24 Select Literary Criticism

(i)
Comedy of Humours

Realism, added to intensified ’humours’ treated in a satirical spirit, was first

given to the theatrical world by Jonson. Here, possibly a remark might be
made concerning Jonson’s matter. He has been called by several critics the
founder of comedy of manners of mankind, so stands as the ancestor ot’ihe
Restoration comedy. Such statements however, go far toward confusing the
issue on the one hand, between Jonson and Shakespeare, and, on the other,
between Jonson and Congreve. Jonson, in point of fact, deals hardly at all with
manners as such : he is not concerned with the social affectations of the
world, but with the follies of particular men or of particular groups of men.
The comic of Every Man In His Humour rises out of the follies of Bobadil, of
Matthew, of Cob, of Clement, not out of the manners af their class. AH the
’humours’ of Every Man Out Of His Humour are hased on genuine traits of
character ; not on the customs and the ways of mankind. So in The Alchemist
it is the gullibility of foods and the cunning of sharpers that is presented ; in
Volpone it is the natural greed of all types of men. So far, indeed, is Jonson-
from being the founder of the comedy of manners that it might almost be
everted that his species of comedy is distinguished from several other types
by the fact that it puts its stress not on manners, but on natural
idiosyncrasies. In only two things does Jonson stand connected with the later
comedy of manners-in his realism and in his satire.

-Allardyce Nicoll

(2) Characterisation

Examples from Every Man In His Humour will suffice to show how carefully
Jonson avoided the kind of exaggeration which is so often assumed to be
necessary on the stage, arid yet fell into another kind of excess by presenting
his types too consistently. The elder Kno’well is a comic figure, but he is
drawn with such moderation that he might easily be taken as a foil to the
follies of the rest. He is a wise, kind, naturally considerate father and
friend. .His ’Humour’ consists in his being excessively a parent, over anxious
for the welfare of his son, zealous to retain the respect due to his years and
office, prompt to take offence at the levity and wilfulness of the younger
generation. Nothing could be more

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KVKBY HAN IN HIS UVHOTJB

carefully restrained than bis presentation. There is no exaggeration or

concession to the law of enlargement accepted by Congreve. Kno’well is an
illustration of Jonson’s method at its best. Any father to any son is his
complete description.

-John Palmer

(3) Plot-Construct ion

Jonson’s second concern was the plot. This may appear to be a matter of less
importance in comedy, which concerns itself with humours and manners at
the expense of action and incident. Yet he lets slip no occasion to repeat
protest of the Prologue to Every Man In His Humour, as in the Prologue to
Volpone and in Bartholomew Fair, where ht burlesques the ancient-modern
’confusion of the playwright’. What Jonson appears to have in his mind is
shown towards the end of his Discoveries, where he lays down two principles.
The first deals with the ’bound’ or ’extend’ of a play. It should not exceed the
compass of one day, but there should be ’place for digression and art’. For he
adds, the episodes and digression in a fable are the same that household
stuff and other furniture in ahouse. The second is concerned with the
complexity of the plot. ’It should be one and entire. One is considerable two
ways : either as it is only separate and by itself, or as being composed of
many parts, it begins to be one, as those parts grow or are wrought together.
That it should be one the first way alone, and by itself, no man that hath
tasted letters ever would say, especially having required before a just
magnitude and equal proportion of the parts in themselves. Neither of which
can possible be, if the action be single and separate, not composed of parts,
which laid together in themselves, with an equal and fitting proportion tend
to the same c’.fl : which thing out of antiquity itself hath deceived many : and
r.•:••.• this day it doth deceive’.

- G. G, Smith

(4) Jonson as a Classical Writer

The presentation of Every Man In His Humour apparently marked a

change on Ben Jonson’s part and his devotion to a new propaganda. By
1598, the drama was long out of its swaddling clothes. Since the union of
poetry and his theatres on the advent of Marlowe, ten years earlier the
importance of theatres in the life of London had been rapidly increasing, and
the drama had been gaining recognition as a form of literalure. Marlowe,
Kyd, Peele, Greene, Lyly and others as well as Shakespeare, had played
important parts in creating a drama at once national, popular and poetical.
On the wholi’, this dramatic development, while breaking away from classical
models and rules, had established no theory or criticism of its own. It had
resulted from the individual innovations of poets and play- *y wrights,
who strove :o mm the demand of the popular stage through the
dramatisation of story. The main- division of tragedy aitd
f

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comedy were recognised, and a third, the chronicle history, created : and
there were various species corresponding to the initiative of individuals, as a
Marlowe type of comedy; but there were no accepted laws for any species,
and hardly any restrictions or principles guiding the presentation of
narratives on the stage.

