No. 3831 (March 30, 1901), and the comments of Castelain. He
thinks that the play in question, in which both Chapman and
Jonson took part, was Sir Gyles Goosecappe, and that the last
imprisonment of the two poets was shortly after the discovery
of the Gunpowder Plot. In the mysterious history of the Gunpowder
Plot Jonson certainly had some obscure part. On the
7th of November, very soon after the discovery of the conspiracy,
the council appears to have sent for him and to have asked him,
as a loyal Roman Catholic, to use his good offices in inducing
the priests to do something required by the council—one hardly
likes to conjecture it to have been some tampering with the
secrets of confession. In any case, the negotiations fell through,
because the priests declined to come forth out of their hiding-places
to be negotiated with—greatly to the wrath of Ben Jonson,
who declares in a letter to Lord Salisbury that “they are all so
enweaved in it that it will make 500 gentlemen less of the religion
within this week, if they carry their understanding about
them.” Jonson himself, however, did not declare his separation
from the Church of Rome for five years longer, however much
it might have been to his advantage to do so.
His powers as a dramatist were at their height during the earlier half of the reign of James I.; and by the year 1616 he had produced nearly all the plays which are worthy of his genius. They include the tragedy of Catiline (acted and printed 1611), which achieved only a doubtful success, and the comedies of Volpone, or the Fox (acted 1605 and printed in 1607 with a dedication “from my house in the Blackfriars”), Epicoene, or the Silent Woman (1609; entered in the Stationers’ Register 1610), the Alchemist (1610; printed in 1610), Bartholomew Fair and The Devil is an Ass (acted respectively in 1614 and 1616). During the same period he produced several masques, usually in connexion with Inigo Jones, with whom, however, he seems to have quarrelled already in this reign, though it is very doubtful whether the architect is really intended to be ridiculed in Bartholomew Fair under the character of Lanthorn Leatherhead. Littlewit, according to Fleay, is Daniel. Among the most attractive of his masques may be mentioned the Masque of Blackness (1606), the Masque of Beauty (1608), and the Masque of Queens (1609), described by Swinburne as “the most splendid of all masques” and as “one of the typically splendid monuments or trophies of English literature.” In 1616 a modest pension of 100 marks a year was conferred upon him; and possibly this sign of royal favour may have encouraged him to the publication of the first volume of the folio collected edition of his works (1616), though there are indications that he had contemplated its production, an exceptional task for a playwright of his times to take in hand, as early as 1612.
He had other patrons more bountiful than the Crown, and for a brief space of time (in 1613) had travelled to France as governor (without apparently much moral authority) to the eldest son of Sir Walter Raleigh, then a state prisoner in the Tower, for whose society Jonson may have gained a liking at the Mermaid Tavern in Cheapside, but for whose personal character he, like so many of his contemporaries, seems to have had but small esteem. By the year 1616 Jonson seems to have made up his mind to cease writing for the stage, where neither his success nor his profits had equalled his merits and expectations. He continued to produce masques and entertainments when called upon; but he was attracted by many other literary pursuits, and had already accomplished enough to furnish plentiful materials for retrospective discourse over pipe or cup. He was already entitled to lord it at the Mermaid, where his quick antagonist in earlier wit-combats (if Fuller’s famous description be authentic) no longer appeared even on a visit from his comfortable retreat at Stratford. That on the other hand Ben carried his wicked town habits into Warwickshire, and there, together with Drayton, made Shakespeare drink so hard with them as to bring upon himself the fatal fever which ended his days, is a scandal with which we may fairly refuse to load Jonson’s memory. That he had a share in the preparing for the press of the first folio of Shakespeare, or in the composition of its preface, is of course a mere conjecture.
It was in the year 1618 that, like Dr Samuel Johnson a century and a half afterwards, Ben resolved to have a real holiday for once, and about midsummer started for his ancestral country, Scotland. He had (very heroically for a man of his habits) determined to make the journey on foot; and he was speedily followed by John Taylor, the water-poet, who still further handicapped himself by the condition that he would accomplish the pilgrimage without a penny in his pocket. Jonson, who put money in his good friend’s purse when he came up with him at Leith, spent more than a year and a half in the hospitable Lowlands, being solemnly elected a burgess of Edinburgh, and on another occasion entertained at a public banquet there. But the best-remembered hospitality which he enjoyed was that of the learned Scottish poet, William Drummond of Hawthornden, to which we owe the so-called Conversations. In these famous jottings, the work of no extenuating hand, Jonson lives for us to this day, delivering his censures, terse as they are, in an expansive mood whether of praise or of blame; nor is he at all generously described in the postscript added by his fatigued and at times irritated host as “a great lover and praiser of himself, a contemner and scorner of others.” A poetical account of this journey, “with all the adventures,” was burnt with Jonson’s library.
After his return to England Jonson appears to have resumed his former course of life. Among his noble patrons and patronesses were the countess of Rutland (Sidney’s daughter) and her cousin Lady Wroth; and in 1619 his visits to the country seats of the nobility were varied by a sojourn at Oxford with Richard Corbet, the poet, at Christ Church, on which occasion he took up the master’s degree granted to him by the university; whether he actually proceeded to the same degree granted to him at Cambridge seems unknown. He confessed about this time that he was or seemed growing “restive,” i.e. lazy, though it was not long before he returned to the occasional composition of masques. The extremely spirited Gipsies Metamorphosed (1621) was thrice presented before the king, who was so pleased with it as to grant to the poet the reversion of the office of master of the revels, besides proposing to confer upon him the honour of knighthood. This honour Jonson (hardly in deference to the memory of Sir Petronel Flash) declined; but there was no reason why he should not gratefully accept the increase of his pension in the same year (1621) to £200—a temporary increase only, inasmuch as it still stood at 100 marks when afterwards augmented by Charles I.
The close of King James I.’s reign found the foremost of its poets in anything but a prosperous condition. It would be unjust to hold the Sun, the Dog, the Triple Tun, or the Old Devil with its Apollo club-room, where Ben’s supremacy must by this time have become established, responsible for this result; taverns were the clubs of that day, and a man of letters is not considered lost in our own because he haunts a smoking-room in Pall Mall. Disease had weakened the poet’s strength, and the burning of his library, as his Execration upon Vulcan sufficiently shows, must have been no mere transitory trouble to a poor poet and scholar. Moreover he cannot but have felt, from the time of the accession of Charles I. early in 1625 onwards, that the royal patronage would no longer be due in part to anything like intellectual sympathy. He thus thought it best to recur to the surer way of writing for the stage, and in 1625 produced, with no faint heart, but with a very clear anticipation of the comments which would be made upon the reappearance of the “huge, overgrown play-maker,” The Staple of News, a comedy excellent in some respects, but little calculated to become popular. It was not printed till 1631. Jonson, whose habit of body was not more conducive than were his ways of life to a healthy old age, had a paralytic stroke in 1626, and a second in 1628. In the latter year, on the death of Middleton, the appointment of city chronologer, with a salary of 100 nobles a year, was bestowed upon him. He appears to have considered the duties of this office as purely ornamental; but in 1631 his salary was suspended until he should have presented some fruits of his labours in his place, or—as he more succinctly phrased it—“yesterday the barbarous court of
