Contributions
Stepson of a bricklayer, a former brickmaking apprentice and soldier in the Low Countries, Ben Jonson rose by talent alone to become the first man of letters of Jacobean England. As a playwright he brought the satirical comedy of "humours" to its height: Volpone, Epicoene, The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair paint with ferocious verve the vices, greed and impostures of his age. At the court of James I, working with the architect Inigo Jones, he invented the great English masque, a total spectacle of poetry, music, dance and machinery. As a poet he wrote epigrams, odes and lyric pieces of classical purity ("To Celia," "On My First Son") and became the model for a generation of disciples, the "Sons of Ben." In 1616, in an unprecedented gesture, he published his own Works in a folio volume, claiming for the theatre the dignity of literature. Pensioned by the king, he is regarded as England's first poet laureate in fact.
Significance
Jonson established the idea that the playwright is a full author, learned, conscious of his art and of his debt to the Ancients: his 1616 Folio opened the way to Shakespeare's First Folio. His regulated, moral satirical comedy founded a tradition running on to Molière and the English comedy of manners; his limpid, controlled classical lyric guided a whole line of "Cavalier" poets. But the man was also proud, quarrelsome and violent. He killed the actor Gabriel Spencer in a duel in 1598 and escaped hanging only through benefit of clergy; he was imprisoned several times, for debt and for plays judged seditious. An avowed egotist, he judged his contemporaries without mercy — including Shakespeare, whom he admired but whose want of "art" he mocked. His end was bitter: paralysed, ruined, forgotten by the new fashion, he died poor in 1637. The self-taught man who became the arbiter of taste never ceased to defend, against all comers, the high idea he held of the writer's calling.
Influence
He founded English satirical comedy and the court masque, modelled the "Cavalier" poets (Herrick, Carew) who called themselves "Sons of Ben," and, by publishing his Works, legitimised the status of the dramatic author. His classicism and formal rigour fed seventeenth-century English poetry. He himself fed on the Latin classics — Horace, Juvenal, Martial, the comedy of Plautus and Terence — claiming a learned imitation of the Ancients and a doctrine of "art" against unbridled invention; London's popular stage and the Stuart court gave him his two grounds.
Anecdote
In September 1598, just after the success of his first great comedy, Jonson fought a duel in the fields of Shoreditch and killed the actor Gabriel Spencer. Tried for murder, he escaped the gallows by pleading benefit of clergy: he recited in Latin the "neck verse," proving he could read, and was handed to the ecclesiastical courts. He got off branded on the thumb with a "T" for Tyburn, the gallows he had barely avoided. Nearly forty years later, buried upright in Westminster Abbey — because, it is said, he could afford no more than eighteen inches of ground — he received the most laconic and most fitting of epitaphs: "O rare Ben Jonson."