-A. H, Tkorndyke

(5)
Jonson’e Place in English Drama

Probably no major author in English has suffered such as catastrophic

decline in popularity since his own day as has Ben Jonson. Certainly none
has been so punished for the crime of not being Shakespeare. Jonson was
from the beginning tied to the kite of Shakespeare criticism, or perhaps it
would be more exact to say that he was dragged captive behind the
triumphal chariot of Shakespeare worship. In the seventeenth century it
was fashionable, and profitable, to compaie them, as Dryden did, to set them
side by side as -the two giants of the English theatre, to discuss their
respective virtues and evaluate their respective merits. By the time
the century was over criticism had rendered its verdict: Shakespeare’s pre-
eminence would henceforth pass unchallenged. But by this time the
luckless Jonson was yoked to Shakespeare in an odious tandem from which
two centuries of subsequent comment would scarcely suffice to extricate
him.

. - Jonas A. Barish W Jonson’s Place in English Drama

The reputation of Jonson has been of the most deadly kind that „ can be
compelled upon the memory of a great poet. To be universally accepted ; to
be damned by the praise that quenches, all desire to read the book ; to
be afflicted by the imputation of the virtues which excite the least pleasure ;
and to be read only by historians and antiquaries this is the most perfect
conspiracy of approval. For some generations the reputation of Jonson has
been carried rather as a liability than as an asset in (he balance sheet of
English literature. No critic has succeeded in making him appear
pleasurable or even interesting. Swinburne’s book on Jonson satisfies no
curiosity and stimulates no thought. For the critical study in the ”Men of
Letters Series” by Mr. Gregory Smith there is a place ; it satisfies curiosity,
it supplies many just observations, it provides valuable matter on the
neglected masques : it only fails to remodel the image of Jonson which is
settled in our minds.

Probably the fault lies with several generations of our poets. It is not that the
value of poetry is only its value to living poets for their own work ; but
appreciation is akin to creation, and true enjoyment of poetry is related to the
stirring of suggestion, the stimulus that a poet feels in his enjoyment of other
poetry. Jonson has provided no creative stimulus for a, very long time ;
consequently
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1VXBY MAN 18 HIS HUMOUS

we must look back as far as Dryden-precisely, a poetic practitioner who

learned from Jonson-before we find a living criticism of Jonson’s work.

-T. S. Eliot

(T> Ben Jonson and Tradition

Ben Jonson is a very great poet-more finely endowed, I think than any who
succeeded him in the seventeenth century-and he read deliberately and
widely. It was to be expected, therefore, that the effects of his reading would
be in some manner present in his verse. Dryden said of him that he was a
learned plagiary of all the ancients : ”You track him everywhere in their
snow”. But this, the common view, violently distorts the sense in which
Jonson is ”traditional” : it not only makes him appear to owe to the Greek and
Latin writers a mere accumulation of thoughts and phrases, it completely
hides the native springs of his vitality. The aim of this chapter is to correct
the perspective, to show tnat Jonson’s art is intimately related to the popular
tradition of individual and social morality.

-L. C. Knight’s

(8) Ben Jonson and Tradition

Like Aristotle’s doctrine of catharsis which it strikingly resembles.. Jonson’s

theory of humours is less analytic than apologetic, less a system of literary
criticism than an exercise in ethical justification. Had Jonson regarded it as
more than a convenient metaphor, he would have become entangled in the
contradiction which brought the Spanish philosopher Huerte before the
Inquisition. If you undertake to reform society by confronting it with its own
picture, and that picture is so darkly deterministic that it precludes all
possibility of reform, what then ? Do you curb your reforming zeal ? Do you
moderate your behaviorism ? Arc you obliged to choose between
philanthropy and misanthropy ? Or, are you simply a hard working
playwright, with a hardheaded and somewhat doctrinaire view of humanity,
trying to protect your vested interests by beating the moralists at their own
game ? O, cursed spite !

