WE intend to throw together a few particulars relative to his life, which may be interesting to those whose leisure does not permit such retrospective studies, and to convey incidentally such a view of his character as those who are familiar with his works may compare with that which they have themselves formed. Born in 1573, Jonson was the junior of Shakspeare by nine years. By birth he may be said to have been a Londoner; for Westminster, within whose precincts he first saw the light, was already linked to the city by the fast-filling Strand. He had Scotch blood in him, however, for his grandfather was a Johnstone of Annandale, who had come into England in the reign of Henry VIII. This Johnstone's son, Anglicized into a Jonson, had had misfortunes under Mary, and had become a minister of the English Reformed Church. He died a month before his son Benjamin was born; and his widow, two years afterwards, married a master-bricklayer, named Fowler. Ben's earliest recollec tions, therefore, were those of the step-son of a bricklayer, living in a lane near Charing-Cross. There seems no reason to doubt that his step-father and mother did him all the justice they could, though in a poor way. They sent him to an ordinary school in the parish of St. Martin's-in-theFields, within which they resided; and, when he was older, some friend, who probably knew his father, got him admitted to Westminster School, of which the great Camden was then one of the masters. If it was not Camden himself who got him admitted to the school, he at least found a friend in this great scholar, to whom, in subsequent years, when both were better known, he was never tired of showing his attachment. "Camden! most reverend head, to whom I owe All that I am in arts, all that I know." These words, in one of his epigrams, are not a mere compliment. Schoolmasters were schoolmasters in those days; Camden was a king among schoolmasters, a training under whom was, probably, so far as classical instruction went, a pretty efficient education in itself; and vast as Jonson's learning in the classical depart 28 434 BEN JONSON. ment is known afterwards to have been, it of writers capable of producing new plays as fast as they were wanted. As the sole end in view was to get ready such pieces as would please when acted, (the subsequent publication of the play being but rarely thought of,) it was comparatively. indifferent to both authors and managers whence the materials were obtained, and whether they were borrowed or original. To furbish up a new play out of old ones which had served their day, or to bring out at a short notice a new play on a subject already made popular at another theatre, was often all that was required. Hence it was not uncommon for proprietors to arrange that two or three, or even five or six, of "their authors" should all set to work at once on a projected play, so as to get it done in time. Here, then, was a field for literary talent, fulfilling very much the same purpose for the London of that day that newspaper and periodical writing fulfils for the London of this. Nor were there wanting men to occupy it. Ever since the disarrangement of ranks in English society caused by the Reformation, a literary class had been forming itself under difficulties out of the stray men of education and ability who were then floated loose from the older and somewhat crippled professions; and this class had a natural tendency to centralize itself in London. For a time the press had furnished the members of the new To be a literary man about town then class with a precarious means of livelihood. meant but one thing to have a connection Translation, as Gifford remarks, was one with the theatres either solely as a play- great resource; and, trusting to the taste writer, or, better still, as both play-writer for reading, then beginning to be considerand actor. To meet the demand for able, young men from the colleges, who amusement among a population hardly had come to London as adventurers, set amounting to 200,000 persons, there were themselves, with extraordinary assiduity, already several regular or established to the translation of romances and poems theatres, such as the Blackfriars, the Rose out of the Italian and Spanish. From in Bankside, and the theatre in Holywell translation to imitation, or adaptation, Lane, Shoreditch; besides many other was an easy step. Very soon the press minor theatres, or rather rooms for scenic began to pour forth tales and poems liberrepresentation, scattered through the ally varied from the Italian and Spanish town, in inns and the like, and supported originals. But the rise of the stage, and by the classes who now attend our modern the elevation of the business connected singing and dancing saloons. The fre- with it, into a flourishing profession, quency with which new plays were pro- opened up a new prospect to these strugduced at these theatres seems also to have gling sons of literature. The press, by On means of which one could only hope to far exceeded any thing now known. an average, the audiences at each of the reach scattered readers at their own firegreater theatres required a new play every sides, offered no such attractions and no eighteen days. To cater for this appetite such emoluments as the theatres, which on the part of the public, the managers gathered all sorts of persons together, and proprietors of theatres were obliged night after night, and submitted them, to keep continually about them a retinue amid the excited conditions of glare, orgy, and scenic effect, to the direct influence | one of its duties, and organized companies of the author's words and fancies. Ac- of players under its own inspection; and cordingly, as by a kind of common im- thus was formed that little busy world of pulse, a number of university men threw actors, dramatic authors, theatre propriethemselves, about or somewhat before the tors, author-actors, and actor-proprietors, year 1580, into the service of the stage, which whirled in the middle of London bent on rescuing it from the coarse and society during the last ten or fifteen years untaught buffooneries of the hostlers, tap- of the reign of Elizabeth, drawing almost sters, discharged servants, and others, who all the literary talent, and much of the had till then had it all to themselves. riot and recklessness of the time, into its These rude earlier practitioners of the vortex. drama were, at all events, driven to the The poor bricklayer seems to have hung lower places of the dramatic world; while for some time on the skirts of this world, the higher places, in more immediate con wistfully looking into it, rather than adnection with the chief theatres, were occu-mitted to a share of its prizes. The prupied by such speculating managers and men of business as Henslowe, and James Burbage, who had gradually taken to this mode of investing their money, and by such scholarly writers as Kyd, Lodge, Greene, Lyly, Peele, Nash, Chettle, Munday, and Marlowe, in association with them. These founders of the regular English drama were, almost without exception, young men who had had a university education, and who, while writing for the stage, continued to write poems and other literary