NAME Benjamin "Ben" Jonson.
WHAT FAMOUS FOR Ben Jonson was an English Stuart dramatist, lyric poet, and literary critic, widely regarded during his lifetime and in modern scholarship as the second most important playwright of the English Renaissance after William Shakespeare. He popularised the "comedy of humours" and wrote enduring satirical masterpieces including Every Man in His Humour, Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair. He was also England's unofficial first Poet Laureate and pioneered court masques alongside architect Inigo Jones. (1)
BIRTH Ben Jonson was born on June 11, 1572, in Westminster, London, although some sources give the date with a question mark since parish records are incomplete.
FAMILY BACKGROUND His father was a clergyman who died shortly before Jonson was born, leaving his mother to raise him alone until she remarried a master bricklayer. Jonson's stepfather brought him up in this trade household, and it was this stepfather's bricklaying business that Jonson himself was later forced to join. (2)
CHILDHOOD As a child, Jonson was reportedly so unattractive and so ridiculously dressed that he was mercilessly teased by his schoolmates, and he retreated into reading to escape his misery. This early hardship is thought to have contributed to the thin-skinned, combative temperament he displayed throughout his adult life. (3)
EDUCATION Jonson attended a free parish school in St. Martin's Lane before being sponsored by the headmaster to study at Westminster School, where he came under the influence of the great classical scholar and antiquarian William Camden.
He was forced to leave in 1589 without completing a university education after losing his scholarship, and was made to work as a bricklayer alongside his stepfather instead — a background he resented and later scholars have often seen as spurring his determination to be recognised as a serious, classically learned writer. (4)
CAREER RECORD 1589 Forced to abandon his formal education, he began an unwilled apprenticeship as a bricklayer under his stepfather in London.
1591 Traveled to Flanders as a volunteer soldier, fighting with Sir Francis Vere's English regiments during the Eighty Years' War.
1597 Returned to London and joined Philip Henslowe's theatrical company as an actor and apprentice playwright, earning money by revising existing repertory plays.
1598 Achieved widespread theatrical fame with his play Every Man in His Humour, produced by the Lord Chamberlain's Men with William Shakespeare in the cast.
1605 Began a decades-long career writing elaborate court masques for King James I and Queen Anne of Denmark, beginning with The Masque of Blackness.
1616 Published The Workes of Beniamin Ionson, a landmark folio that treated published stage plays as serious literature for the first time. He was awarded a royal pension of 100 marks per year, making him the effective Poet Laureate.
1628 Appointed City Chronologer of London following a stroke that limited his physical mobility.
APPEARANCE In his youth he was said to be strikingly ugly and dressed absurdly, a combination that made him a target for childhood bullies. (3)
Jonson himself described his own physique bluntly in verse, writing of his "mountain belly" and "rocky face," and the antiquarian John Aubrey recorded that he had "one eye lower than tother and bigger" and had once possessed "a clear and fair skin." In his youth he was said to be strikingly ugly and dressed absurdly, a combination that made him a target for childhood bullies. (5)
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| Ben Jonson by Abraham van Blyenberch c 1617-1618 |
FASHION Aubrey noted that despite his fame Jonson's personal habit of dress was "very plain," and that the actor John Lacy recalled him wearing a coat resembling a coachman's coat, slit under the armpits. The one certain surviving portrait, now in the National Portrait Gallery, shows him simply and soberly attired rather than in the ornate fashions of the court he entertained. (4)
CHARACTER Jonson was famously proud, quarrelsome, and quick to take offence, yet he inspired intense loyalty among a devoted circle of younger writers who called themselves "the Tribe of Ben." Britannica describes him as "a man of contraries," at once an angry and stubborn figure and one who attracted more disciples than almost any other writer of his age. (6)
SPEAKING VOICE Jonson prized eloquent, direct speech and believed that "language most shows a man," arguing that no mirror reveals character so truly as the way a person speaks. Contemporaries who met him, including the poet William Drummond, recorded him as a dominating and voluble conversationalist who talked at great length once he got going. (7)
SENSE OF HUMOUR His comic sensibility was satirical rather than gentle, built on exposing greed, vanity, and hypocrisy through characters who each embodied a single dominant "humour" or vice. This dry, mocking wit made him a celebrated companion at London's Mermaid Tavern, where he traded witty stories with fellow writers.
RELATIONSHIPS Jonson married Ann Lewis on November 14, 1594, at the church of St Magnus-the-Martyr near London Bridge, and he later described her to William Drummond as "a shrew, yet honest." The marriage appears to have been troubled, and for around five years Jonson lived apart from his wife, relying instead on the hospitality of his patron, Lord Aubigny, with a possible legal separation occurring later in life. (3)
His friendship with William Shakespeare was close but famously complicated, marked by intellectual sparring at the Mermaid Tavern and by the ambivalent preface Jonson wrote for the First Folio of Shakespeare's works, which both praised and gently criticised his late rival. Jonson also enjoyed the company of Sir Walter Raleigh and later collaborated, often stormily, with the designer Inigo Jones on court masques. (3)
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| Image by Gemini |
MONEY AND FAME During their lifetimes Jonson actually eclipsed Shakespeare in fame and was far better known to contemporaries.
