BEN JONSON, LADY MARY WROTH
Campion is only nearly incomparable. Ben Jonson—another man described as “the first poet laureate”—compares with any poet of his age and the next. He’s the most versatile writer in the history of English poetry. He can almost out-Campion Campion and he fathers Robert Herrick’s lyrics and those of other “Sons of Ben,” Jonson’s followers, who climb near to Campion’s heights:
Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And I’ll not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
Doth ask a drink divine;
But might I of Jove’s Nectar sup,
I would not change for thine.
I sent thee late a rosy wreath,
Not so much honouring thee
As giving it a hope, that there
It could not withered be.
But thou thereon did’st only breathe,
And sent’st it back to me;
Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,
Not of itself, but thee.
He can set himself on a par with the satirists of the generations that followed his own, with a greater fluidity in his use of the couplet:
At court I met it, in clothes brave enough,
To be a courtier; and looks grave enough,
To seem a statesman: as I near it came,
It made me a great face, I asked its name,
A lord, it cried, buried in flesh and blood,
And such from whom let no man hope least good,
For I will do none: and as little ill,
For I will dare none. Good Lord, walk dead still.
Or he writes “On English Monsieur”:
Would you believe, when you this Monsieur see,
That his whole body should speak French, not he?
That so much scarf of France, and hat, and feather,
And shoe, and tie, and garter should come hither,
And land on one, whose face durst never be
Toward the sea, farther than half-way tree?
That he, untravelled, should be French so much,
As French-men in his company should seem Dutch?
Or had his father, when he did him get,
The French disease, with which he labours yet?
Or hung some monsieur’s picture on the wall,
By which his dam conceived him, clothes and all?
The common elements in these poems and the epistles, elegies and plays are balance, construction and proportion (except in flattery). Even at his most intemperate, his art brings disparate elements into tight control. The fireworks hang suspended in the air, a promise, a pleasure even at their harshest.
And since our dainty age
Cannot endure reproof,
Make not thyself a Page,
To that strumpet the Stage,
But sing high and aloof
Safe from the wolf’s black jaw, and the dull
Ass’s hoof.
His epitaph in Westminster Abbey reads: “O rare Benn Johnson.” Cutting the stone, Aubrey tells us, cost 18d., paid by Jack Young, later Sir Jack. He also tells us that the living poet had a certain peculiarity of face: “Ben Jonson had one eie lower than t’other, and bigger, like Clun the Player; perhaps he begott Clun.” If there is dirt to be dished, and even if there isn’t, we can trust Aubrey to dish it.
Jonson suffers one irremediable disability: Shakespeare. Alexander Pope underlines the point in his Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1725): “It is ever the nature of parties to be in extremes; and nothing is so probable, as that because Ben Jonson had much the more learning, it was said on the other hand that Shakespeare had none at all; and because Shakespeare had much the most wit and fancy, it was retorted on the other, that Jonson wanted both. Because Shakespeare borrowed nothing, it was said that Ben Jonson borrowed everything.” In the plays the proximity of Shakespeare does Jonson most harm, though he writes plays so different from his friend’s that they seem distinct in kind and period. Part of that difference is Jonson’s poetic balance, deliberate artistry: he knows what he wants to say and has the means of saying it, no more or less. He reaches a conclusion and stops: no discovery leads him beyond his destination. He speaks for his age, while Shakespeare speaks for himself. Jonson’s art is normative, Shakespeare’s radical and exploratory. In Jonson there’s structure and gauged variegation, in Shakespeare movement and warmth. Coleridge disliked the “rankness” of Jonson’s realism and found no “goodness of heart.” He condemned the “absurd rant and ventriloquism” in the tragedy Sejanus, staged by Shakespeare’s company at the Globe. At times Jonson’s words, unlike Shakespeare’s, tend to separate out and stand single, rather than coalesce, as though he had attended to each individual word. His mind is busy near the surface. He is thirsty at the lip, not in the throat.
