to be regretted as introducing into his dramas an exotic and often vexatious element. A man of letters to the very core, he never quite understood that there is and ought to be a wide difference of methods between the world of letters and the world of the theatre.
The richness and versatility of Jonson’s genius will never be fully appreciated by those who fail to acquaint themselves with what is preserved to us of his “masques” and cognate entertainments. He was conscious enough of his success in this direction—“next himself,” he said, “only Fletcher and Chapman could write a masque.” He introduced, or at least established, the ingenious innovation of the anti-masque, which Schlegel has described, as a species of “parody added by the poet to his device, and usually prefixed to the serious entry,” and which accordingly supplies a grotesque antidote to the often extravagantly imaginative main conception. Jonson’s learning, creative power and humorous ingenuity—combined, it should not be forgotten, with a genuine lyrical gift—all found abundant opportunities for displaying themselves in these productions. Though a growth of foreign origin, the masque was by him thoroughly domesticated in the high places of English literature. He lived long enough to see the species produce its poetic masterpiece in Comus.
The Sad Shepherd, of which Jonson left behind him three acts and a prologue, is distinguished among English pastoral dramas by its freshness of tone; it breathes something of the spirit of the greenwood, and is not unnatural even in its supernatural element. While this piece, with its charming love-scenes between Robin Hood and Maid Marion, remains a fragment, another pastoral by Jonson, the May Lord (which F. G. Fleay and J. A. Symonds sought to identify with The Sad Shepherd; see, however, W. W. Greg in introduction to the Louvain reprint), has been lost, and a third, of which Loch Lomond was intended to be the scene, probably remained unwritten.
Though Ben Jonson never altogether recognized the truth of the maxim that the dramatic art has properly speaking no didactic purpose, his long and laborious life was not wasted upon a barren endeavour. In tragedy he added two works of uncommon merit to our dramatic literature. In comedy his aim was higher, his effort more sustained, and his success more solid than were those of any of his fellows. In the subsidiary and hybrid species of the masque, he helped to open a new and attractive though undoubtedly devious path in the field of dramatic literature. His intellectual endowments surpassed those of most of the great English dramatists in richness and breadth; and in energy of application he probably left them all behind. Inferior to more than one of his fellow-dramatists in the power of imaginative sympathy, he was first among the Elizabethans in the power of observation; and there is point in Barrett Wendell’s paradox, that as a dramatist he was not really a poet but a painter. Yet it is less by these gifts, or even by his unexcelled capacity for hard work, than by the true ring of manliness that he will always remain distinguished among his peers.
Jonson was buried on the north side of the nave in Westminster Abbey, and the inscription, “O Rare Ben Jonson,” was cut in the slab over his grave. In the beginning of the 18th century a portrait bust was put up to his memory in the Poets’ Corner by Harley, earl of Oxford. Of Honthorst’s portrait of Jonson at Knole Park there is a copy in the National Portrait Gallery; another was engraved by W. Marshall for the 1640 edition of his Poems.
Bibliography.—The date of the first folio volume of Jonson’s Works (of which title his novel but characteristic use in applying it to plays was at the time much ridiculed) has already been mentioned as 1616; the second, professedly published in 1640, is described by Gifford as “a wretched continuation of the first, printed from MSS. surreptitiously obtained during his life, or ignorantly hurried through the press after his death, and bearing a variety of dates from 1631 to 1641 inclusive.” The works were reprinted in a single folio volume in 1692, in which The New Inn and The Case is Altered were included for the first time, and again in 6 vols. 8vo in 1715. Peter Whalley’s edition in 7 vols., with a life, appeared in 1756, but was superseded in 1816 by William Gifford’s, in 9 vols. (of which the first includes a biographical memoir, and the famous essay on the “Proofs of Ben Jonson’s Malignity, from the Commentators on Shakespeare”). A new edition of Gifford’s was published in 9 vols. in 1875 by Colonel F. Cunningham, as well as a cheap reprint in 3 vols. in 1870. Both contain the Conversations with Drummond, which were first printed in full by David Laing in the Shakespeare Society’s Publications (1842) and the Jonsonus Virbius, a collection (unparalleled in number and variety of authors) of poetical tributes, published about six months after Jonson’s death by his friends and admirers. There is also a single-volume edition, with a very readable memoir, by Barry Cornwall (1838). An edition of Ben Jonson’s works from the original texts was recently undertaken by C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson. A selection from his plays, edited for the “Mermaid” series in 1893–1895 by B. Nicholson, with an introduction by C. H. Herford, was reissued in 1904. W. W. Bang in his Materialien zur Kunde des alten englischen Dramas has reprinted from the folio of 1616 those of Ben Jonson’s plays which are contained in it (Louvain, 1905–1906). Every Man in his Humour and Every Man out of his Humour have been edited for the same series (16 and 17, 1905 and 1907) by W. W. Bang and W. W. Greg. Every Man in his Humour has also been edited, with a brief biographical as well as special introduction, to which the present sketch owes some details, by H. B. Wheatley (1877). Some valuable editions of plays by Ben Jonson have been recently published by American scholars in the Yale Studies in English, edited by A. S. Cook—The Poetaster, ed. H. S. Mallory (1905); The Alchemist, ed. C. M. Hathaway (1903); The Devil is an Ass, ed. W. S. Johnson (1905); The Staple of News, ed. De Winter (1905); The New Inn, ed. by G. Bremner (1908); The Sad Shepherd (with Waldron’s continuation) has been edited by W. W. Greg for Bang’s Materialien zur Kunde des alten englischen Dramas (Louvain, 1905).
