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Updated: May 3, 2025
Of all Jonson's pieces there is hardly one which, as it stands, would please on the stage in the present day, even as most of them failed to please in his own time; extracts from them, however, could hardly fail to be successful. In general, much might be borrowed from him, and much might be learned both from his merits and defects.
It is most instructive to compare Julius Cæsar with Ben Jonson's Catiline and Sejanus. Jonson was careful not to go beyond his text. In Catiline he translates almost literally the whole of Cicero's first oration against Catiline. Sejanus is a mosaic of passages from Tacitus and Suetonius. There is none of this dead learning in Shakspere's play.
Shakespeare displays some fellow feeling for the object of his satire, but Jonson's satire is cold and devoid of sympathy. Jonson deliberately took his stand in opposition to the romantic spirit of the age. Marlowe and Shakespeare had disregarded the classical unities and had developed the drama on romantic lines.
As the restoration of the Stuarts to the throne of England inaugurated a new period in English criticism, during which English critical theories were largely influenced by French criticism, this study will stop short of this, restricting itself to the years between the publication of Thomas Wilson's Arte of Rhetorique in 1553 and that of Ben Jonson's Timber in 1641.
In that character, methinks, I am reading Jonson's verses to the memory of Shakespeare; an insolent, sparing, and invidious panegyric: where good nature the most godlike commendation of a man is only attributed to your person, and denied to your writings; for they are everywhere so full of candour, that, like Horace, you only expose the follies of men without arraigning their vices; and in this excel him, that you add that pointedness of thought which is visibly wanting in our great Roman.
For the use of the word civility, see ante ii. 155. See ante, i. 447. See ante, April 18, 1775. See post, April 15, 1778. It would not become me to expatiate on this strong and pointed remark, in which a very great deal of meaning is condensed. 'Mr. Wilkes's second political essay was an ironical dedication to the Earl of Bute of Ben Jonson's play, The Fall of Mortimer.
Yet, in spite of the royal condescension, Dolly felt terribly afraid, and owned to Raleigh that she was very glad to get outside the palace doors again. On another day the knight took them to the play on the other side of the river, where they saw a comedy of Ben Jonson's.
Indeed, in the remarks on Jonson's comedies that immediately follow, he expressly rejects them; and seldom does he show a more nicely balanced judgment than in what he there says on the limits of imitation in the field of art.
"There," said Master Shakspere, pointing to the second bag, "are one hundred and fifty gold rose-nobles. In the other just three hundred more. Neighbor Attwood, we shall have no paupers here." Everybody laughed then and clapped their hands, and the London players gave a rousing cheer. Master Ben Jonson's shout might have been heard in Market Square.
There are some admirable scenes in Ben Jonson's Volpone, showing the humours of a legacy-hunter, and the different ways of fobbing him off with excuses and assurances of not being forgotten. Yet it is hardly right, after all, to encourage this kind of pitiful, barefaced intercourse without meaning to pay for it, as the coquette has no right to jilt the lovers she has trifled with.
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