His 1616 royal pension of 100 marks (roughly £60-66) was not always paid on time, and by the late 1620s he was so short of money that he wrote the bitter "Ode to Himself" complaining of "the loathsome age." Fellow poets rallied to his defence, and Charles I responded by increasing his pension to £100 a year along with a gift of £100 and an annual allowance of Canary wine. (2) , (21, Britannica poet laureate) (8)
FOOD AND DRINK Jonson had a well-documented fondness for drink, regularly meeting friends such as Shakespeare and Raleigh at the Mermaid Tavern on Bread Street, Cheapside, where they drank Canary wine (a type of sherry) and swapped stories. His own poem "Inviting a Friend to Supper" celebrates just such a cup of "rich Canary wine," and both Drummond and Aubrey specifically noted his heavy drinking in their accounts of him. (3)
DRAMAS After fighting in Flanders during the Eighty Years' War Ben Jonson returned to England in the mid 1590s. Doing what ambitious young writers have always done when faced with the prospect of starvation, he joined the theatre. He became part of Philip Henslowe's London company as an actor and jobbing playwright, revising existing plays whenever required. It was not quite the glamorous literary career one imagines in retrospect, but it paid the bills and put him in the right place at the right time. Jonson is also thought to have played Hieronimo in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, which must have been one of the few occasions when a future literary giant got to murder people onstage without anyone calling the police.
In 1598, Jonson's comedy Every Man in His Humour established the style that would become known as the "comedy of humours" and made his reputation. The play's original cast included William Shakespeare, which gives us one of those pleasing moments in literary history when two men who would later be studied by generations of scholars were simply trying to get through another night's performance without forgetting their lines.
Jonson's great run of satirical comedies followed in the years that came next. Volpone appeared in 1605–06, followed by Epicoene, or the Silent Woman in 1609, The Alchemist in 1610, and Bartholomew Fair in 1614. These plays established Jonson as one of the sharpest comic writers of his age, with an impressive talent for exposing human greed, vanity and foolishness. In Jonson's world, people generally behaved badly for money, status or sex, and occasionally managed to achieve all three at once.
From 1605 onward, Jonson also devoted much of his time to producing elaborate masques for the court of King James I. In 1616, James I granted Jonson an annual pension, a significant mark of royal favour. The payment later helped earn Jonson a place in history as England's first Poet Laureate, although this is slightly misleading: the title itself was never formally bestowed upon him. Still, Jonson had something almost as useful as a title—an income from the Crown, which is generally regarded by writers as a fairly good substitute.
Jonson died in 1637, still working almost to the end of his life. He had spent his career writing plays, poetry and masques, leaving behind a body of work that helped shape English drama and comedy. He had begun as an actor and jobbing playwright and ended as one of the most influential literary figures of the English Renaissance—a career progression rather more impressive than most people manage after starting out in the theatre.
MUSIC AND ARTS From 1605 Jonson spent much of his career writing court masques, an entertainment form combining music, dance, and elaborate costume that placed spectacle above plot and is regarded as a forerunner of ballet and opera. His first masque, The Masque of Blackness, was written specifically to satisfy Queen Anne of Denmark's wish to appear on stage as an African woman.
His most celebrated collaborator on these projects was the designer Inigo Jones, who created the scenery for Jonson's Oberon, the Faery Prince, performed at Whitehall on January 1, 1611, in which Prince Henry, King James's eldest son, played the title role. Over time a bitter professional rivalry grew between the two men, as Jones's increasingly spectacular stage effects, such as boats on wheels and clouds suspended on wires, began to overshadow Jonson's own text. (3)
LITERATURE In 1616, Jonson published The Workes of Beniamin Ionson, the first folio publication in history to include stage plays alongside poetry, establishing drama as a legitimate literary art form and paving the way for Shakespeare's First Folio in 1623.
Beyond his plays, Jonson was a gifted lyric and epigrammatic poet whose collected poems, including "On My First Sonne," rank among the most personal and moving verse of the era. His influence extended to later novelists such as Henry Fielding and to a generation of Restoration dramatists who styled themselves "the Tribe of Ben" in tribute to him. (2)
NATURE One of Jonson's best-known poems, "To Penshurst," is a country-house poem celebrating the natural abundance and harmony of an aristocratic estate, reflecting the classical pastoral tradition he admired. His verse generally favoured order, cultivation, and moral instruction drawn from the natural world over romantic wilderness for its own sake.
HOBBIES AND SPORTS Jonson's chief recreational pursuit outside writing was convivial drinking and conversation with fellow wits at taverns such as the Mermaid, where intellectual debate functioned almost as sport.