The criticisms of Ben Jonson are too numerous for cataloguing here; among those by eminent Englishmen should be specially mentioned John Dryden’s, particularly those in his Essay on Dramatic Poësy (1667–1668; revised 1684), and in the preface to An Evening’s Love, or the Mock Astrologer (1668), and A. C. Swinburne’s Study of Ben Jonson (1889), in which, however, the significance of the Discoveries is misapprehended. See also F. G. Fleay, Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama (1891), i. 311–387, ii. 1–18; C. H. Herford, “Ben Jonson” (art. in Dict. Nat. Biog., vol. xxx., 1802); A. W. Ward, History of English Dramatic Literature, 2nd ed. (1899), ii. 296–407; and for a list of early impressions, W. W. Greg, List of English Plays written before 1643 and printed before 1700 (Bibliographical Society, 1900), pp. 55–58 and supplement 11–15. An important French work on Ben Jonson, both biographical and critical, and containing, besides many translations of scenes and passages, some valuable appendices, to more than one of which reference has been made above, is Maurice Castelain’s Ben Jonson, l’homme et l’œuvre (1907). Among treatises or essays on particular aspects of his literary work may be mentioned Emil Koeppel’s Quellenstudien zu den Dramen Ben Jonson’s, &c. (1895); the same writer’s “Ben Jonson’s Wirkung auf zeitgenössische Dramatiker,” &c., in Anglicistische Forschungen, 20 (1906); F. E. Schelling’s Ben Jonson and the Classical School (1898); and as to his masques, A. Soergel, Die englischen Maskenspiele (1882) and J. Schmidt, “Über Ben Jonson’s Maskenspiele,” in Herrig’s Archiv, &c., xxvii. 51–91. See also H. Reinsch, “Ben Jonson’s Poetik und seine Beziehungen zu Horaz,” in Münchener Beiträge, 16 (1899). (A. W. W.)
JOPLIN, a city of Jasper county, Missouri, U.S.A., on Joplin
creek, about 140 m. S. of Kansas City. Pop. (1890), 9943;
(1900), 26,023, of whom 893 were foreign-born and 773 were
negroes; (1910 census) 32,073. It is served by the Missouri
Pacific, the St Louis & San Francisco, the Missouri, Kansas
& Texas, and the Kansas City Southern railways, and by
interurban electric lines. The city has a fine court-house, a
United States government building, a Carnegie library and a
large auditorium. Joplin is the trade centre of a rich agricultural
and fruit-growing district, but its growth has been chiefly
due to its situation in one of the most productive zinc and lead
regions in the country, for which it is the commercial centre.
In 1906 the value of zinc-ore shipments from this Missouri-Kansas
(or Joplin) district was $12,074,105, and of shipments
of lead ore, $3,048,558. The value of Joplin’s factory product
in 1905 was $3,006,203, an increase of 29.3% since 1900.
Natural gas, piped from the Kansas fields, is used for light and
power, and electricity for commercial lighting and power is
derived from plants on Spring River, near Vark, Kansas, and on
Shoal creek. The municipality owns its electric-lighting plant;
the water-works are under private ownership. The first settlement
in the neighbourhood was made in 1838. In 1871 Joplin
was laid out and incorporated as a town; in 1872 it and a rival
town on the other side of Joplin creek were united under the
name Union City; in 1873 Union City was chartered as a city
