He is still the greatest unread English author.… Jonson has always had more attention from antiquarians than from critics, and has too often served as a cadaver over which to read a lecture on the lore of language and custom.2

And in 1948 Edmund Wilson commented, just as bleakly:

… among a thousand people, say, who have some knowledge and love of Shakespeare, and even some taste for Webster and Marlowe, I doubt whether you could find half a dozen who have any enthusiasm for Jonson or who have seriously read his plays. T. S. Eliot, admitting the long neglect into which Ben Jonson’s work had fallen, put up… a strong plea for Jonson as an artist, and thus made a respect for this poet de rigueur in literary circles. But one’s impression is that what people have read has been, not Jonson, but Eliot’s essay.1

Readers are still put off by talk of Jonson’s monumental learning and by the constant, artificial twinning, as in Milton’s lines, of a Jonson laboriously theoretical and a Shakespeare effortlessly inspired. Many critical discussions of Jonsonian comedy are bedevilled by the fact that writers on Shakespeare use Jonson as the convenient representative writer of ‘classical’ comedy, in order to contrast that genre with the richer Shakespearean comedy exemplified in Twelfth Night, As You Like It, or The Tempest. Jonson’s two great comedies, Volpone and The Alchemist, are not examples of a kind of play which is inherently inferior to Shakespearean comedy. They are comic masterpieces in their own right, but in a different tradition. Jonson’s best work for the theatre operates within narrow limits; it does not have the diversity of Shakespeare’s comedies, histories, and tragedies. The three plays reprinted here are the best three – though a case could be made for displacing Bartholomew Fair with The Silent Woman – and they are plays of the same broad, satiric scope. This makes it necessary, in the sections on individual plays, to emphasize their differences as well as their similarities, as a step towards evaluating them critically.

Jonson’s biography and the critical theories behind his plays are of secondary importance, despite the facts that Jonson’s was a life of compelling interest to the literary historian and that he was hugely respected in his own day as a prescriptive literary theorist. But some knowledge of the details of Jonson’s life, of his theories about literary composition and about what constituted literary excellence, and of his artistic assumptions, helps to put the three comedies in perspective for modern readers and playgoers.

II

Jonson was a great and colourful character. He probably killed a man in a hand-to-hand fight while soldiering in the Low Countries, and he certainly killed the actor Gabriel Spencer in a duel. He was imprisoned several times. He once worked as a bricklayer. He was a bonhomous, opinionated, and highly prized drinking companion in literary London, and the William Hickeys of this world might write him down as an habitué of the Mermaid Tavern, the Sun, the Dog, the Triple Tun, and the Apollo Room upstairs above the Old Devil. His output – as printed in his own Folio Workes or in the eleven stout, splendid, Oxonian volumes edited and annotated by C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson – demonstrates, however, that the greater part of his crowded life must have been spent in what W. B. Yeats once called ‘the sedentary toil of creative art’. It is as a writer that he is of interest to us today, not as a personality.

Ben Jonson was born, the posthumous son of a minister, in 1572, and, thanks to an unknown patron, he was educated at one of the great schools of the day, Westminster, where the headmaster was the scholar and antiquarian, William Camden. At a time when he might have expected to go up to Cambridge or Oxford, he was apprenticed, briefly and humiliatingly, to his stepfather as a bricklayer. He served as a soldier in the Low Countries, married, and was for a time an actor. From around 1597 he wrote plays for Philip Henslowe, working on such get-penny entertainments as Hot Anger Soon Cold and Richard Crookback as well as on the superb additions to the ever-popular melodrama The Spanish Tragedy. His first truly Jonsonian comedies were Everyman in his Humour, in which William Shakespeare acted in 1598, and Everyman out of his Humour; both are ‘comedies of humours’, in which each character is a type dominated by a ruling passion or obsession. To the complicated literary feud known as ‘The War of the Theatres’ Jonson contributed Poetaster and he was himself attacked in Satiromastix, or The Untrussing of the Humorous Poet. Soon after, however, he collaborated with Chapman and one of his attackers, Marston, on a racy London comedy Eastward Ho!, which contained a joke (‘I ken the man weel. He’s ane of my thirty pound knights’) about King James’s Scots accent and his mercenary creation of knights. The collaborators were imprisoned.