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On June 11, 1572, Ben Jonson, English playwright and poet (Volpone), was born in London (d. 1637). From the article:
"Ben Jonson
1572–1637
The poet, essayist, and playwright Ben Jonson was born on June 11, 1572 in London, England. His father, a minister, died shortly before his birth and his mother remarried a bricklayer.
Jonson was raised in Westminster and attended St. Martin's parish school and Westminster School, where he came under the influence of the classical scholar William Camden. He left the Westminster school in 1589, worked briefly in his stepfather's trade as a bricklayer, then served in the military at Flanders, before working as an actor and playwright for Philip Henslowe's theater company.
In 1594, Jonson married Anne Lewis and began to work as an actor and playwright. Jonson and Lewis had at least two children, but little else is known of their marriage.
In 1598, Jonson wrote what is considered his first great play, Every Man in His Humor. In a 1616 production, William Shakespeare acted in one of the lead roles. Shortly after the play opened, Jonson killed Gabriel Spencer in a duel and was tried for murder. He was released by pleading "benefit of clergy" (i.e., by proving he could read and write in Latin, he was allowed to face a more lenient court). He spent only a few weeks in prison, but shortly after his release he was again arrested for failing to pay an actor.
Under King James I, Jonson received royal favor and patronage. Over the next fifteen years many of his most famous satirical plays, including Volpone (1606) and The Alchemist (1610), were produced for the London stage. In 1616, he was granted a substantial pension of 100 marks a year, and is often identified as England's first Poet Laureate.
His circle of admirers and friends, who called themselves the "Tribe of Ben," met regularly at the Mermaid Tavern and later at the Devil's Head. Among his followers were nobles such as the Duke and Duchess of Newcastle as well as writers including Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace, Sir John Suckling, James Howell, and Thomas Carew.
Jonson was also friends with many of the writers of his day, and many of his most well-known poems include tributes to friends such as Shakespeare, John Donne, and Francis Bacon.
Ben Jonson died in Westminster on August 8, 1637. A tremendous crowd of mourners attended his burial at Westminster Abbey. He is regarded as one of the major dramatists and poets of the seventeenth century."
"Ben Jonson
1572–1637
The poet, essayist, and playwright Ben Jonson was born on June 11, 1572 in London, England. His father, a minister, died shortly before his birth and his mother remarried a bricklayer.
Jonson was raised in Westminster and attended St. Martin's parish school and Westminster School, where he came under the influence of the classical scholar William Camden. He left the Westminster school in 1589, worked briefly in his stepfather's trade as a bricklayer, then served in the military at Flanders, before working as an actor and playwright for Philip Henslowe's theater company.
In 1594, Jonson married Anne Lewis and began to work as an actor and playwright. Jonson and Lewis had at least two children, but little else is known of their marriage.
In 1598, Jonson wrote what is considered his first great play, Every Man in His Humor. In a 1616 production, William Shakespeare acted in one of the lead roles. Shortly after the play opened, Jonson killed Gabriel Spencer in a duel and was tried for murder. He was released by pleading "benefit of clergy" (i.e., by proving he could read and write in Latin, he was allowed to face a more lenient court). He spent only a few weeks in prison, but shortly after his release he was again arrested for failing to pay an actor.
Under King James I, Jonson received royal favor and patronage. Over the next fifteen years many of his most famous satirical plays, including Volpone (1606) and The Alchemist (1610), were produced for the London stage. In 1616, he was granted a substantial pension of 100 marks a year, and is often identified as England's first Poet Laureate.
His circle of admirers and friends, who called themselves the "Tribe of Ben," met regularly at the Mermaid Tavern and later at the Devil's Head. Among his followers were nobles such as the Duke and Duchess of Newcastle as well as writers including Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace, Sir John Suckling, James Howell, and Thomas Carew.
Jonson was also friends with many of the writers of his day, and many of his most well-known poems include tributes to friends such as Shakespeare, John Donne, and Francis Bacon.
Ben Jonson died in Westminster on August 8, 1637. A tremendous crowd of mourners attended his burial at Westminster Abbey. He is regarded as one of the major dramatists and poets of the seventeenth century."
Ben Jonson | Academy of American Poets
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Benjamin "Ben" Jonson was born in June, 1572. A contemporary of William Shakespeare, he is best known for his satirical plays; Volpone, The Alchemist, and Ba...