pieces of a non-dramatic character. Very soon, however, there were others, not exactly college-bred men, but men with the literary faculty and the spirit of social adventure strong in them, who, either led by magnetic attraction, or driven by the force of circumstances, attached themselves to this metropolitan group of authors, actors, and managers. Such a man was Shakspeare, the son of the ex-alderman of Stratford-on-Avon, who came up to town in 1585 or 1586, at the age of twenty-two or thereby, to push his fortune. Such a man also, a little later, as we have seen, in point of time, was our soldier-bricklayer, Ben Jonson, just returned from Flanders. Later or contemporary adherents to the same increasing cluster-some from the unlearned, but more from the learned class, and some also from among those seniors of Shakspeare and Jonson, who had hitherto kept aloof from the stage, and been known only as general poets, writers, and translatorswere Chapman, Drayton, Daniel, Webster, Middleton, Decker, Wilson, Marston, Hathway, Tailor, Tourneur, and Heywood. New actors, also, with the Burbages and Kemps at their head, sprang up to perform the plays so prolifically produced; new theatres were built; the Court made the patronage of the stage dent Shakspeare, confining himself to one theatre and one company, was already a conspicuous man, attacked by the envy of some on account of his rapid and astonishing success as a play-writer, but on the whole a favorite with his fellows, and growing rich on his triple profits as author, actor, and shareholder. Even others who had nothing but their authorship to trust to, and who, instead of writing uniformly for one theatre as Shakespeare did, wrote for any theatre that would accept their plays, were in the receipt of earnings which Jonson might envy. After 1592, £5 for a play (equivalent to about £25 now) seems to have been about the average sum paid by such managers as Henslowe to authors of good reputation; but the standard of price was gradually rising, and before the close of Elizabeth's reign, as much as £10 or £12 was given by Henslowe for a single play. Small remuneration as, even after allowing for the difference of value, this would now be considered, busy writers, otherwise connected with the theatres, contrived to make it answer. But this was a height of fortune to which Jonson had to work his way. Through what obscure toils as a hack-author and would-be actor, connected with some of the minor London playhouses, or even with strolling companies, he did work his way to it, must remain matter for conjecture. Our first distinct recognition of his whereabouts, after his betaking himself to the stage, is in 1596-8. by which time he had so far succeeded as to be in connection with Henslowe, then the potentate among theatrical managers, and the employer of full one half of the dramatic authors of London. Henslowe's principal theatre was the Rose in Bankside; but he may also have had an interest in a small theatre called the Curtain, situated in Holywell Lane, Shoreditch, to give him eminence among his conclose to that other and larger one already temporaries, or secure his future fame. mentioned as situated in the same locality, Nothing, at least, of what he wrote for and which was called, by way of distinc- Henslowe, or others, before this time, surtion and superiority, "The Theatre." It vives among his printed works. is as a member of the company performing at the Curtain, at all events, that Jonson is first heard of. In the interval during which we lose sight of him, he had become a married man and a father; and as he seems from the first to have had very little chance of making any but the stiffest figure as an actor, he was now probably doing his best to shuffle off the actor altogether, and get into such relations with Henslowe as would enable him to support his family by writing alone. The following entries in Henslowe's Diary give us some traces of him at this time: There was, indeed, a too near possibility that Jonson's career might be altogether brought to a close at this time, and that in a manner the most disagreeable in the world. Never a man of very orderly temper or habits, he had got into a quarrel with a fellow-player of Henslowe's company, named Gabriel Spenser; and in September, 1598, he and Spenser fought a duel with swords in Hoxton Fields. Spenser, who was the challenger, was killed on the spot. Jonson received a wound in the arm, and was arrested and imprisoned on a charge of murder. The case excited no little interest in the playing world; not a few seem to have taken the part of the slain man; and, as Jonson afterwards told Drummond, he was "almost at the gallows" for his exploit. It is not every man of letters that has his career marked by so close an approach to the very utmost fate that the world can award to one of its members; and Jonson seems fully to have appreciated the distinction which the incident conferred on him. Even now it may help us to a more correct estimate of Ben's nature, if we generalize the incident, and remember him as a man who, while he had that in him on the one hand which could bring him into fellowship with the greatest and strongest minds known in England, and could even make him a magnate among them, had, on the other hand, some of those other qualities in him which, in a society constructed according to law and precedent, are apt, if at all in excess, to bring their possessor into acquaintance with the hangman. Nay, probably we are wrong in saying "other qualities;" for who can tell what potency those very qualities which might hang a man, may, if baulked of that issue in the case of a man of letters, and driven in These extracts clearly show that, whether acting at the Curtain or at the Rose, Jonson had, by the year 1597, worked his way up so far as to be one of Henslowe's writers for the stage, standing to him in the same relation as Drayton, Decker, Munday, Marston, Chettle, and many more-that is, receiving payments from him for work already done, or, more frequently, loans on the faith of work still in progress. It has been supposed by Malone, Gifford, and others, that a piece mentioned in Henslowe's Diary, under the name of "The Umers," (i.e., "The Humors,") as having been produced at the Rose on the 11th of May, 1597, and acted a good many times in that and the follow-upon his general activity, impart to his ing months, was no other than the original draft by Jonson of his Every Man in his Humor, produced afterwards by Shakspeare's company at the Globe, as a new play. This is possible, but it is by no means likely; and on the whole, in spite of Gifford, we are obliged to conclude that whatever Jonson did for the London stage prior to his twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth year, was not of so much consequence as genius? An "almost hanged man of genius," whether we regard the constitutional unruliness which brought him into that predicament, or the probable effects of the predicament itself, must needs be a formidable person in a community. One effect of the predicament itself in Ben Jonson's case was to make him turn Catholic. Very loose in matters of religious faith when he went into prison, he |