-Harry Levin

(9) Jonson’s Satire

If tragedy can scoff, comedy can scorn. The comical satires are of the ”biting”
variety, not the ”toothless”. Professing to sport with human follies, not with
crimes, Jonson too often took it upon .oh*vstif to dispense poetic justice, to
regulate his comical satires by a more rigorous ethic than life itself ever
provides, to conjure up an inferno of punishments for his personal enemies.
Some high minded malcontent an Asper or a Crites-like the melancholy
Jaques and

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not unlike the sort of mad man that Hamlet pretended to be, figures as
Jonson’s accredited representative, and entrusted with the responsibility of
scourging vice, untrusting affectation, and reconciling humours all around.
Jonsonian comedy invariably tends in the direction of an arraignment; it must
enact a trial and achieve an official resolution of the comic knot, whether by
royal Cynthia or imperial Augustus, by court of Senate, or merely by a non-
chalant interloper or humane jurist of the Bridlegoose breed.

-Harry Levin

(10) Rhetoric

. To linger over the elements of pure design in Jonson’s dialogue is to ignore

its expressiveness as representation. The language itlelf is complete y
idiomatic, uninhibited by the formality *of plot and characterization or the
complexity of scenes and speeches. Because Spenser writes no language”,
Jonson refused to tolerate him and he

TtlSPaH-MarSt°n nmh’ng ,bUt 3 Pre’criP’ior> * purge unnatura! diction His

own occasional verse moves, like his drama on the social plane and speaks in
the familiar tones of human intercourse Even self-communion, with Jonson,
takes the form of a public address. Ode, epigram, elegy, epistle-near! y every
poem is composed on something or to somebody, brandishing precepts and
elici ting examples in the injunctive mood of Roman poetry. A poetic style
suitable for these purposes had to be fittest Tor discourse and nearest prose.
Whatever the restraints Jonson chose to accept his handling of words never
lost its flexibility ; throughout the most torruous stanzas his phrasing remains
as English as Purcell’s.

-Harry Levin

(11) Morose Jonson /

Jonson also lacks natural invention, and his theatre has little organic life. His
plots are incoherent and clumsy ; his juxtapositions of elements are too often
like the ”mechanical mixtures” of chemistry that produce no molecular
reactions. His chief artifices for making something happen are to introduce
his characters in impossible daises and to have them play incredible practical
jokes Nor has he *«/ sense of movement or proportion : almost everything
goes on too long, and while it continues, it does not develop Nor is his taste
ra other matter reliable. His puns, as Dryden complained are sometimes of a
stunning stupidity : and when he is dirty he is’ unlike Shakespeare,
sometimes disgusting to such a degree that he makes-one sympathetic with
the Puritans in their efforts to clean up the theatre. His reading of Greek and
Latin, for all the boasting he does about it, has served Jaini very insufficiently
for the refinement and ordering of his work, and usually appears in his plays
as either an alien and obstructive element or, when more skilfully managed
as a padding to give the effect of a dignity and weight which he can-

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fevfeBY if AH is ma Htntotrtt

not supply himself. He is much better when he lets himself go in a vain that
is completely unclassical.

-Edmund Wilson

(12) Jonson’s Satire

As for satire, there is, in any case, very little overt satire in E.M.I.H.H., but
such satire of contemporary men and manners and institutions-satire such as
Pope practised it-as is to be found in Jonsonian comedy, is not integral to his
greatest masterpieces. Some of his ”dotage” plays consists almost entirely of
attack on the false standards of capitals, and of such of its enterprises as. the
press, company-floating, etc. But within the limits of E.M.I HH., Volpone, The
Akhemist, The Silent Woman, Bartholomew Fair, such contemporary satire is
detachable. It is no doubt of these plays that Mr. Eliot was thinking when he
wrote : ”But satire like Jonson’s is great in the end not by hitting off its object,
but by creating it: the satire is merely the means which leads to an aesthetic
result, the impulse which projects a new world into a new orbit.

Whether or not this last is true of all great satirists, it least calls attention to
the uniqueness of Jonson’s comic world, and corrects the usual view that his
plays are heavy transcripts of contemporary life chooped into an arbitrary
shape by a rigid application of the classical unities, of which the sole end is
rather pedantic ridicule. Such a reputation has effectually killed him as a
dramatist transcending the limits of space and time and having that element
oi ”permanent modernity” which is necessary for his plays to be still acted as
living theatre and not as museum piece to illustrate the history of drama.