Thank you, my friend SGT (Join to see) for making us aware that June 11 is the anniversary of the birth of English playwright, essayist, and poet Ben Jonson.
The Poetry of Ben Jonson
"Benjamin "Ben" Jonson was born in June, 1572. A contemporary of William Shakespeare, he is best known for his satirical plays; Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, and his equally accomplished lyric poems.
A man of vast reading and a seemingly insatiable appetite for controversy, including time in jail and a penchant for switching faiths, Jonson had an unparalleled breadth of influence on Jacobean and Caroline playwrights and poets.
In 1616 Jonson was appointed by King James I to receive a yearly pension of £60 to become what is now recognised as the post of the first official Poet Laureate.
He died on the 6th of August, 1637 at Westminster and is buried in the north aisle of the nave at Westminster Abbey.
A master of both playwriting and poetry his reputation continues to endure and reach a new audience with each succeeding generation."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWjPtVafvXc
Ben Jonson background from poetryfoundation.org/poets/ben-jonson
"Ben Jonson is among the best-known writers and theorists of English Renaissance literature, second in reputation only to Shakespeare. A prolific dramatist and a man of letters highly learned in the classics, he profoundly influenced the Augustan age through his emphasis on the precepts of Horace, Aristotle, and other classical Greek and Latin thinkers. While he is now remembered primarily for his satirical comedies, he also distinguished himself as a poet, preeminent writer of masques, erudite defender of his work, and the originator of English literary criticism. Jonson’s professional reputation is often obscured by that of the man himself: bold, independent and aggressive. He fashioned for himself an image as the sole arbiter of taste, standing for erudition and the supremacy of classical models against what he perceived as the general populace’s ignorant preference for the sensational. While his direct influence can be seen in each genre he undertook, his ultimate legacy is considered to be his literary craftsmanship, his strong sense of artistic form and control, and his role in bringing, as Alexander Pope noted, “critical learning into vogue.”
Jonson was born in London shortly after the death of his father, a minister who claimed descent from the Scottish gentry. Despite a poor upbringing, he was educated at Westminster School under the renowned antiquary William Camden. He apparently left his schooling unwillingly to work with his stepfather as a bricklayer. He then served as a volunteer in the Low Countries in the Dutch war against Spain, and the story is told that he defeated a challenger in single combat between the opposing armies, stripping his vanquished opponent of his arms in the classical fashion. Returning to England by 1592, Jonson married Anne Lewis in 1594. Although the union was unhappy, it produced several children, all of whom Jonson outlived. In the years following his marriage, he became an actor and also wrote numerous “get-penny” entertainments—financially motivated and quickly composed plays. He also provided respected emendations and additions to Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1592). By 1597 he was writing for Philip Henslowe’s theatrical company. That year, Henslowe employed Jonson to finish Thomas Nashe’s satire The Isle of Dogs (now lost), but the play was suppressed for alleged seditious content and Jonson was jailed for a short time. In 1598 the earliest of his extant works, Every Man in His Humour, was produced by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men with William Shakespeare—who became close friends with Jonson—in the cast. That same year, Jonson fell into further trouble after killing actor Gabriel Spencer in a duel, narrowly escaping the gallows by claiming benefit of clergy (meaning he was shown leniency for proving that he was literate and educated). While incarcerated at Newgate prison, Jonson converted to Catholicism.
Shortly thereafter, writing for the Children of the Queen’s Chapel, Jonson became embroiled in a public feud with playwrights John Marston and Thomas Dekker. In Cynthia’s Revells and Poetaster (both 1601), Jonson portrayed himself as the impartial, well informed judge of art and society and wrote unflattering portraits of the two dramatists. Marston and Dekker counterattacked with a satiric portrayal of Jonson in the play Satiromastix; or, The Untrussing of the Humorous Poet (1602). Interestingly, scholars speculate that the dispute, which became known as the “War of the Theatres,” was mutually contrived in order to further the authors’ careers. In any event, Jonson later reconciled with Marston, and collaborated with him and George Chapman in writing Eastward Ho! (1605). A joke at the King’s expense in this play landed him once again, along with his coauthors, in prison. Once freed, however, Jonson entered a period of good fortune and productivity. He had many friends at court, and James I valued his learning highly. His abilities thus did not go unrecognized, and he was frequently called upon to write his popular, elegant masques, such as The Masque of Blacknesse (1605). During this period, Jonson also produced his most successful comedies, beginning in 1606 with Volpone and following with The Silent Woman (1609), The Alchemist (1610), and Bartholomew Fayre (1614). Jonson’s remaining tragedies, Sejanus His Fall (1603) and Catiline His Conspiracy (1611), though monuments to his scholarship, were not well received due to their rigid imitation of classical tragic forms and their pedantic tone.