It’s true, but it is not the whole truth. Jonson’s attitude to the very sound of language can seem casual. Except in songs from the plays (“Queen, and huntress, chaste and fair,” for instance) and a few lyrics, words are chosen first for their sense and accent, second for their sound value: meaning is what Jonson is about—not nuance but sense. So there are clumps of consonants and a sometimes indiscriminate collocation of vowels. Swinburne called him “one of the singers who could not sing.” Dryden pilloried him as “not only a professed imitator of Horace, but a learned plagiary of all others; you track him everywhere in their snow.” It is the kind of poetry Jonson writes that irritates his critics: they disapprove of what he’s doing. When he isn’t singing, he speaks, an art Swinburne never learned. If his poetry is “of the surface,” he has made his surfaces with a special kind of care, and to effect. If he borrowed from classical literature, he was no different from his contemporaries, except that he had a deeper knowledge of what he was quarrying than many did (and did not always acknowledge the debt—though this was not yet the custom). He translated Horace’s Ars Poetica. Many poems borrow lines, but he integrates them into his verse. He is of a stature with Martial and Juvenal: collaboration, not plagiarism, is the term for what he does. Eliot concedes that Jonson and Chapman “incorporated their erudition into their sensibility.” So, too, did Eliot.
Dryden’s criticism is telling at one point: Jonson “weaved” the language “too closely and laboriously” and he “did a little too much Romanise our tongue, leaving the words he translated almost as much Latin as he found them.” Dryden ends with the inevitable verdict: “I admire him, but I love Shakespeare.” Yet Jonson, not Shakespeare, paves the way to Dryden and Pope.
Shakespeare—who, as Pope insists, “lived on amicable terms” with Jonson, and “was introduced upon the stage,” and encouraged by him—does not overshadow Jonson’s nondramatic verse. It stands as a model to two subsequent generations of writers and includes poems so distinctively his own in kind that we could confuse them with the work of no one else. Most notable among these are the “country house” poems, elegies and epigrams.
In classical times an “epigram” was the inscription on a tombstone, usually in elegiac verse. But like the term “elegy,” “epigram” outgrew its original sense. For Jonson it named the short and not so short occasional poem with a single mood or idea: satirical, amatory, dedicatory or elegiac. He and the “sons of Ben” developed it to high perfection. His long poems tend to “epigram” in the newer sense of “pithy brief statement”: couplets and other passages detach themselves and catch like burrs in the mind.
If not a consistent master of mere “music” in verse, Jonson is a master of stress. His poems are regular, with the authority of speech, even in his most intricate forms, an intricacy at times of alternation between a constant and a variable line length, as in “Her Triumph”:
Have you seen but a bright Lily grow,
Before rude hands have touched it?
Have you marked but the fall o’ the snow,
Before the soil hath smutched it?
Have you felt the wool o’ the beaver?
Or swan’s down ever?
Or have smelt o’ the bud o’ briar?
Or the nard i’ the fire?
Or have tasted the bag o’ the bee?
O so white! O so soft! O so sweet is she!
These lines spoke to Ezra Pound: the more we read Jonson the more we see him as an enabling figure comparable to Pound. Clarity of expression is matched by intellectual and perceptual rigor. His aesthetic is expressed in an aphorism: “Language most shows a man. Speak that I may see thee.” In the poems we hear and see the man. He addresses a variety of subjects with equal variety of feeling. He doesn’t save poetry for moments of crisis or climax. It is a natural language that answers any occasion. Edmund Bolton, writing in his Hypercritica in 1722, comments, “I never tasted English more to my liking, nor more smart, and put to the height of use in poetry, than in the vital, judicious, and most practicable language of Benjamin Jonson’s poems.” Smart, vital, judicious, practicable. Jonson wrote with feeling, tempered thought and wit, a language close to speech: comprehensive, colloquial.
His ability to catch the tone of each situation, class and calling was due in part to his background. He was born in London in 1572, probably a month after his father’s death. His mother married again, a bricklayer, and he spent his boyhood working with his stepfather, Aubrey tells us, “particularly on the Garden-wall of Lincoln’s Inne next to Chancery Lane,” where a passing nobleman, hearing him reciting Greek as he worked and discovering his wit, had him given an exhibition (minor scholarship) to Trinity College, Cambridge. This pretty story may be untrue; but we know he was educated at Westminster School under William Camden (“Camden, most reverend head, to whom I owe / All that I am in arts, all that I know”). Like Marlowe and Shakespeare, he was the new kind of writer, from the new classes. In 1588 he left school and began bricklaying, a fact that later enemies used against him. After military service in Flanders, he married in 1594. Two children were born; both died and were lamented in elegies: “Here lies to each her parents ruth” and the harrowing, resigned “On my First Son,” Benjamin:
Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy,
Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O, could I lose all father, now. For why
Will man lament the state he should envy?