-Arthur Safe

(13) Jonson’s Criticism

It follows that when Jonson was praised, as he sometimes was, he was likely
to be praised for odd reasons. Coleridge endorsed Sejanus and Catiline for
their usefulness as versified history. Ward reckoned it as one advantage of
the plot of Poetaster that it allowed Jonson to parade his learning. And
Swinburne noted approvingly that Volpone contained ”a savour of something
like romance.” To praise Jonson, one had to turn him into a school-master, or
an ex* hibitionist of learning, or a purveyor of exoticism. Needless to say,
none of these rather desperate shifts afforded a sound basis for appreciation.
As long as criticism of the drama continued to centre on character-as long as
readers continued to judge dramatic personages as though they were about
to invite them to supper, insisting that they have good hearts and good table
manners-Jonson was doomed to play satyr to Shakespeare’s Hyperion.
In the various w.ays in which the cYitics taxed Jonson, they did not so much
say wrong things as innate right things out of all

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V
by

reasonable proportion. Even the eighteenth century editors, who turned

Jonson into a hobgoblin, started from something real: the intense sense of
personality that radiates from everything he wrote. On this score he forms an
authentic contrast to Shakespeare. Shakespeare effaces himself nearly to the
point of anonymity. Jonson always conveys the’sense of his own combative
presence. He hectors his audiences, he harangues his readers, he stands
before the recipients of his verse epistles ”passionately kind and angry” as
the occasion requires. He forces us, in short, to react to him as a man. Too
many readers have been driven by Jonson’s assert! /enc^s into taking up
postures of defense. Postures of Defense, however, once grown habitual, are
difficult to distinguish from postures of attack. They become postures of
attack. Hence, no doubt, the tone of personal outrage in which Jonson’s
unfriendly critics often discuss him. Hence, also, perhaps, the fact that the
partisan of Jonson is likely to breathe a little fire and brimstone Gifford, for
instance, whose proneness to passionate controversy was notorious.

-Jones A. Barish

(14) Humour in the Play

I have used the analogy of a machine to illustiate the machanies of Jonson’s

revised structure for Every Man In His Humour but there is a much better
analogy and one which Jonson himself was probably aware of. The action of
this play now parallels the predictable course of a disease, moving from
symptoms to aggravation to crisis to cure. That is to say, the structure of the
play like the main characters in! if, participates in the analogy which the title
suggests. We can say that Acts I and II present the accumulation of
symptoms, Act III the aggravation, Act IV the crisis, normality and thrust upon
those who are incorrigible fools. The machinations of Brain-worm, Kno’well
and the others, the erratic behaviour of the fools, and the instances of pure
chance are all secondary factors in the forward movement of the whole. What
really makes the revised Every Man In His Homour move is the humour
characters, and these move in } the way they do because they are what they
are.; and the meaning of their movement is symbolized in the external
structure of the dramatic poem which presents them. For this reason, Every
Man In His Humour, in the form in which we commonly read it now, is
Jonson’s first and only fully realized humour play and a minor masterpiece of
its kind.
-J. A. Bryant, Jr.

(15) Jonson as a Literary Artist

If we approach Jonson with less frozen awe -f his learning, with a clearer
understanding of his ”rhetoric” and its applications, if we grasp the fact that
the knowledge required of the reader is not archaeology but knowledge of
Jonson, we can derive not only
!16

tvJunr KiK ifr Jus ntmotjfc

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217

truction in two-dimensional life-but enjoyment. We can even

n]y him, be aware of him as a part of our literary inheritance

raving further expression. Of all the dramatists of his time, Jonson

i probably the one whom the present age would find the most

fmpathetic, if it knew him. There is a brutality, a lack of senti-

icnt, a polished surface, a handling of large bold designs in brilliant

Dlours, which ought to attract about three thousand people in

,ondon and elsewhere. At least, if we bad a contemporary

hakcspeare and a contemporary Jonson, it might be the Jonson who

ould arouse the enthusiasm of the intelligentsia. Though be is

tturated in literature, he never sacrifices the theatrical qualities-

icatrical in the most favourable sense-to literature or to the study

f r’ xracter. His work is a titanic show. But Jonson’s masques,

a important part of his work, are neglected ; our flaccid culture

ts shows and literature fade, but prefers faded literature to faded

lows. There are hundreds of people who have read Comua to ten

ho have read the Masque of Blackness, Comus contains fine poetry,

ad poetry exemplifying some merits to which Jonson’s masque

oetry cannot pretend. Nevertheless, Comus is the death of the

asque ; it is the transition of a form of art-even of a form which

tisted for but a short generation-into ”literature”, literature cast

t a form which has lost in its application. Even though Comus

as a masque at Ludlow Castle, Jonson had, what Milton came

:rhaps too late to have, a sense for the living art ; his art was

>plied. The masques can still be read, and with pleasure, by any-

ic who will take the trouble-a trouble which in this part of Jonson

indeed, a study of antiquities-to imagine them in action,

splayed with the music, costumes, dances, and the scenery of Inigo

mes. They are additional evidence that Jonson had a fine sense of

rm, of the purpose for which a particular form is intended ;

idence that he was a literary artist even more than he was a man

’letters.

