Ben Jonson Biographical Material

This is to get us started on the plays and some of the lyric poetry of Ben Johnson, so I just want to give you a little introduction to his life. If you took Shakespeare out of the period of literature that we're studying, it would still be known as the golden age of English literature. There were many good playwrights and just a plethora of plays. Londoners were crazy about going to plays. Remove Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe dies early, and Ben Johnson becomes the great playwright of the age, and English literature would still be well represented by him, in much the same way that French literature is represented by Moliere. Johnson was born in 1572. That makes him eight years Shakespeare's junior, but he knew Shakespeare well. The two men acted in each other's plays. Johnson wrote plays that were put on by the theater companies that Shakespeare was a stockholder in, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, and then when King James took over in 1603, the name of that company was changed to the King's Men, and Johnson also wrote plays for them. I'll go back a little bit and tell you some of Johnson's background. Like Shakespeare, Johnson wasn't a university man. He didn't come from a wealthy enough family, prominent enough family. Shakespeare, same thing. It didn't matter. They both got good grammar school educations, and Johnson got a better one at Shakespeare. Johnson studied with William Camden, one of the great humanist scholars of the day. Johnson went to the best grammar school in London as a scholarship boy, so somehow or other he was noticed for being very, very bright, even at an early age. And this must have been a bit unusual, because Johnson's father was a bricklayer, and Johnson worked as an apprentice for his stepfather. His trade was bricklaying, and he must have gotten quite a few muscles. It must have been a hard, back-breaking job. Johnson didn't like it, we know that, and he didn't particularly like his stepfather either. At any rate, Johnson left home at a fairly young age, and in his 20s, he was in the army in the Low Countries, in the Netherlands, where Protestant and Catholic forces were ranged against each other, and he was in an area where there was something very much kind of like World War I trench warfare going on. He was on one side of a battlefield, the Spaniards were on the other, they were camped there, dug in. And so one day, Johnson, perhaps a little bit bored, stood up and shouted to the other lines that he challenged, because they were close, challenged their best, toughest fighter to come out and meet him in the middle of no man's land to fight to the death for the honor of their respective countries. Well, the Spanish send out a challenger, Johnson met him and killed him. So this is the kind of guy that Johnson was. He was capable of great physical violence. And this surfaced again years later when he was a playwright in London. He got into a beef with an actor named Gabriel Spencer over a debt. They fought a duel, he killed Gabriel Spencer. Now, dueling was illegal, so that was a homicide. And Johnson could have been executed, but Johnson knew Latin, and he was able to read what they called a neck verse, because if you could read this verse in Latin, it saved your neck. Now, how did that come about? It's kind of an interesting little piece of history. In the Middle Ages, people who could write were rare. We didn't want to just go sacrificing them just because they killed somebody, right? They were too valuable for that. They got what was in effect one free homicide, unless that homicide somehow linked them to treason. In that case, nothing was going to say about it. But if they just killed some poor schmuck, like an actor, who cares about actors anyway, you know, they were branded on the thumb as a record that they had a previous homicide. Not a very good record-keeping system in those days on paper, but you made it stick. So Johnson was branded on the thumb and released, and he continued to work in drama and write plays. Johnson also was thrown in jail for writing a play that James I, the new King of England, didn't like. It was called The Isle of Dogs, and it was a savage satire, particularly aimed at the Scots, who had come down with King James from Scotland to start running England. He made fun of their accents. He made fun of their stupidity. He was merciless, along with two other writers at the play. He was thrown in jail. Another writer was thrown in jail. He probably worried about his fate. One guy got away and didn't resurface until things had blown over. While he was in prison, Johnson met a Catholic priest, and he had conversations with the priest, and he converted. Converted from the Church of England to being Roman Catholic, another gutsy, stubborn thing to do. And he remained Roman Catholic for many, many years, until he couldn't really make that work together with his profession. It was really hard to get anywhere if you were Catholic. There were a lot of laws that were aimed against you, specifically socially. It was a problem. And so probably under that kind of pressure, Johnson reconverted to being a typical English Protestant in the Anglican Church, where he remained until his death. Johnson, though, was one of the high church Anglicans. He always had a kind of sympathy for things Catholic, as did a lot of the people who followed James I, and especially the ones who became the Cavaliers who followed Charles I during the Civil War. A lot of these people, like Robert Herrick, John Suckwing, looked up to Johnson as an exemplar of a man of great poetic skill and a person of great integrity. A group of younger poets formed around Johnson as he got older, and they called themselves the Tribe of Ben. They met regularly at the Mermaid Tavern to read their verses to each other, drink sack, and simply have a good time. They valued friendship. They valued being social with each other. We're going to see some of this in Johnson's poetry, particularly on inviting a friend to dinner. There were many poems written to Ben Johnson, clearly out of gratitude for his mentorship, for his poetry, for leading the Tribe of Ben. Johnson himself has one of the commendatory poems to Shakespeare's First Folio, where he says, Shakespeare was not for an age, but for all time. Johnson wrote very different kinds of plays than William Shakespeare. Shakespeare's plays, to me, are much deeper than Johnson's plays. Shakespeare is interested in the possibility of human transformation. He's interested in the possibility that societies can come back from relatively catastrophic situations. Shakespeare is finally, at bottom, I think, an optimist about human possibilities. Johnson, on the other hand, is not. Johnson is a pessimist, and when he writes a comedy, it's a satire. Johnson doesn't expect people to be able to change, and his plays, in his plays, they basically don't change. So, we're going to take a look at two of his plays in this class. First, The Alchemist. Second, Bartholomew Fair. If I use this tape in another class, we may very well be looking at Bull Pony, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair. So, I will address future possibilities here. Johnson writes what is called city comedy. His four great comedies are Bull Pony, Epicene, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair. Bull Pony would be a city comedy, but it doesn't take place in London, and that's part of the definition of a city comedy. It takes place in Venice, but it is constructed just like a city comedy. We see all different kinds of people. We see a group of very, very smart crooks who don't trust each other, taking advantage of people who have great weaknesses, especially greed. This is essentially the same plot as The Alchemist, except The Alchemist is even a crazier, more energetic comedy than Bull Pony. This takes place in London, and we see, again, a wide range of citizens of London, and to a large extent, it's about life in London. London was always a dynamic city, according to the standards of the day. It was getting much more that way during Ben Johnson's time. Lots of people from the country came into London to try to find work, and so the city was always in upheaval, always in change. When you look at The Alchemist, change is what it's about. Alchemy is about changing base metals into gold somehow. It's also about language, how you can use language to take a sort of base metal like dapper or able drugger or sort of epicure mammon and spin it around them and get gold out of them. Language is one of the great con jobs in all of Shakespeare's satirical comedies about London life. So, Bartholomew Fair, we have a fair, a place where you go to buy different things, have fun, eat pig, we'll find out. For us, I guess it'd be hot dogs. Anyway, to just have a good time and also probably to be conned, probably to be conned in one way or another, which is in some ways part of the fun of going to a fair, provided it's not too bad. So, this is the territory of Ben Johnson. When we look at his poetry, we're going to see something which is quite different than Shakespeare's sonnets, quite different than anything Dunn wrote. Johnson is a very straightforward, plain style poet, pretty much just says what he means in a kind of very sober way. I think the key to understanding Johnson is the idea of the gathered self, the self that despite all the storms of the world, everything that the world presents to you, which would transform you, you have this inner core of integrity that you are able to hang on to and preserve. We'll see that exemplified in several of his lyric poems. All right, that's enough for now. Next shot, next clip, we'll go on to the outpost.