In 1616 Jonson published his Workes, becoming the first English writer to dignify his dramas by terming them “works,” and for this perceived presumption he was soundly ridiculed. In that year Jonson assumed the responsibilities and privileges of Poet Laureate, though without formal appointment. From 1616 to 1625 he primarily wrote masques for presentation at court. He had already collaborated with poet, architect, and stage designer Inigo Jones one several court masques, and the two continued their joint efforts, establishing the reign of James I as the period of the consummate masque. For his achievements, the University of Oxford honored him in 1619 with a master of arts degree.
Misfortune, however, marked Jonson’s later years. A fire destroyed his library in 1623, and when James I died in 1625, Jonson lost much of his influence at court, though he was named City Chronologer in 1628. Later that year, he suffered the first of several strokes which left him bedridden. Jonson produced four plays during the reign of Charles I, and was eventually granted a new pension in 1634. None of these later plays was successful. The rest of his life, spent in retirement, he filled primarily with study and writing; at his death, on August 6, 1637, two unfinished plays were discovered among his mass of papers and manuscripts. Jonson left a financially depleted estate, but was nevertheless buried with honor in Westminster Abbey.
Jonson’s earliest comedies, such as Every Man in His Humour, derive from Roman comedy in form and structure and are noteworthy as models of the comedy of “humours,” in which each character represents a type dominated by a particular obsession. Although Jonson was not the first to employ the comedy of humours, his use of the form in Every Man in His Humour and Every Man out of His Humour is considered exemplary, and such characterization continued to be a feature of his work. Of particular significance in appraisals of Jonson are the four comical satires produced between 1606 and 1614: Volpone, The Silent Woman, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fayre. Each exposes some aberration of human appetite through comic exaggeration and periodic moralisms while evincing Jonson’s interest in the variety of life and in the villain as a cunning, imaginative artist. Volpone, his most famous and most frequently staged work, is also his harshest attack on human vice, specifically targeting greed. Like The Silent Woman and The Alchemist, it mixes didactic intent with scenes of tightly constructed comic counterpoise. The last of Jonson’s great dramas is the panoramic Bartholomew Fayre. Softening the didacticism that characterized his earlier work, Jonson expressed the classical moralist’s views of wisdom and folly through a multiplicity of layered, interrelated plots in a colorfully portrayed and loosely structured form. All four comedies exhibit careful planning executed with classical precision, a command of low speech and colloquial usage, and a movement toward more realistic, three-dimensional character depiction.
Critics note that Jonson’s later plays, beginning with The Divell is an Asse in 1616, betray the dramatist’s diminishing artistry. These later dramas were dismissed by John Dryden, who undertook the first extensive analysis of Jonson, as mere “dotages.” While generously likening him to Virgil and calling him “the most learned and judicious writer which any theatre ever had,” Dryden’s comments also signaled the start of a decline in Jonson’s reputation, for his observations included a comparison of Jonson and Shakespeare, one which nodded admiringly toward Jonson, but bowed adoringly before Shakespeare. This telling comparison colored Jonson’s reputation for more than 200 years, fueled by such 19th-century Romantic critics as Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1818), and William Hazlitt (1819), who found Jonson lacking in imagination, delicacy, and soul. His “greatest defect,” according to George Saintsbury, was the “want of passion.” “Yet,” he conceded, “his merits are extraordinary.” Most 19th-century critics agreed with the assessment of John Addington Symonds that the “higher gifts of poetry, with which Shakespeare—‘nature’s child’—was so richly endowed, are almost absolutely wanting in Ben Jonson.”