-T.S.Eliot (16) The Negative in Jonson’s Nature

Ben Jonson’s enjoyment of tavern life and his great reputation wit have
created, among those who do not read him, an entirely oneoui impression of
high spirits and joviality ; but his portraits >w rather th: face of a min who
habitually worries, who is sens!- c and holds himself aloof, not yielding
himself to intimate fellowps. In many of his plays thire figures an unsociable
and embittered •sonage who sometimes rep-esents virtue and censors the
other iracters, but is in other cases presented by Jonson as a thoroughly
agreeable person and the butt of deserved persecution. Such, in : second
of these categories, are Macilente in Every Man Out Of s Humour, Morose in
The Silent Woman, Surly in The Alchemist, d Wasp in Bartholomew Fair. The
roost conspicuous of these is arose, and Jonson’s treatment of him is
particularly significant, ic dramatist, on a visit to the country, had
encountered a local aracter who gave him an idea for a play. This was a
man who

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had a morbid aversion to noise. Now, Jonson seems never to have inquired
the reason, never to have tried to imagine what the life of such a -man would
be really like ; nor could he ever have been conscious of what it was in
himself that impelled him to feel so vivid an interest in him. According to his
usual custom, he simply put him on the stage as a ”humour,” an eccentric
with an irrational horror of any kind of sound except that of his own voice,
who lives in a room with a double wall and the windows ”close shut and
caulked” in a street too narrow for traffic, and who, declaring that ”all
discourses but mine own” seem to him ”harsh, impertinent, and irksome”,
makes his servants communicate with him by signs. And the only way that
Jonson can find to exploit the possibilities of this neurotic is to make him the
agonized victim of a group of ferocious young men, who hunt him in his
burrow like a badger, and trick him into marrying a ”silent woman”, who,
immediately after the ceremony-while her sponsors raise a hideous racket-
opens fire on him with a frenzy of chatter, and turns out in the end to be a
boy in disguise. But Morose himself is cruel through meannes: he has merited
the worst he can surfer. He has wanted to disinherit his nephew, and has
consigned him, in a venomous outburst, to the direst humiliation and poverty.
Through Morose and through the characters like him, Ben Jonson is
tormenting himself for what is negative and recessive in his nature.

-Edmund Wilson (17) Jonson’s Constructive Skill

Critics since the seventeenth century have agreed that Ben Jonson is a
master of comic structure, but there has been serious disagreement as to just
what kind of structure it is in which he excels. To Dryden, Jonson was pre-
eminent among English dramatists because he obeyed the neo-classic rules
of unity of time, place, and action. Of the three, unity of action is
fundamental, and it is Jonson’s plotting that Dryden found most praiseworthy.
He preferred The Silent Woman above all other plays because he found it an
ideal combination of the scope, variety, and naturalness of the English drama
with the control and careful organization of the French. And the examcn of
that play in An Essay of Dramatic Poesy emphasizes that there is immense
variety of character and incident but that the action is ”entirely one.” Critics
in recent years, however, have disputed Dryden’s picture of a regular, neo-
classic Jonson, especially in the matter of plot structure. Freda L. Townsend,
lor example, argues persuasively that none of Jonson’s great comedies has
the unified action characteristic of Terentian comedy and enjoined by neo-
classic precept. She compares Jonson’s art with that of Ariosto and the
baroque painters, and she sees Bartholomew Fair rather than The Silent
Woman as the culmination of his development away from a simply unified
comedy towards one which involves the intricate interweaving of as many
different interests as
• possible. T. S. Eliot perhaps best sums up this ”modern” view of Jonson’s
technique when he says that his ”immense dramatic cons-
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219

tructive skill” is riot so much in plot as in ”doing without a plot’”, and adds :
”The plot does not hold the play together ; what holds the play together is a
unity of inspiration that radiates into plot and personages alike”.

-Bay L. Heffner, Jr.