To have so soon ’scaped world’s, and flesh’s rage,
And, if no other misery, yet age?
Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.
For whose sake, henceforth, all his vows be such,
As what he loves may never like too much.
In 1597 he was acting and writing for the Admiral’s Company of Players. His first work for the stage may have been additional scenes for Thomas Kyd’s A Spanish Tragedy. In that year he was imprisoned for his part in The Isle of Dogs, a seditious play of which he was probably part author. During his spell in prison he became a Roman Catholic, a faith he held for twelve years. In 1598 he killed a fellow actor with a rapier and narrowly escaped hanging. (Aubrey reports with wild implausibility that he killed Marlowe, “the Poet, on Bunhill, coming from the Green-curtain play-house”—“a kind of Nursery or obscure Play-house”). He was branded on the thumb. Every Man In His Humour, in which Shakespeare played a part, was staged at the Globe in 1598. Jonson made progress as a playwright and was soon established as a leading tragic and comic dramatist. He was a heavy drinker: “Canarie was his beloved liquor,” Aubrey assures us. He would carouse, go home to bed, and after a good sweat get up to study. “I have seen his studyeing chaire, which was of strawe, such as olde woemen used.”
In 1612–13 he completed the first book of Epigrams. The next year he traveled abroad with Ralegh’s son and wrote a fine commendatory poem for Ralegh’s History. In 1616, the year of Shakespeare’s death, Jonson’s “first folio” was published—the only first folio to be seen through the press by its author. It was a crucial book, its success paving the way for Shakespeare’s First Folio seven years later, in which Jonson had a financial stake and for which he composed his famous elegy “To the Memory of my Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare: and what he hath left us,” one of the most eloquent blurbs ever written.
After 1616 begin what Dryden calls Jonson’s “dotages,” a string of unsuccessful plays. But Jonson was far from doddery. He made his legendary journey on foot to Scotland to visit William Drummond of Hawthornden, with whom he stayed for three weeks until Drummond’s wine cellar was drunk dry. Drummond gave an account of his conversations with Jonson and, since he as a poeta doctus was vain of his achievements, took pleasure in commenting on Jonson’s ignorance. In effect, he says that Jonson had little French and less Italian. Certainly Jonson was not in the contemporary European swim. He took his bearings from the classics.
In later years he may have been a deputy professor of rhetoric at Gresham College, London. Such an appointment would explain the pedagogic relations he has with the Sons of Ben. He earned respect as a technical master, as Pound was to do. He was venerated by younger poets, those who knew him and those who knew only his work, notably Herrick, Carew, Lovelace and Suckling: the Cavaliers. Jonson was the poet to emulate: he serves the language, he does not inscribe it with his “own character” or weave it in accordance with personal myth. The most classical of poets, he nourished himself on the classics and imparted classical virtues. His “school,” “tribe” and Sons affirm something as salutary as it is strange to our age, when poets are required to have “a voice.” He and his followers were masters, with meanings to convey. In their art there is an element little valued now: self-effacement before the rigors of form and the challenge of subject. They don’t lack “subjectivity,” yet what interests us is not subjectivity, eccentricity or individuality, but their centeredness, a sense of sanctioned authority, the legitimacy of the classics. Rejecting the false, fatuous excesses of the stage in its decline, Jonson says in “Ode to Himself”:
Leave things so prostitute,
And take the Alcaic lute;
Or thine own Horace, or Anacreon’s lyre;
Warm thee by Pindar’s fire:
And though thy nerves be shrunk, and blood be cold,
Ere years have made thee old,
Strike that disdainful heat
Throughout, to their defeat:
As curious fools, and envious of thy strain,
May blushing swear, no palsy’s in thy brain.
The poem ends conventionally flattering the king, but before that (how reluctant we are to accept praise of kings, while we admire the cult of Elizabeth) he ventures successfully as near to the complexity and purity on Pindarics as any English poet has done. He received an MA from Christ Church, Oxford, in 1619.