T.S. Eliot, writing in 1919, focused attention on Jonson’s reputation as “the most deadly kind that can be compelled upon the memory of a great poet. To be universally accepted; to be damned by the praise that quenches all desire to read the book; to be afflicted by the imputation of the virtues which excite the least pleasure; and to be read only by historians and antiquaries—this is the most perfect conspiracy of approval.” With this began a reevaluation of Jonson, whose reputation benefited from modernist reaction against Romanticist sensibility, and who began to be appreciated on his own terms. English critic L.C. Knights, in 1937, considered Jonson “a very great poet”; and while Edmund Wilson, in 1948, still found none of Shakespeare’s “immense range” in Jonson, he thought him “a great man of letters” and acknowledged his influence on writers as diverse as Milton, Congreve, Swift, and Huxley. Recent scholarship has sought to place Jonson in the theatrical and political milieu of London, addressing his relationship with his audience and the monarchy. This focus on historical context has also produced an emphasis on the former bricklayer’s “self-fashioning” into dramatist, critic, and finally the first poet laureate. Many critics now regard him as a fore-runner in the 17th-century movement toward classicism, and his plays are often admired for their accurate depictions of the men and women of his day, their mastery of form, and their successful blend of the serious and the comic, the topical, and the timeless."
FYI LTC Stephen C. LTC (Join to see) Lt Col John (Jack) Christensen Lt Col Charlie Brown Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. Maj William W. "Bill" Price Maj Marty Hogan SCPO Morris Ramsey SFC William Farrell SGT Mark Halmrast Sgt Randy Wilber Sgt John H. SGT Gregory Lawritson CPL Dave Hoover SPC Margaret Higgins SSgt Brian Brakke 1stSgt Eugene Harless SSG William Jones SSG Diane R.
The Poetry of Ben Jonson
"Benjamin "Ben" Jonson was born in June, 1572. A contemporary of William Shakespeare, he is best known for his satirical plays; Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, and his equally accomplished lyric poems.
A man of vast reading and a seemingly insatiable appetite for controversy, including time in jail and a penchant for switching faiths, Jonson had an unparalleled breadth of influence on Jacobean and Caroline playwrights and poets.
In 1616 Jonson was appointed by King James I to receive a yearly pension of £60 to become what is now recognised as the post of the first official Poet Laureate.
He died on the 6th of August, 1637 at Westminster and is buried in the north aisle of the nave at Westminster Abbey.
A master of both playwriting and poetry his reputation continues to endure and reach a new audience with each succeeding generation."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWjPtVafvXc
Ben Jonson background from poetryfoundation.org/poets/ben-jonson
"Ben Jonson is among the best-known writers and theorists of English Renaissance literature, second in reputation only to Shakespeare. A prolific dramatist and a man of letters highly learned in the classics, he profoundly influenced the Augustan age through his emphasis on the precepts of Horace, Aristotle, and other classical Greek and Latin thinkers. While he is now remembered primarily for his satirical comedies, he also distinguished himself as a poet, preeminent writer of masques, erudite defender of his work, and the originator of English literary criticism. Jonson’s professional reputation is often obscured by that of the man himself: bold, independent and aggressive. He fashioned for himself an image as the sole arbiter of taste, standing for erudition and the supremacy of classical models against what he perceived as the general populace’s ignorant preference for the sensational. While his direct influence can be seen in each genre he undertook, his ultimate legacy is considered to be his literary craftsmanship, his strong sense of artistic form and control, and his role in bringing, as Alexander Pope noted, “critical learning into vogue.”
Jonson was born in London shortly after the death of his father, a minister who claimed descent from the Scottish gentry. Despite a poor upbringing, he was educated at Westminster School under the renowned antiquary William Camden. He apparently left his schooling unwillingly to work with his stepfather as a bricklayer. He then served as a volunteer in the Low Countries in the Dutch war against Spain, and the story is told that he defeated a challenger in single combat between the opposing armies, stripping his vanquished opponent of his arms in the classical fashion. Returning to England by 1592, Jonson married Anne Lewis in 1594. Although the union was unhappy, it produced several children, all of whom Jonson outlived. In the years following his marriage, he became an actor and also wrote numerous “get-penny” entertainments—financially motivated and quickly composed plays. He also provided respected emendations and additions to Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1592). By 1597 he was writing for Philip Henslowe’s theatrical company. That year, Henslowe employed Jonson to finish Thomas Nashe’s satire The Isle of Dogs (now lost), but the play was suppressed for alleged seditious content and Jonson was jailed for a short time. In 1598 the earliest of his extant works, Every Man in His Humour, was produced by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men with William Shakespeare—who became close friends with Jonson—in the cast. That same year, Jonson fell into further trouble after killing actor Gabriel Spencer in a duel, narrowly escaping the gallows by claiming benefit of clergy (meaning he was shown leniency for proving that he was literate and educated). While incarcerated at Newgate prison, Jonson converted to Catholicism.
