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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

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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

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ment is known afterwards to have been, it seems likely that the foundation of it was entirely laid in Westminster School. Even if we admit the authority of Aubrey and Fuller, for supposing that, after leaving school, he went to Cambridge, we seem bound, by the tenor of his own statements to Drummond of Hawthornden, to suppose that his stay at the University was but short. He was taken from his studies, as he told Drummond, to be put to a trade. The trade chosen was naturally that of his step-father; and he must have worked at it for some time, for the name of "bricklayer" stuck to him. According to Fuller, "he helped in the building of the new structure of Lincoln's Inn, when, having a trowel in one hand, he had a book in his pocket." At last, rather than wear the bricklayer's apron longer, he enlisted, and went to serve with the Queen's army in Flanders. He served, at least, one campaign, and in such a way as to have some personal feats of courage to boast of. It was probably about 1593, when he was nineteen or twenty years of age, that he returned to England. He seems to have had but two alternatives after doing so-bricklaying again, or literature. He chose the latter; and, taking up his abode with his mother, now again a widow by the death of his step-father, he began his forty-four years' life as a literary man about town.

To be a literary man about town then meant but one thing-to have a connection with the theatres either solely as a playwriter, or, better still, as both play-writer and actor. To meet the demand for amusement among a population hardly amounting to 200,000 persons, there were already several regular or established theatres, such as the Blackfriars, the Rose in Bankside, and the theatre in Holywell Lane, Shoreditch; besides many other minor theatres, or rather rooms for scenic representation, scattered through the town, in inns and the like, and supported by the classes who now attend our modern singing and dancing saloons. The frequency with which new plays were produced at these theatres seems also to have far exceeded any thing now known. On an average, the audiences at each of the greater theatres required a new play every eighteen days. To cater for this appetite on the part of the public, the managers and proprietors of theatres were obliged to keep continually about them a retinue

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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 class with a precarious means of livelihood. Translation, as Gifford remarks, was one great resource; and, trusting to the taste for reading, then beginning to be considerable, young men from the colleges, who had come to London as adventurers, set themselves, with extraordinary assiduity, to the translation of romances and poems out of the Italian and Spanish. From translation to imitation, or adaptation, was an easy step. Very soon the press began to pour forth tales and poems liberally varied from the Italian and Spanish originals. But the rise of the stage, and the elevation of the business connected with it, into a flourishing profession, opened up a new prospect to these struggling sons of literature. The press, by means of which one could only hope to reach scattered readers at their own firesides, offered no such attractions and no such emoluments as the theatres, which gathered all sorts of persons together, night after night, and submitted them, amid the excited conditions of glare, orgy,

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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 lower places of the dramatic world; while the higher places, in more immediate con nection with the chief theatres, were occupied 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

The poor bricklayer seems to have hung for some time on the skirts of this world, wistfully looking into it, rather than admitted to a share of its prizes. The prudent 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 But this was a height of make it answer. 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:

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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

was visited there by a Catholic priest, from whom, as he told Drummond, "he took his religion on trust." He kept to it twelve years, and then publicly and emphatically renounced it, and reëntered the Church of England. Such alternations, it is to be remarked, were not then unusual with Englishmen of more grave and serene natures that Jonson.

It is from the period of Jonson's release from prison that his acknowledged literary reputation begins. Very probably there was a considerable increase of interest-kindly on the part of some, and bitterly hostile on the part of others-in the fortunes of the rough ex-bricklayer who had killed Gabriel Spenser, and so narrowly escaped the consequences. To avail himself of this interest, such as it was, he had a play ready in which he really showed what powers lay under his roughness. Whether by Shakspeare's interest or not, Every Man in his Humor was produced, in the shape in which we now have it, in the year 1598, at the Globe theatre in Bankside, with all the strength of the company, Shakspeare himself included, to give it success. From that time Ben took his place among the dramatists. There was certainly enough in the play both to excite admiration and to give offence. No one could deny that there was stuff in the author of such a piece, that there was genuine humor and dramatic talent in him, and that, after all, call him bricklayer as people pleased, there was enough of learning in him to recall the fact that he had been Camden's scholar, and far more than many could pretend to who had never carried the hod. Shakspeare, for example, must have recognized the sturdy young fellow of twenty-five who had written such a piece as worthy of the grasp of companionship. On the other hand, however, there was a certain arrogance of tone and manner about the play, a certain air of self-assertion and dogmatism which, if it only interested and amused Shakspeare, could not but rouse the Deckers, and Marstons, and Chettles, and set them against the author. The author as good as announced himself as the only man who had a genuine notion of true comedy-the comedy of actual life, after the manner of Plautus and Terence, instead of the comedy of romance and phantasy practised by Shakspeare and others. And, if the impression thus produced was

not likely to be diminished by Ben's personal intercourse with his brother dramatists, it was certainly not likely to be effaced by his two next plays-Every Man out of his Humor, acted at the Globe in 1599; and Cynthia's Revels, acted before the Court by the children of the Royal Chapel in 1600. In both of these "Comical Satires," as they were called, not only was the new style of comedy continued, but the author's ideas of poetry and the drama were asserted, and, as it were, paraded in a way to provoke criticism and controversy on the part of his contemporaries. Thus, in Every Man out of his Humor, the plan is adopted of introducing a play within a play, as in the Duke of Buckingham's "Rehearsal" and Sheridan's "Critic," in after times. Three characters, called respectively Asper, or "the Rough;" Cordatus, or "the well-affected ;" and Mitis, or "the Complaisant," are first introduced-Asper, as the author of the play, and Cordatus and Mitis as friends of his; and these three personages are made first to discuss the intention of the real or inner play at some length, and then to sit as spectators of it while it is being acted, and to interpret it scene by scene, and pass running comments upon it. There is no doubt that in Asper the poet meant to typify himself; and the following passage, in which he and his friends Cordatus and Mitis exchange their ideas as to the nature of true dramatic writing, before the acting of the play begins, may, therefore, be quoted, as indicating the spirit in which Ben Jonson at this time came before the critics and the public. Asper, it may be premised, is thus described in the preliminary account of the Dramatis Persona: "He is of an ingenious and free spirit, eager and constant in reproof, without fear controlling the world's abuses-one whom no servile hope of gain, or frosty apprehension of danger, can make to be a parasite, either to time, place, or opinion." This nonpareil of a dramatist, and his two remonstrating friends, rush on the stage together as the horn blows for the performance to begin, and the following dialogue ensues:

"Cordatus.-Nay, my dear Asper.
Mitis.-Stay your mind.
"Asper.-Away!

Who is so patient of this impious world,
That he can check his spirit, or rein his tongue?
Or who hath such a dead, unfeeling sense

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