Yet already Jonson had won favour at Court and had created his first royal masque. The Masque of Blackness. He became the greatest English writer and contriver of these splendid Renaissance entertainments, producing thirty-three for King James, and inventing the grotesque comic interlude, the anti-masque. In most of these he collaborated with the famous architect and stage-designer, Inigo Jones, whose spectacular scenes and machines were later to eclipse Jonson’s poetry and songs.

Jonson’s great run of comedies consists of Volpone (1606), The Silent Woman (1609), The Alchemist (1610), written, like Shakespeare’s plays, for the King’s Men, and Bartholomew Fair (1614). His two Roman tragedies, correct by classical standards, Sejanus, his Fall (1603) and Catiline, his Conspiracy (1611) were failures in the theatre, but Professor G. E. Bentley’s researches have shown that Catiline was the most respected play of the seventeenth century, the tragedy educated people were expected to admire.1 Jonson’s later plays, which Dryden termed ‘dotages’, show a sad falling-off.

In 1616 Jonson published in folio The Workes of Beniamin Jonson, a daring act which had important reverberations. The Workes included not only epistles, satires, and epigrams (respectable literary genres) but also masques and nine play-scripts, edited as meticulously as if they had been philosophical treatises or a Spenserian epic. None of the early hack-work for Henslowe was printed, but the use of the title Workes for mere stage-plays was greeted with scorn and derision. Had Jonson not put his plays before the public in this collected edition, the actors Heming and Condell might never have undertaken the great posthumous collection of plays, many not previously printed, by William Shakespeare, the First Folio of 1623. The gossip John Aubrey records, ‘Ben Jonson was never a good Actor, but an excellent Instructor’, which suggests that he insisted on supervising rehearsals of his own plays – something in keeping with his finicky and exacting temperament and his (justifiable) pride in his work.

In the year his Workes were published in Folio, Jonson was granted a royal pension and made, in effect, Poet Laureate. King James wanted to make him a knight. He was uniquely honoured among Jacobean writers: Cambridge and Oxford gave him honorary degrees, and when he walked to Edinburgh in 1618 he was made an honorary burgess and entertained at a civic banquet costing, £220 6s. 4d., Scots – the Scots pound being worth 1s. 8d. He made a long stay with William Drummond of Hawthornden, the Scots poet, who jotted down his table-talk, which was pithy, opinionated, and revealing. His last years in London were unhappy. His library was burned. He became paralysed, and was unable to get out the second volume of his Workes. Under King Charles, James’s Laureate did not find favour: he quarrelled with Inigo Jones and was replaced as masque-writer at Court by Aurelian Townshend. He died on 6 August 1637, and his burial at Westminster Abbey was attended by ‘all or the greatest part of the nobility and gentry then in town’. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson in their Oxford edition end the biography thus:

Neglected as his later years had been, the passing of Ben was, for the entire world of letters, the passing of its king – a king who had perhaps ceased to govern, but who still reigned.1

In 1638 appeared a collection of thirty-three poems, Jonsonus Virbius, or The Memory of Ben Jonson Revived By The Friends of the Muses. The projected memorial to him in the Abbey never materialized. Instead, a square of marble was inscribed, at a cost (according to Aubrey) of eighteen-pence: ‘O Rare Ben Jonson.’

Jonson was, in a way that Shakespeare never was, a celebrity and a man of letters. He was a poet, a writer of court-masques, a literary theorist, a grammarian, a dramatist, and a pundit. His theories about composition and rhetoric are easily accessible in Timber, or Discoveries, posthumously pieced together from Jonson’s commonplace book, or even from lecture-notes, by Sir Kenelm Digby. There is nothing there specifically about the writing of comedies, but Jonson’s ideas on this subject would have matched Sir Philip Sidney’s definition:

Comedy is an imitation of the common errors of our life, which he presenteth in the most ridiculous and scornful sort that may be; so as it is impossible that any beholder can be content to be such a one.

The Prologue to Every Man in his Humour tells of the author’s ambition to offer models of comedy-writing:

He rather prays, you will be pleased to see
One such, today, as other plays should be.

Jonson promises:

… deeds and language, such as men do use,
And persons, such as Comedy would choose,
When she would show an image of the times,
And sport with human follies, not with crimes.

This, like the epistle-dedicatory of Volpone, aligns him with the satiric tradition of comedy – where comedy is didactic and offers moral correction. It points also to that classical notion of comedy as concerned, not like tragedy with kings and princes but with people placed low in the social scale, people of the city and the streets.