Shortly thereafter, writing for the Children of the Queen’s Chapel, Jonson became embroiled in a public feud with playwrights John Marston and Thomas Dekker. In Cynthia’s Revells and Poetaster (both 1601), Jonson portrayed himself as the impartial, well informed judge of art and society and wrote unflattering portraits of the two dramatists. Marston and Dekker counterattacked with a satiric portrayal of Jonson in the play Satiromastix; or, The Untrussing of the Humorous Poet (1602). Interestingly, scholars speculate that the dispute, which became known as the “War of the Theatres,” was mutually contrived in order to further the authors’ careers. In any event, Jonson later reconciled with Marston, and collaborated with him and George Chapman in writing Eastward Ho! (1605). A joke at the King’s expense in this play landed him once again, along with his coauthors, in prison. Once freed, however, Jonson entered a period of good fortune and productivity. He had many friends at court, and James I valued his learning highly. His abilities thus did not go unrecognized, and he was frequently called upon to write his popular, elegant masques, such as The Masque of Blacknesse (1605). During this period, Jonson also produced his most successful comedies, beginning in 1606 with Volpone and following with The Silent Woman (1609), The Alchemist (1610), and Bartholomew Fayre (1614). Jonson’s remaining tragedies, Sejanus His Fall (1603) and Catiline His Conspiracy (1611), though monuments to his scholarship, were not well received due to their rigid imitation of classical tragic forms and their pedantic tone.
In 1616 Jonson published his Workes, becoming the first English writer to dignify his dramas by terming them “works,” and for this perceived presumption he was soundly ridiculed. In that year Jonson assumed the responsibilities and privileges of Poet Laureate, though without formal appointment. From 1616 to 1625 he primarily wrote masques for presentation at court. He had already collaborated with poet, architect, and stage designer Inigo Jones one several court masques, and the two continued their joint efforts, establishing the reign of James I as the period of the consummate masque. For his achievements, the University of Oxford honored him in 1619 with a master of arts degree.
Misfortune, however, marked Jonson’s later years. A fire destroyed his library in 1623, and when James I died in 1625, Jonson lost much of his influence at court, though he was named City Chronologer in 1628. Later that year, he suffered the first of several strokes which left him bedridden. Jonson produced four plays during the reign of Charles I, and was eventually granted a new pension in 1634. None of these later plays was successful. The rest of his life, spent in retirement, he filled primarily with study and writing; at his death, on August 6, 1637, two unfinished plays were discovered among his mass of papers and manuscripts. Jonson left a financially depleted estate, but was nevertheless buried with honor in Westminster Abbey.
Jonson’s earliest comedies, such as Every Man in His Humour, derive from Roman comedy in form and structure and are noteworthy as models of the comedy of “humours,” in which each character represents a type dominated by a particular obsession. Although Jonson was not the first to employ the comedy of humours, his use of the form in Every Man in His Humour and Every Man out of His Humour is considered exemplary, and such characterization continued to be a feature of his work. Of particular significance in appraisals of Jonson are the four comical satires produced between 1606 and 1614: Volpone, The Silent Woman, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fayre. Each exposes some aberration of human appetite through comic exaggeration and periodic moralisms while evincing Jonson’s interest in the variety of life and in the villain as a cunning, imaginative artist. Volpone, his most famous and most frequently staged work, is also his harshest attack on human vice, specifically targeting greed. Like The Silent Woman and The Alchemist, it mixes didactic intent with scenes of tightly constructed comic counterpoise. The last of Jonson’s great dramas is the panoramic Bartholomew Fayre. Softening the didacticism that characterized his earlier work, Jonson expressed the classical moralist’s views of wisdom and folly through a multiplicity of layered, interrelated plots in a colorfully portrayed and loosely structured form. All four comedies exhibit careful planning executed with classical precision, a command of low speech and colloquial usage, and a movement toward more realistic, three-dimensional character depiction.
