



Produced by Sue Asscher and Amy E. Zelmer





EVERY MAN IN HIS HUMOUR

By Ben Jonson




INTRODUCTION

THE greatest of English dramatists except Shakespeare, the first
literary dictator and poet-laureate, a writer of verse, prose,
satire, and criticism who most potently of all the men of his time
affected the subsequent course of English letters: such was Ben
Jonson, and as such his strong personality assumes an interest to
us almost unparalleled, at least in his age.

Ben Jonson came of the stock that was centuries after to give to
the world Thomas Carlyle; for Jonson's grandfather was of
Annandale, over the Solway, whence he migrated to England.
Jonson's father lost his estate under Queen Mary, "having been cast
into prison and forfeited."  He entered the church, but died a
month before his illustrious son was born, leaving his widow and
child in poverty.  Jonson's birthplace was Westminster, and the
time of his birth early in 1573.  He was thus nearly ten years
Shakespeare's junior, and less well off, if a trifle better born.
But Jonson did not profit even by this slight advantage.  His
mother married beneath her, a wright or bricklayer, and Jonson was
for a time apprenticed to the trade.  As a youth he attracted the
attention of the famous antiquary, William Camden, then usher at
Westminster School, and there the poet laid the solid foundations
of his classical learning.  Jonson always held Camden in
veneration, acknowledging that to him he owed,

"All that I am in arts, all that I know;"

and dedicating his first dramatic success, "Every Man in His
Humour," to him.  It is doubtful whether Jonson ever went to either
university, though Fuller says that he was "statutably admitted
into St. John's College, Cambridge."  He tells us that he took no
degree, but was later "Master of Arts in both the universities, by
their favour, not his study."  When a mere youth Jonson enlisted as
a soldier, trailing his pike in Flanders in the protracted wars of
William the Silent against the Spanish.  Jonson was a large and
raw-boned lad; he became by his own account in time exceedingly
bulky.  In chat with his friend William Drummond of Hawthornden,
Jonson told how "in his service in the Low Countries he had, in the
face of both the camps, killed an enemy, and taken opima spolia
from him;" and how "since his coming to England, being appealed to
the fields, he had killed his adversary which had hurt him in the
arm and whose sword was ten inches longer than his."  Jonson's
reach may have made up for the lack of his sword; certainly his
prowess lost nothing in the telling.  Obviously Jonson was brave,
combative, and not averse to talking of himself and his doings.

In 1592, Jonson returned from abroad penniless.  Soon after he
married, almost as early and quite as imprudently as Shakespeare.
He told Drummond curtly that "his wife was a shrew, yet honest";
for some years he lived apart from her in the household of Lord
Albany.  Yet two touching epitaphs among Jonson's "Epigrams," "On
my first daughter," and "On my first son," attest the warmth of the
poet's family affections.  The daughter died in infancy, the son of
the plague; another son grew up to manhood little credit to his
father whom he survived.  We know nothing beyond this of Jonson's
domestic life.

How soon Jonson drifted into what we now call grandly "the
theatrical profession" we do not know.  In 1593, Marlowe made his
tragic exit from life, and Greene, Shakespeare's other rival on the
popular stage, had preceded Marlowe in an equally miserable death
the year before.  Shakespeare already had the running to himself.
Jonson appears first in the employment of Philip Henslowe, the
exploiter of several troupes