Ben Johnson, On My First Daughter

On My First Daughter

By: Ben Jobnson 1572–1637 Ben Jonson Here lies, to each her parents’ ruth, Mary, the daughter of their youth; Yet all heaven’s gifts being heaven’s due, It makes the father less to rue. At six months’ end she parted hence With safety of her innocence; Whose soul heaven’s queen, whose name she bears, In comfort of her mother’s tears, Hath placed amongst her virgin-train: Where, while that severed doth remain, This grave partakes the fleshly birth; Which cover lightly, gentle earth!

Paraphrased: Here lies Mary (Ruth is a middle name?), Her parents had her while they were very young. She was a gift from heaven and is now back in heaven. Knowing this, gives her father less regret or sorrow (rue). The baby was 6 month old at death. Her innocent age assures her a place in heaven. She bore the name of Mary, the mother of Jesus (They call her the Queen of Heaven. Perhaps the family was Catholic.) I'm stumped by the line "placed amongst her virgin-train" Where, while... doesn't make sense Where, while... doesn't make sense to me either (possibly written by a grief stricken parent or family member, so we must excuse possible errors.) While that severed doth remain (She was taken from her parents and they must remain here on earth) They placed the body of their child in the grave and plead for the dirt to cover her gently.

A Note on paraphrase: ". . . to each her parents’ ruth" --- Both parents grieve, but: "Yet all heaven’s gifts being heaven’s due, It makes the father less to rue." --- A rationalizing of the death: heaven gives life; it belongs to heaven; it is heaven's to take away. A statement that the father is "less to rue" (presumably, being a man, Mr. Johnson felt himself more rational and able to overcome his emotions than a woman would be. A little investigation of societal beliefs about men and women in Johnson's time might work nicely into your paper.) "At six months’ end she parted hence With safety of her innocence;" --- Again, it is sad (she died), but the rationalizing: on the other hand, since she died early, she died with her innocence intact. And: "Whose soul heaven’s queen, whose name she bears, In comfort of her mother’s tears, Hath placed amongst her virgin-train: Where, while that severed doth remain, " --- Because she died with this innocence, she has a place in the Virgin Mary's "virgin-train" (A special honor, apparently; you may wish to investigate the term "virgin-train" and see if it was unique to Johnson or if it was a more generally recognized idea in the society of the time or in his religion). Also, her soul will still exist even while the grave consumes the body. This is another example of rationalization: If he thinks rationally about the death, something good comes out of this sad event. We understand that it is an elegy. From the first line he is talking about sorrow and suffering. ‘’to each of her parent’’ here he said this to emphasize that both of them felt sorrow for her. He said ’’each’’ because each of them felt sorrow in his or her own way. We know that the sorrow of the mother is not like the sorrow of the father for his daughter or son. We know that suffering is probably can be overcome by the man but it could hardly be overcome by woman. We know already that that woman is more emotional than the man. We have to know also that the feeling of the father can never be as much as the feeling of the mother for the son or daughter. Because the feeling of the mother started before the father. She has born this baby nine months in her body in her soul. She has shared him or her everything , her food her life ,and many things. He or she has developed in his or her mother. The woman is always with her child it is not a man. Even when the child dies in her body , she suffers. So I want to say that the mother suffers more than the father and we will see that later. Then he is in fact using grammatical structure to indicate the psychological structure or position. And so we have two structures that work together in the same time to indicate the suffering , the psychological and the biological fracture.

