Ben 1573-1637 Jonson

Before the year 1598 was out, however, Jonson found himself in prison and in danger of the gallows. In a duel, fought on Sept. 22, in Hogsden Fields, he had killed an actor of Henslowe's company named Gabriel Spenser. It seems clear that he acted in self-defence, and the attack may have had something to do with Jonson's work for a rival company. In prison Jonson was visited by a Roman Catholic priest, and the result (certainly strange, if Jonson's parentage is considered) was his conversion to the Church of Rome, to which he adhered for 12 years. He pleaded guilty to the charge of manslaughter brought against him, as the rolls of Middlesex sessions show; but, after a short imprison ment, he was released by benefit of clergy, forfeiting his "goods and chattels," and being branded on his left thumb.

The affair did not affect his reputation; in 1599, Henslowe, who had commercial sense, had made up the quarrel, and Jonson re ceived (Sept. 27), together with Dekker, Chettle and "another gentleman," earnest-money for a tragedy (undiscovered) called Robert II., King of Scots. He had a share in other ephemeral pieces of the period. In 1599 he brought out through the lord chamberlain's company at the Globe the elaborate comedy of Every Man out of his Humour (quarto 160o; fol. 1616)—a play subsequently presented before Queen Elizabeth. In this play he opened battle, though not yet overtly, on contemporary writers. Cynthia's Revels, performed by the chapel children in 1600 and printed with the first title of The Fountain of Self-Love in 1601, though it was no doubt primarily designed as a compliment to the queen, contained attacks on his old friends and associates Dekker and Marston. According to Jonson, his quarrel with Marston had begun by the latter attacking his morals, and in the course of it they came to blows, and might have come to worse. In Cynthia's Revels, Dekker is generally held to be satirized as Hedon, and Marston as Anaides (Fleay, however, thinks Anaides is Dekker, and Hedon Daniel), while the character of Crites was assumed, perhaps unjustly, by Dekker to refer to Jonson himself. Learning the intention of the two writers whom he had satirized, or at all events of Dekker, to wreak literary vengeance upon him, he anticipated them in The Poetaster (r6or), again played by the children of the queen's chapel at the Blackfriars and printed in 1602; Marston and Dekker are here ridiculed respectively as the aristocratic Crispinus and the vulgar Democritus. The play was completed 15 weeks after its plot was first conceived. Fleay's supposition that the "purge," said in the Return from Parnassus (Pt. II. act iv. sc. iii.) to have been administered by Shakespeare to Jonson in return for Horace's "pill to the poets" in this piece, consisted of Troilus and Cressida is supremely ingenious, but cannot be examined here. Dekker retaliated on The Poetaster by the Satiromastix, or The Untrussing of the Humorous Poet (1602). Some more last words were indeed attempted on Jonson's part, but in the Apologetic Dialogue added to The Poetaster in the edition of 1616, though excluded from that of 1602, he says he intends to turn his attention to tragedy.

Tragedies and Masques.

This intention he apparently car ried out at once, for in 1602 he received o from Henslowe for a play, entitled Richard Crookbacke, now lost—unfortunately so, for purposes of comparison in particular, even if it was only, as Fleay conjectures, "an alteration of Marlowe's play." According to a statement by Overbury, early in 1603, "Ben Jon son, the poet, now lives upon one Townesend," supposed to have been the poet and masque-writer Aurelian Townshend, at one time steward to the 1st earl of Salisbury, "and scornes the world." To his other early patron, Lord Albany, Jonson dedicated the first of his two extant tragedies, Sejanus, produced by the king's servants at the Globe late in 1603, Shakespeare once more taking a part in the performance. Either on its performance or on its appearing in print in 1605, Jonson was called before the privy council by the Earl of Northampton. But it is open to question whether this was the occasion on which, according t ) Jonson's statement to Drummond, Northampton "accused him both of popery and treason." When the reign of James I. opened in England, Jonson's genius, which, far from being "ponderous" in its operations, was sin gularly swift and flexible in adapting itself to the demands made upon it, met the new taste for masques and entertainments— new of course in degree rather than in kind—introduced with the new reign and fostered by both the king and his consort. The pageant which on May 7, 1603, bade the king welcome to Lon don was partly of Jonson's, partly of Dekker's, devising, and he was able to deepen and diversify the impression by the composi tion of masques presented to James I. when entertained at houses of the nobility. The Satyr (June 25, 1603) was produced on one of these occasions, Queen Anne's sojourn at Althorpe, the seat of Sir Robert Spencer, afterwards Lord Althorpe, who seems to have previously bestowed some patronage upon him. The Penates followed on May-day 1604 at the house of Sir William Cornwallis at Highgate. The queen herself with her ladies danced in Jonson's Masque of Blackness at Whitehall on Jan. 6, 1605. He was soon occasionally employed by the court itself—already in 1606 in conjunction with Inigo Jones, as responsible for the "painting and carpentry"—and thus speedily showed himself master in a species of composition for which, more than any other English poet before Milton, he secured an enduring place in the national poetic literature. Incidentally, joint employment in The King's Entertainment (1604) had reconciled him with Dekker; and with Marston also, who in 1604 dedicated to him his Malcontent, he was again on pleasant terms. When, therefore, in 1604-05 Marston and Chapman (who, Jonson told Drummond, was loved of him), produced the excellent comedy of Eastward Ho, it con tained some contributions by Jonson. At all events, when the authors were arrested on account of passages deemed insulting to the Scots, he "voluntarily imprisoned himself" with them. They were soon released, and a banquet at his expense, attended by Camden and Selden, terminated the incident.