Critics note that Jonson’s later plays, beginning with The Divell is an Asse in 1616, betray the dramatist’s diminishing artistry. These later dramas were dismissed by John Dryden, who undertook the first extensive analysis of Jonson, as mere “dotages.” While generously likening him to Virgil and calling him “the most learned and judicious writer which any theatre ever had,” Dryden’s comments also signaled the start of a decline in Jonson’s reputation, for his observations included a comparison of Jonson and Shakespeare, one which nodded admiringly toward Jonson, but bowed adoringly before Shakespeare. This telling comparison colored Jonson’s reputation for more than 200 years, fueled by such 19th-century Romantic critics as Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1818), and William Hazlitt (1819), who found Jonson lacking in imagination, delicacy, and soul. His “greatest defect,” according to George Saintsbury, was the “want of passion.” “Yet,” he conceded, “his merits are extraordinary.” Most 19th-century critics agreed with the assessment of John Addington Symonds that the “higher gifts of poetry, with which Shakespeare—‘nature’s child’—was so richly endowed, are almost absolutely wanting in Ben Jonson.”
T.S. Eliot, writing in 1919, focused attention on Jonson’s reputation as “the most deadly kind that can be compelled upon the memory of a great poet. To be universally accepted; to be damned by the praise that quenches all desire to read the book; to be afflicted by the imputation of the virtues which excite the least pleasure; and to be read only by historians and antiquaries—this is the most perfect conspiracy of approval.” With this began a reevaluation of Jonson, whose reputation benefited from modernist reaction against Romanticist sensibility, and who began to be appreciated on his own terms. English critic L.C. Knights, in 1937, considered Jonson “a very great poet”; and while Edmund Wilson, in 1948, still found none of Shakespeare’s “immense range” in Jonson, he thought him “a great man of letters” and acknowledged his influence on writers as diverse as Milton, Congreve, Swift, and Huxley. Recent scholarship has sought to place Jonson in the theatrical and political milieu of London, addressing his relationship with his audience and the monarchy. This focus on historical context has also produced an emphasis on the former bricklayer’s “self-fashioning” into dramatist, critic, and finally the first poet laureate. Many critics now regard him as a fore-runner in the 17th-century movement toward classicism, and his plays are often admired for their accurate depictions of the men and women of his day, their mastery of form, and their successful blend of the serious and the comic, the topical, and the timeless."
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Lt Col Charlie Brown
To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare
BY BEN JONSON
To draw no envy, Shakespeare, on thy name,
Am I thus ample to thy book and fame;
While I confess thy writings to be such
As neither man nor muse can praise too much;
'Tis true, and all men's suffrage. But these ways
Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise;
For seeliest ignorance on these may light,
Which, when it sounds at best, but echoes right;
Or blind affection, which doth ne'er advance
The truth, but gropes, and urgeth all by chance;
Or crafty malice might pretend this praise,
And think to ruin, where it seem'd to raise.
These are, as some infamous bawd or whore
Should praise a matron; what could hurt her more?
But thou art proof against them, and indeed,
Above th' ill fortune of them, or the need.
I therefore will begin. Soul of the age!
The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage!
My Shakespeare, rise! I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie
A little further, to make thee a room:
Thou art a monument without a tomb,
And art alive still while thy book doth live
And we have wits to read and praise to give.
That I not mix thee so, my brain excuses,
I mean with great, but disproportion'd Muses,
For if I thought my judgment were of years,
I should commit thee surely with thy peers,
And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine,
Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe's mighty line.
And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,
From thence to honour thee, I would not seek
For names; but call forth thund'ring Aeschylus,
Euripides and Sophocles to us;
Pacuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead,
To life again, to hear thy buskin tread,
And shake a stage; or, when thy socks were on,
Leave thee alone for the comparison
Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome
Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.
Tri'umph, my Britain, thou hast one to show
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age but for all time!
And all the Muses still were in their prime,
When, like Apollo, he came forth to warm
Our ears, or like a Mercury to charm!
Nature herself was proud of his designs
And joy'd to wear the dressing of his lines,
Which were so richly spun, and woven so fit,
As, since, she will vouchsafe no other wit.
