Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Ben Jonson (1572-1637) - Coggle Diagram
Ben Jonson (1572-1637)
Personal life
He grew up in relatively poor conditions; attended elementary school and then Westminster grammar school; instead of completing his studies, he apprenticed under his stepfather, a bricklayer, but he abandoned his work and went to fight in the Low Countries
He became a Catholic after having been imprisoned for manslaughter; he avoided execution by reading aloud a psalm in Latin ("neck-verse") thus earning himself the far more lenient punishments reserved for clergymen. He remained Catholic for twelve years, then returned to Anglicanism to avoid being excluded from Court - but he kept Catholic sympathies
He was often involved in trouble with authority and despite being an esteemed member of the royal court, both his writings and his personal life were always closely scrutinized
at one moment, he was even involved in some way with the organizers of the Gunpowder Plot!
Between his 50s and 60s his health declined a lot; he was also fighting with poverty (not the only moment in his life due to his generous habits)
He was married to Anne Lewis, about whom we know very little: we do know that hedescribed her as ‘a shrew but honest’ and that despite them spending increasing periods of time apart, their separation was never absolute and they had several children
Playwright
Unlike Shakespeare, Jonson never technically belonged to any company, but he wrote for the Pembroke's Men, the Admiral's Men, and for boy companies
Comedies: A Tale of A Tub; The Isle of Dogs; Every Man in His Humour; Every Man Out of His Humour; Poetaster; Eastward Ho!; The Alchemist, Epicoene or The Silent Woman; Bartholomew Fair; The Devil is an Ass; Volpone or The Fox; etc.
city comedies: plays set in London, with citizens as characters; these comedies were typically moral (set out to denounce anyone who besmirched the name of London) and more realistic than other plays
Jonsonian humour: an obsession or affectation that renders a person comic or ridiculous, out of line w/ society, and in need of comic reformation
Tragedies: Sejanus His Fall, Catiline His Conspiracy
Masques: The Masque of Blackness; The Masque of Queens; The Gypsy Metamorphosed; Love's Triumph Through Callipolis; Chloridia
concept of "antimasque": a device to set off the entry of masque's heroic characters, in which a rabble of threatening or grotesque antimasquers would miraculously vanish at the entry of the main characters (vice is vanished by virtue)
most of them in collaboration w/genius architect Inigo Jones, who devised not only ingenious stage machinery and exotic costumes, but also perspectival scenery, a crucial innovation in the history of theatre
The roots of Jonson's theatre are found in classicism, humanism, and in his own colourful life in early modern London; he wants to guide the audience to key issues, but is also ill at ease with their unpredictability
despite often openly declaring a purpose of moral reform, his comedies often end on a note of tolerant good humour and a recognition of shared humanity
his plays follow an "open" mode of representation: no clear boundary b/w the onstage world and the real world (the audience's participation is explicitly acknowledged + the plays are located in the moment of their production)
Not only a playwright!
Jonson did not want to be known as a mere "man of the theatre"; he wanted to excel in all Renaissance humanistic endeavours (poetry, history, philology, rhetoric and playwriting)
He published his own plays, creating a rather modern idea of authorial ownership
He wrote an English Grammar, translated Horace's Ars Poetica, and three collections of poems