Ben Jonson Biography

One of the most colorful personalities and the leading man of letters of his age, Benjamin Jonson left a vigorous impression on his time. Jonson was born in or around London on June 11, 1573. His father, a minister, died a month before Ben was born, and his widowed mother married a bricklayer. By 1580 Jonson was studying with William Camden, one of the finest scholars of his day, at Westminster School. From Camden, Jonson drew his delight and his competence in classical languages and literatures, and learned much of his own country’s history and literature. The Westminster boys also did three plays a year in English and Latin, experiences that constituted Jonson’s apprenticeship for the stage.

After leaving school, probably in 1588, Jonson was a bricklayer, a soldier, and a traveling actor. He married Anne Lewis on November 14, 1594. Of the couple’s four or more children, a six-month-old daughter and a seven-year-old son met untimely deaths. The brief poems written by the grieving father show a tenderness not common to the rugged, often rough-tongued, dramatist. During his acting career he performed as Hieronimo in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (pr. c. 1585-1589) and later sold additions to Jeronymo (obviously The Spanish Tragedy) to Philip Henslowe, the manager of the Admiral’s Men. Little is known about his career as a soldier except that he served on the Continent and challenged an enemy soldier to a one-on-one fight and killed him.

In 1597 Jonson and two other actors were imprisoned for their part in The Isle of Dogs, chiefly written by Thomas Nashe, a satiric play that was denounced as seditious. One of the actors was Gabriel Spencer, whom Jonson killed in a duel the next year. Spencer’s death led to Jonson’s second recorded brush with the law, but he successfully pleaded benefit of clergy.

This fortunate escape helped make 1598 a memorable year for Jonson. In that year Francis Meres recorded him as one of “our best for Tragedie,” and the theatrical company of Richard Burbage and William Shakespeare produced his Every Man in His Humour, Jonson’s first resounding success, a realistic comedy that marked his future path. This company (the Lord Chamberlain’s, later the King’s Men) produced nine of Jonson’s plays. Unlike Shakespeare, Jonson did not write almost exclusively for one company.

Between 1599 and 1603 Jonson took part in the War of the Theatres, in which dramatists attacked one another through their plays. Jonson’s Poetaster (pr. 1601) and Thomas Dekker’s Satiromastix (pr. 1601) were the main battles in this bloodless conflict. Except for the disgruntled Jonson, who temporarily turned his back on comedy as a result of the war, the participants apparently did not take it too seriously. As a stimulant to theatrical attendance the feud may have been more commercial than emotional.

In 1603 Sejanus His Fall, one of Jonson’s two surviving tragedies, was performed with Shakespeare and Burbage among the principal tragedians, but it was a failure, probably because of a dearth of action and the great number of similar characters. In the same year began Jonson’s long career as writer of court masques, which led to his position as poet laureate in fact if not in name. Except for his third imprisonment (probably in 1605 for his part in Eastward Ho!), Jonson enjoyed a decade of triumphs as his prestige grew in the theater, at court, and in literary circles.

His comedy Volpone: Or, The Fox premiered in 1605 and was a great triumph. The least realistic of the plays, it marks an advance for him as a comic dramatist: Instead of sporting with folly, he castigates vice, and rather than mocking eccentricity, he exposes deceit and greed. Only the subplot retains unaltered the elements of “comedy of humours.” Epicne: Or, The Silent Woman , his next comedy, is set in London and focuses on a young man’s efforts to get his eccentric uncle to name him heir. Subplots introduce licentious women, gulled men, and foolish...