ABOUT THIS POEM Poet: Ben Jonson 1572–1637 POET’S REGION: England SCHOOL / PERIOD: Renaissance Subjects: Living, Parenthood, Death, Sorrow & Grieving Poetic Terms: Couplet Speaker and tone, subject, figurative language, and imagery are these aspects. When comparing and contrasting Ben Jonson’s two poems: “on my first daughter” and “on my first son” it is these aspects that have to be considered. These poems contain many of these aspects and they are both very similar and very at the same time. The subject of both poems is the reaction a parent has to their child’s death, although “on my first daughter” is about a girl and “on my first son” is about a boy. The speaker in “On my first daughter” is an unknown person talking about two parents. In “On my first son” the speaker is the parent himself. The two poems are very similar in that they are

about the death of a child, and how that death if affecting each parent. Both poems also contain figurative language. “On my first daughter” uses several metaphors. She was the “daughter of their youth”, and a gift from heaven. “On my first son” also uses metaphors when the boy is described as his fathers “best piece of poetry”. The tone and language are also very similar in both poems, yet the tone in “on my first son” is slightly different. In “On my first daughter”, the tone says that the parents are deeply upset about the loss of their daughter. She lies dead “to both her parents ruth” and her mothers’ tears must be comforted, because she was so innocent. Although the tone in “On my first son” also says that the father is upset with his son’s death, it also portrays that the father is having doubts about being upset. When he says “for why will man lament the state he should envy” shows that the father knows his son is in a better place and that he should cry but envy him, and be proud because his son was his “best piece of poetry. In conclusion, while both poems are very similar in the aspects of subject, and figurative language, the tone is what differentiates them because although both poems possess a tone that says the parents are grieving about their child’s death, the second poem changes at the end, and almost comes to a tone that is understanding on the fathers part, so even though all these aspects are attributed to making these poems so similar, they also make these poems, with a similar subject, very different.

"On My First Daughter" One's overall sense of "On My First Daughter" seems to me likely to be altogether different from one's overall sense of "On My First Son." The clevernesses of "On My First Son" insist that its readers engage with it—if only as an exercise in wit. Indeed, it is so busy and so successful in its insistence that, ironically, it has taken me almost twice as long to give an account of the operations of "On My First Son" as it will to do the same for its humble sibling, the poem I champion as worthier of the two. "On My First Daughter" invites us to dismiss it as dowdy, casual, and ineffectual—as just another rehearsal of traditional words of comfort. The invitation is metrically underscored by the inherently chipper octosyllabic couplets. Where the decasyllables of "On My First Son" can feel like needlessly expanded octosyllables and therefore have the dignity of enforced slowness, these lines trot along with an easy glibness that implies a like ease and lightness in what the poem says. Here lyes to each her parents ruth, Mary, the daughter of their youth: Yet, all heauens gifts, being heauens due, It makes the father, lesse, to rue. At sixe moneths end, shee parted hence With safetie of her innocence; Whose soule heauens Queene, (whose name shee beares) In comfort of her mothers teares, Hath plac'd amongst her virgin-traine: Where, while that seuer'd doth remaine, This graue partakes the fleshly birth. Which couer lightly, gentle earth. The poem only once comes close to demanding attention to its wit, and even then—in the speaker's parting instructions to the earth that covers the child's grave—the conceit is such as to seem merely sweet, an ornamental ruffle that calls attention to its easiness, artificiality, and perfect incapacity to redefine either the facts of the situation or anyone's perception of them. There is undeniable wit in Jonson's uses of safety in line 6 and of virgin-train in line 9, but, although the business of explaining those effects to a modern reader can seem to make them comparable to the showy and demanding little puzzles in "On My First Son," there is nothing in "On My First

