Ben Jonson As A Playwright

BEN JONSON AS A
PLAYWRIGHT
English Drama
Presentation by- Pragyanjali Sahoo
BACKGROUND
TOPICS TO BE THEATRICAL CAREER
COVERED
MAJOR WORKS
HIS PERSONAL LIFE/

PERSONALITY
IMPORTANCE AS A
PLAYWRIGHT
BACKGROUND
• Ben Jonson, byname of Benjamin Jonson, was born
on June 11, 1572 in London, England.
• He was born into relative poverty. His father died
shortly before his birth, and his mother remarried a
bricklayer.By good fortune the boy was able
to attend Westminster School.
• After leaving school Jonson attempted to join his
stepfather as a bricklayer, but the profession didn't
take. In the 1590s Jonson served in the armed
forces in the Low Countries. He returned to
England at around 1592.
• Married Anne Lewis in November 1594. He
described her as "a shrew, yet honest."
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Theatrical
Career
• On returning to England, he became an
actor and playwright, experiencing the life
of a strolling player.
• He apparently played the leading role of
Hieronimo in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish
Tragedy.
• By 1597 he was writing plays for Philip
Henslowe, the leading impresario for the
public theatre.
• It was also in this year that his earliest
surviving play, The Case is Altered, was
performed by Pembroke's Company.
Every Man in His Humour
• Year 1598, abrupt change in Jonson’s status.
• When Every Man in His Humour was successfully presented by the Lord Chamberlain’s
theatrical company, his reputation was established.
• In this play Jonson tried to bring the spirit and manner of Latin comedy to the English popular
stage by presenting the story of a young man with an eye for a girl, who has difficulty with a
phlegmatic father, is dependent on a clever servant, and is ultimately successful.
• But at the same time Jonson sought to embody in four of the main characters the four
“humours” of medieval and Renaissance medicine—choler, melancholy, phlegm, and blood—
which were thought to determine human physical and mental makeup.

BEN JONSON
“In small proportions we just beauties see;

And in short measures, life may perfect be.”

MAJOR WORKS
In addition to writing numerous masques,
including Entertainment at Althorpe and The Masque of
Blackness, Jonson wrote his four most famous plays, considered
his major comedies—Volpone, The Alchemist, Epicoene,
and Bartholomew Fair—all within eight years.
At this point, Jonson’s popularity as a playwright in England was
second only to Shakespeare, and many contemporaries wrote in
print that they preferred Jonson.

TOO WITTY FOR HIS OWN GOOD!
o Jonson's sharp tongue got him into no end of trouble: In summer of 1597 the satirical
comedy The Isle of Dogs, which Jonson co-wrote with Thomas Nashe, was performed,
and the play upset the powers that be. Jonson was arrested along with two other actors.
o Jonson’s Eastward Ho! was a response to John Webster's and Thomas Dekker's Northward
Ho!, and a salacious one at that. The play mocked King James, the Scots, knights of the
realm, and courtiers, and all three playwrights were imprisoned until October.
o In 1598, Jonson killed a fellow actor in a duel, and, though he escaped capital
punishment by pleading “benefit of clergy” (the ability to read from the Latin Bible), he
could not escape branding. During his brief imprisonment over the affair he became a
Roman Catholic.

In the late Jacobean and Caroline years, it was he, Shakespeare,
and Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher who provided all the
models. But it was he, and he alone, who gave the essential
impulse to dramatic characterization in comedy of the Restoration
and also in the 18th and 19th centuries.
An important playwright
• Jonson was aware of his legacy to a degree unprecedented
among early modern playwrights. He was the first
playwright to ensure his own works were published as a
formal folio, treating his plays as works of literary note
rather than as frivolous stage plays.
• The 1616 folio divided his works into plays, poetry,
masques, and entertainments. Jonson was witty, intelligent,
well read, and as capable a poet as he was a playwright.
• "On My First Sonne", an elegy written after the death of his
seven-year-old son Benjamin, is truly heartbreaking. Jonson
was a true Renaissance man.
Jonson suffered a series of strokes, fell out of court favor, and

died on 6 August 1637.

Thank You :)
-pragya

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BEN JONSON AS A

TOPICS TO BE THEATRICAL CAREER

HIS PERSONAL LIFE/

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2023 Ben Jonson as a Playwright 5

“In small proportions we just beauties see;

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Jonson suffered a series of strokes, fell out of court favor, and

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