His years as a young soldier in Flanders gave him genuine combat training, and he later put his swordsmanship to lethal use in a real duel with the actor Gabriel Spenser at Hoxton Fields on September 22, 1598, reflecting the wider Elizabethan enthusiasm for fencing as a mark of masculine accomplishment. (9)
SCIENCE AND MATHS Jonson was deeply fascinated by pseudo-science, particularly alchemy and astrology, which he researched thoroughly in order to satirise tricksters and gullible victims in his famous comedy The Alchemist. (6)
PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Jonson was for a period a convert to Roman Catholicism, famously described as having been "twelve years a papist," before returning to the Protestant fold, reflecting the religious pressures and shifting loyalties of Jacobean England. Britannica notes the irony that despite this Catholic interlude he became, in practice, Protestant England's first poet laureate. (6)
POLITICS Jonson wrote extensively for the royal court under both James I and Charles I, producing masques that flattered and entertained the monarchy, yet he was repeatedly caught up in political trouble for perceived slights against the crown or its allies. His work for the Stuart court placed him at the centre of Jacobean and Caroline political culture even as his own writings sometimes provoked the authorities. (3)
SCANDAL Jonson's life was filled with legal trouble and scandal. In 1597 he was imprisoned in Marshalsea for co-writing the controversial lost play The Isle of Dogs. The authorities found it so offensive that all copies were destroyed, leaving the exact nature of the scandal unknown.
On September 22, 1598, he killed actor Gabriel Spenser in a duel at Hogsden Fields. Imprisoned in Newgate and facing execution, Jonson escaped the gallows by pleading "benefit of clergy" (proving he could read Latin), resulting in the forfeiture of his goods and a felon's brand on his thumb.
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| Image by Perplexity |
In 1605, passages in Eastward Ho, co-written with John Marston and George Chapman, were judged insulting to the Scots, and Jonson and his fellow writers were briefly arrested before being released and celebrating with a banquet.
In 1628 Jonson was mistakenly arrested on suspicion of having written verses approving of the assassination of the Duke of Buckingham; on his release, he returned home only to find his house on fire. (3)
MILITARY RECORD After his apprenticeship as a bricklayer, Jonson travelled to the Netherlands and volunteered to serve as a soldier with the English regiments commanded by Sir Francis Vere in Flanders, reportedly distinguishing himself in single combat against an enemy soldier before returning to England to begin his theatrical career. (2)
HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS In his youth, Jonson was physically strong and athletic.
Jonson was a large, heavily built man in later life, by his own admission possessing a "mountain belly" that made him stoop, and he suffered increasingly poor health, including apparent strokes, in his final years. (5)
He also reported a vivid, unsettling vision of his eldest son marked with a bloody cross around the time the boy died of plague in London, an episode recorded by Drummond. (10)
HOMES Jonson lived in and around London and Westminster for most of his life, and for a period during his marital estrangement he resided as a guest at the household of his patron, Lord Aubigny, rather than with his wife.
Shortly after his arrest in 1628, his London home caught fire, destroying many of his books and unpublished manuscripts. (3)
TRAVEL Jonson's most significant journey abroad was his time in the Netherlands as a young soldier fighting with English regiments in Flanders.
Later, in 1618-1619, he made a lengthy walking tour to Scotland, during which he stayed with the poet William Drummond of Hawthornden, whose notes on their nightly conversations remain a key primary source for Jonson's life and character. (7)
DEATH Ben Jonson died on August 6, 1637, and his funeral was held three days later; he was buried standing or sitting upright in the north aisle of the nave at Westminster Abbey, in a plot too small for a conventional burial after he reportedly asked King Charles I for a mere "two feet square" of ground.
His grave is marked with the inscription "O Rare Ben Johnson," the word "rare" deriving from the Latin rarus, meaning remarkable.
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| The Ben Jonson Memorial, in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey By 14GTR - Own work, |
In 1849, the Dean of Westminster, William Buckland, disturbed the grave and took the heel bone, which resurfaced decades later in a junk shop in 1938. (3)
APPEARANCES IN MEDIA Jonson appears as a character in numerous historical plays, novels, and television dramas focusing on Shakespeare's era, including the 2011 film Anonymous (played by Sebastian Armesto) and the BBC drama Will (2017).
Jonson's plays, particularly Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, have been revived on stage repeatedly since the 18th century.
His preface to the Shakespeare First Folio remains one of the most quoted pieces of early modern literary criticism, frequently cited in documentaries and books about Shakespeare. (15, Britannica)
ACHIEVEMENTS Jonson pioneered the comedy of humours, transformed the Jacobean court masque, became England's first Poet Laureate, and elevated playwriting to a recognized literary art form with his landmark 1616 Folio.
He mentored an entire generation of Cavaliers and Restoration poets known as the "Tribe of Ben," including Robert Herrick and Richard Lovelace, and profoundly influenced later writers such as Henry Fielding.
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