He works like Campion in the ephemeral mode of masques and draws images from masque conventions, for instance in the elegies that end in staged apotheoses. He collaborated with the architect and designer Inigo Jones, but as Jones grew more self-important, they fell out. Jonson resented the superior success of friends and juniors, and they rounded on him. Jones certainly did, and Jonson’s satires on his onetime friend are brutal and distasteful. His later years, in which he suffered from palsy and paralysis, were especially bitter. He was neglected by King Charles upon his accession (James paid him attention). Six petitions of debt were filed against him. Charles eventually realized his value and the poet found new aristocratic patronage: he did not die, as Chapman did, in want. He was buried in 1637 in Westminster Abbey, with Chaucer and Spenser his only peers in that poetic afterworld.
Two modern poets, Yvor Winters and Thom Gunn, insist that Jonson is the man from whom we learn most not only about his age, but about our art. Winters places Jonson at the heart of what he calls the “native tradition,” heard in the plain-spoken poems of Wyatt, Gascoigne, Greville and others. From Marlowe he learned that the best verse integrates images rather than using them decoratively. He could control rhetoric for complex tone. Expository rather than persuasive, he has, Winters says, a specific morality, and the poems apply it to a social world: relations between people and the people and God.
Gunn suggests that Jonson chose classical models to balance a personal tendency toward extremes—a credible reading, given what we know of Jonson’s life and what we sense in the controlled vehemence of the satires, as from the dark world of the comedies. Gunn senses a problem of “willed feeling,” which modern readers dislike, especially in poems of flattery that protest that they’re not flattering. Those to King James, King Charles and noblemen of various stations are fulsome and repetitive. “How, best of Kings, do’st thou a sceptre bear!” (the Earl of Rochester found a distinctly disrespectful way of depicting that scepter.) Jonson’s flattery only works when it’s indirect, as in “To Penshurst” and “To Sir Robert Wroth,” where he praises patrons by celebrating their estates and style of life. The sincere tributes to Camden, Shakespeare, Donne, Drayton and others are in a different league of seriousness.
All poetry, Gunn reminds us, is occasional, and a good poem remains true to its occasion, its subject. It can be the death of a prince or a boy actor (“Weep with me all ye that read”); it can be a moment of anger at social affectation; a thank-you letter or an impulse to translate a classical poem (“Drink to me only,” “Come, my Celia,” “Follow a shadow”). It can be a large-scale social indictment (“On the Famous Voyage”), the publication of a book, a sickness or a journey. It can be a weekend at a country house. Such poems are “works of a diverse nature,” united by a sensibility to some extent typical of the best of its age. The religious verse has its occasions, too: “A Hymn to God the Father” is utterly chaste and precise:
Who more can crave
Than thou hast done:
That gav’st a Son,
To free a slave?
First made of nought;
With all since bought.
Only in the love poetry does Jonson descend to the commonplace, but even there with a command that makes it readable. Aubrey reports: “ ’Twas an ingeniose remarque of my Lady Hoskins, that B. J. never writes of Love, or if he does, does it not naturally.” Best are the elegies in which an old man addresses a young mistress:
Alas, I have lost my heat, my blood, my prime,
Winter is come a quarter ere his time,
My health will leave me; and when you depart,
How shall I do sweet mistress, for my heart?
In the elegy “Let me be what I am” there is less resignation. We see one face of the speaker in such work. The poems that moralize give a certain solidity to their moral categories by their setting. They take off from a specific point. In “To John Donne” he writes:
In another poem, “He that departs with his own honesty / For vulgar praise, doth it too dearly buy.”
Jonson is a moral critic of literature and society. Even personal problems, the elegies for his children, the “Execration upon Vulcan” (after a fire destroyed his manuscripts and library), the “Ode to Himself,” have general point and reference; they don’t exist for themselves. Poetry is occasional and applied writing. Development in Jonson is moral, not formal; we follow from poem to poem a mind that sometimes runs deep. The work should be read in extenso, taking the Epigrams, The Forest, The Underwood and Miscellany whole, prose aphorisms along with verse. The best poems have a tone of just approval or censure, this justice a product of formal control, balance and conclusion, and equitable wisdom. It is important to remember that poetry feigns; the tone and texture can say one thing while the poet is keen for us to infer something else. “Rare poems ask rare friends,” “A good poet’s made, as well as born,” “In small proportions, we just beauties see; / And in short measures, life may perfect be.” Pithy rightness is his hallmark. He is our greatest epigrammatist.