The merry Greek, tart Aristophanes,
Neat Terence, witty Plautus, now not please,
But antiquated and deserted lie,
As they were not of Nature's family.
Yet must I not give Nature all: thy art,
My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part.
For though the poet's matter nature be,
His art doth give the fashion; and, that he
Who casts to write a living line, must sweat,
(Such as thine are) and strike the second heat
Upon the Muses' anvil; turn the same
(And himself with it) that he thinks to frame,
Or, for the laurel, he may gain a scorn;
For a good poet's made, as well as born;
And such wert thou. Look how the father's face
Lives in his issue, even so the race
Of Shakespeare's mind and manners brightly shines
In his well-turned, and true-filed lines;
In each of which he seems to shake a lance,
As brandish'd at the eyes of ignorance.
Sweet Swan of Avon! what a sight it were
To see thee in our waters yet appear,
And make those flights upon the banks of Thames,
That so did take Eliza and our James!
But stay, I see thee in the hemisphere
Advanc'd, and made a constellation there!
Shine forth, thou star of poets, and with rage
Or influence, chide or cheer the drooping stage;
Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourn'd like night,
And despairs day, but for thy volume's light.
To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare
BY BEN JONSON
To draw no envy, Shakespeare, on thy name,
Am I thus ample to thy book and fame;
While I confess thy writings to be such
As neither man nor muse can praise too much;
'Tis true, and all men's suffrage. But these ways
Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise;
For seeliest ignorance on these may light,
Which, when it sounds at best, but echoes right;
Or blind affection, which doth ne'er advance
The truth, but gropes, and urgeth all by chance;
Or crafty malice might pretend this praise,
And think to ruin, where it seem'd to raise.
These are, as some infamous bawd or whore
Should praise a matron; what could hurt her more?
But thou art proof against them, and indeed,
Above th' ill fortune of them, or the need.
I therefore will begin. Soul of the age!
The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage!
My Shakespeare, rise! I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie
A little further, to make thee a room:
Thou art a monument without a tomb,
And art alive still while thy book doth live
And we have wits to read and praise to give.
That I not mix thee so, my brain excuses,
I mean with great, but disproportion'd Muses,
For if I thought my judgment were of years,
I should commit thee surely with thy peers,
And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine,
Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe's mighty line.
And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,
From thence to honour thee, I would not seek
For names; but call forth thund'ring Aeschylus,
Euripides and Sophocles to us;
Pacuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead,
To life again, to hear thy buskin tread,
And shake a stage; or, when thy socks were on,
Leave thee alone for the comparison
Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome
Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.
Tri'umph, my Britain, thou hast one to show
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age but for all time!
And all the Muses still were in their prime,
When, like Apollo, he came forth to warm
Our ears, or like a Mercury to charm!
Nature herself was proud of his designs
And joy'd to wear the dressing of his lines,
Which were so richly spun, and woven so fit,
As, since, she will vouchsafe no other wit.
The merry Greek, tart Aristophanes,
Neat Terence, witty Plautus, now not please,
But antiquated and deserted lie,
As they were not of Nature's family.
Yet must I not give Nature all: thy art,
My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part.
For though the poet's matter nature be,
His art doth give the fashion; and, that he
Who casts to write a living line, must sweat,
(Such as thine are) and strike the second heat
Upon the Muses' anvil; turn the same
(And himself with it) that he thinks to frame,
Or, for the laurel, he may gain a scorn;
For a good poet's made, as well as born;
And such wert thou. Look how the father's face
Lives in his issue, even so the race
Of Shakespeare's mind and manners brightly shines
In his well-turned, and true-filed lines;
In each of which he seems to shake a lance,
As brandish'd at the eyes of ignorance.
Sweet Swan of Avon! what a sight it were
To see thee in our waters yet appear,
And make those flights upon the banks of Thames,
That so did take Eliza and our James!
But stay, I see thee in the hemisphere
Advanc'd, and made a constellation there!
Shine forth, thou star of poets, and with rage
Or influence, chide or cheer the drooping stage;
Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourn'd like night,
And despairs day, but for thy volume's light.
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SP5 Jeannie Carle
SGT (Join to see) - Keeping this one. I have a "chosen sister" who hopes to come visit one day and we intend to use the stage in the gym of my home to recite poetry for our own enjoyment. I want this one. Thank you.
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