; (18)
Jonson’s Masques

Jonson’s masques have generally been considered as fanciful mixtures of

spectacular and dramatic elements, characterized by a heavy display of
learning and, for modern democratic taste, a troublesome flattery of the king.
They have seldom been accorded the dignity of serious literary efforts ; and
yet if one looks twice at the author’s own comments upon his work, one is
struck by the unusually wide discrepancy between what Jonson thought he
was doing and what critics have told us he was doing,

A masque, as Jonson himself conceived it, is a form of dramatic

entertainment in which the logical working out of a central idea or device
provides the action. The particular kind of action proper to the form resides in
the symbolic representation of contrasted condition, usually of order or virtue
as opposed to disorder or depravity. It consists of’’one entire body or figure,”
as Jonson puts it, comprising distinct members, each expressed for itself, yet
harmonized by the device so that the whole is complete in itself. The nature
of the device is explained by language at times dramatic and at times
narrative, and the whole is further illustrated by music, spectacle, and
symbolic characters in a sequence of dances. Each member is brought in
separately, for its own sake, in the parts of the work, but each contributes to
the illustration of the whole. Each has meaning in terms of the device, which
turns on a sudden change -involving discovery of the masquers,
transformation of the entire scene, and recognition of the virtues embodied in
the king ; and arouses wonder and respect in the spectators. By these means,
a masque accomplishes its purpose of honouring magnificence, in ethical
sense, and of inciting in the beholders a conscious moral imitation of the
virtues embodied in kingship.

-Dolora Cunningham

(19) Comparison with Roman Play

On the surface, Every Man In Hu Humour would seem to be just the sort of
thing a Roman playwright might have turned out had he been writing at the
close of the Elizabethan period. Almost no detail in it does not admit of some
comparison with Roman comedy. There is the familiar ”suspect world” of
pretenders, parasites, and four-flushers. There is also the young man whose
descent into that world has caused the concern of a father who has

*f

almost forgotten what it means’to be youthful. There is the witty servant,

loyal to the young man, but eager for sport for sport’s. And, finally, there is
the young girl, enmeshed in the ”suspect world” but altogether woithy of the
young man, whose only fault is that he is young, rebellious, and adventurous.
The action of the intrigue is the young man’s acquisition of the young girl,
effected through the help of the loyal servant, who gulls the young man’s
father. At the end a disinterested person (Clement) bring about the
reconciliation of the principal parties, much as Lysimachus, makes possible
the denouement of Plautus’s Mercolor.

The structure of the play also shows the influence of Roman comedy. Act I
gives the protasi*, the exposition of the principal characters, the situation,
and the accidents which set eyerything off. Acts II and IV are devoted almost
exclusively to the business of getting impediments out of the way. In Act II
the wily servant, here called Musco, works alone ; in Act IV he works in
conjunction with the friend, Prospero. But the result of their maneouvering in
both of three acts is the pairing of the lovers and the gulling of the cautious
protectors who would keep them apart. As in most Roman comedy, Act, III is
epitaait, the stirring of all the difficulties. Here at the centre of the play we
have the two wild scenes at Thorello’s or Kitely’s, punctuated by a view of the
elder Lorenzo’s discomforturc at Justice Clement’s and concluded by another
forward thrust in the action when Prospero promises to secure Hesperida for
the young Lorenzo. Act V shows the result of all the plotting and with the aid
of Justice Clement brings an end to all the suspicions, vindication to the
virtuous young people, and judgment to the fools.

-J. A. Bryant, Jr.

(20) Ben Jonson’s Personal Character

Let me try to describe the curious character of Ben Jonson. He was a strong
hefty fellow with heavy features. He had a turbulent, argumentative nature,
picked quarrels readily, and resorted quickly .to fighting. He had a brain that
worked overtime, a rich store of classical learning-in his day he was thought
to be the most learned man in England-and a prolific imagination. But
whatever his enemies might say, however great his respect for classical
perfection, he kept an instinctive sympathy for the low-life of London, the
rogues and ragamuffins of the streets of Westminster, then little more than a
country village, and the rich characters of a London fairground.
What is remarkable about Ben Jonson is that he succeeded in reconciling all
these various and conflicting elements in his character. His great plays are
the product of a tremendous brain. In fact I cannot think of a single writer
with the possible exception of Bernard Shaw whose works make one so
conscious of the power of the

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intellect behind them. At the same time there is a tremendous physical

energy in his characters. They’re all living to the very top of their bent. They
have big, expressive, and often ugly voices. One pictures them as so many
caricatures with strong features, blotched complexions, gangling limbs, obese
or emaciated, the sort of characters that make you terribly aware of their
physical existence, even of their smell. When he is writing a play set in
Imperial Rome, such as Sejanus, he forces his characters into a sort of Roman
dignity, but their brutish strength remains.

-John Allen

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