“To Penshurst” and “To Sir Robert Wroth” are original in ways we have to remind ourselves how to appreciate. Notions of “landscape” took shape rather late. Among the first painted landscapes were Inigo Jones’s idealized scenarios for Jonson’s masques. “Such are the distinguished beginnings of the kind of painting in which Englishmen have excelled.” Such too were the beginnings of a literary tradition that takes pastoral convention into the actual countryside and finds in the harmony between nature and nurture a civilizing theme. The “country house” poems are occasional, responding to external events. “To Penshurst,” in pentameter couplets, “To Sir Robert Wroth,” in pentameter/tetrameter couplets, progress with tidy conclusiveness, each detail moralized and added to the tally, developing broader themes of order, proportion, natural hierarchy. “To Penshurst” is the finest “country house” poem, celebrating a place associated with Sir Philip Sidney. Jonson first praises its lack of affectation and deliberate grandeur, its healthy naturalness. In classical terms he evokes the park and generalizes its qualities by subtle use of the definite article and the possessive pronoun with collective and plural nouns, much in the manner that Pope was to perfect:
The lower land, that to the river bends,
Thy sheep, thy bullocks, kine, and calves do feed:
The middle grounds thy mares, and horses breed.
Each bank doth yield thee conies; and the tops,
Fertile of wood, Ashour, and Sidney’s copse,
To crown thy open table, doth provide
The purpled pheasant, with the speckled side:
The painted partridge lies in every field,
And, for thy mess, is willing to be killed.
This is more alive than Pope’s “Windsor Forest” because the kind of pastoral language is new. The past participles “painted” and “purpled” suggest the hand of nurture. The word “open” unostentatiously marks the host’s hospitality as much as nature’s. Jonson presents less an artificial than a cultivated and compliant landscape, a refiguring of Eden. It’s a distinction worth bearing in mind. It is Pope, in “Windsor Forest,” who artificializes. “To Penshurst” celebrates responsible hierarchy, natural proportion: praise justly and gratefully rendered, not flattery.
“To Sir Robert Wroth,” with its diminishing couplet, sounds a similar note of just praise. Sir Robert is the natural squire, hunter and farmer, with fields, livestock and fruit trees. The natural cycle is contained in the simple couplet: “The trees cut out in log; and those boughs made / A fire now, that lent a shade!” Jonson evokes a golden age, cultivating landscape with classical tools, avoiding pastoral idealization. “Strive, Wroth, to live long innocent,” he urges. Others can be soldiers, merchants, usurers profiting from their victims’ distress, or sycophantic courtiers. Wroth leads a life of service: he serves God, his country and his neighbors. And he earns the friendship, gratitude and service of one of the great poets of his age.
It’s worth remembering that, from Jonson, he also earned a degree of obloquy. Wroth’s wife was Lady Mary, Sidney’s grandniece (or granddaughter, if we credit Aubrey), a poet of merit “unworthily married to a jealous husband” (the words are Jonson’s, and Jonson, who did not like sonnets, liked hers) to whom she dedicated A Treatise on Madde Dogges. She wrote the first English sonnet sequence by a woman (“Pamphilia to Amphilanthus”) and built on her great-uncle’s prose romance one of her own, scandalously publishing it under her own name. Wroth died in 1614 leaving her with a baby and numerous debts, and she fell into a relationship with her cousin William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, bearing him two bastards. Jonson’s praise of her husband in his great poem, qualified by dispraise in his prose, underlines a paradox at the heart of his enterprise. He is a poet not quite in the court and thus not secure in patronage, though not yet wedded to Grub Street, its disciplines and treacheries. The world of such a man is unstable, and part of Jonson’s greatness is to have survived in it and to have made it survive in his verse.
Jonson makes us guests at great houses and lets us hear the age’s mannerly speech and savor its hospitality. We hear his songs, too; and we meet, through his eyes, friends and foes as real as any in poetry. He was among the first great poets to take an active interest in publishing, to seek fortune and solace from the printing of his own work in book form. He is the grandfather, or godfather, of Grub Street.