous and scornful sort that may be, so as it is impos-
sible that any beholder can be content to be such a one’ – Sidney.
Jonson’s comedy-of-humour characters are caricatures ruled by a single idea. In
physiology a ‘humour’ was a bodily fluid, an excess of which unbalanced the
te mperament, making it phlegmatic, bilious, sanguine, melancholy, choleric, and so
on. Jonson extended this purgative approach to ruling passions and monomaniac
fixations. (This ‘humour’ tradition goes from Chaucer to Dickens via Henry Fielding
and the caricaturist Hogarth in the 18th century. Dickens liked to act the part of
Bobadil in Every Man in his Humour; see p. 291.) In Jonson’s grotesque world,
avarice is the chief vice, ahead of pride, lust and gluttony; folly is everywhere.
Jonson’s London bubbles most anarchically in Bartholomew Fair, the action centring
on the tent of the pig-woman, Ursula, where pig flesh and human flesh are for sale,
and hypocrisy is unmasked. Although he later wrote more for the Court than for the
public, Jonson does not mock the citizen more than the courtier. His ideal remained
an integrity, artistic, intellectual and moral; he hated fraud, personal, moral or social.
He is a simpler moralist than Shakespeare, more focused on virtue and vice.
Jonson gave his abundant spirits a classical focus.Epicœnehas a brilliantly simple
plot.Volponeand The Alchemistshare a simple base in the confidence tricks played
by two fraudsters on a series of greedy gulls. The deception-machine spins faster and
faster until the tricksters overreach themselves and the bubble bursts. Jonson makes
Marlowe’s theme of aspiration comic rather than tragic.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 137