Daughter" to make a reader aware either of the poet's brilliance or the poem's effectiveness in enabling its reader's mind to perceive the fact of the child's death in a single set of terms (the poem) that recognizes and subsumes all the pertinent but mutually exclusive terms available (for the most obvious instances, those of grief and those of Christian comfort). The wit of "On My First Daughter" is undemanding, apparently natural to the English language and the topic. It is a kind typified by the play on on in the title of this poem, of "On My First Son," and of innumerable other epitaphs; in the particular case of "On My First Daughter" its first phrase, Here lies, abruptly changes the meaning of On in the title from "on the subject of"—"about"—to "over"—"on top of." Play on on indicating topic and on indicating location is so common, so much an accident of the language, and so contextually just in both of its applications in epitaph titles that even to label it wordplay is to exaggerate its intensity and its impact upon a reader's conscious perception. Although the paragraphs that follow will attempt to demonstrate great complexity and subtlety of effect in "On My First Daughter," I want it understood in advance that the fact of that complexity and subtlety coexists with the fact not only of the poem's genuine simplicity but with the fact of its genuine vapidity. Whatever else and however grand "On My First Daughter" may be, it is also as insipid as this poem, the most vapid of Herrick's several pallid imitations of it: Upon a child Here a pretty Baby lies Sung asleep with Lullabies: Pray be silent, and not stirre Th'easie earth that covers her. The first line of "On My First Daughter" is altogether matter-of-fact: a flat statement, interrupted by "to the sorrow of each of her parents" (an interruption by which the fact of the parents' grief becomes syntactically indivisible from—and as unalterable as—the fact that "here lies Mary") and further augmented by further identification of Mary in terms of the parents.[29] Like their newly departed youth, their newly departed daughter is gone forever, and at the simultaneous completions of the clause and the couplet there is no more to say: Here lyes to each her parents ruth, Mary, the daughter of their youth: Line 3 begins a new independent clause, and the concluding rhyme of the second couplet seals off another isolated, self-sufficient assertion: Yet, all heauens gifts, being heauens due, It makes the father, lesse, to rue. However, the word Yet, the first word of the second couplet, makes a small syntactic gesture of connection between the two couplets and thus of continuation beyond the matter-of-fact finality of the two opening lines. That syntactic gesture corresponds exactly to the same word's ideational gesture, its signal that some sort of modification of the preceding assertion is possible and will follow. Moreover, the vowel sound of the first rhyme pair, ruth / youth, returns in the second, due / rue; and the cognates ruth and rue have a sort of polyptotonic "rhyme"—just as ruth and less to rue "rhyme" ideationally. And yet the two couplets, one a flat hopeless statement and the other a philosophical bromide, are effectively isolated from one another—two assertions on the same topic but from spheres of thought as separate as Earth and heaven. The second couplet may be a mere bromide, but it is also full of entirely unostentatious energy, energy generated by quiet interaction between valid and invalid assertions. That interaction, I think, contributes a lot to the ultimately invaluable feel this confident, easy couplet has of philosophic insecurity and poetic ineptitude. The lines contain one valid assertion (nothing on this Earth lives forever), and two that are—in very different ways—invalid. The metaphor of gifts and debts in line 3 contains an inaudible assertion of injustice (gifts by definition are not loans; givers

surrender all proprietary rights). I say the reported injustice is inaudible for two reasons: first, because the wit of the oxymoronic paradox by which heaven's earthly gifts are never more than loans had sunk into cliche[cliché] and from cliche[cliché] had passed into entirely undemanding commonplace centuries before the first readers of "On My First Daughter" were born and, second, because the gift-debt metaphor is vehicle for a proposition so obviously true as to be a truism. Similarly, I think, the unarguability of the truism that nobody lives forever holds us off from pausing to observe the couplet's other invalid assertion—pausing to doubt that anyone could ever have hoped to comfort or to be comforted by the thought that a dead baby would have died in sixty or seventy years anyway (there may be some conceivable comfort for the parent of a dead infant in the thought that the child has scaped world's and flesh's rage / And, if no other misery, yet age, but none from stoic realization that all human life is transitory). The third couplet takes a third approach to the topic—narration of the immediate facts of the child's death: At sixe moneths end, shee parted hence With safetie of her innocence; Once again, the couplet is closed, final, isolated. Moreover, the new couplet asks to be recognized as another exercise in appropriate commonplaces, one poetic (the euphemistic metaphor of a journey), and one theological (the child died before worldly contact could endanger her soul). And yet, without jarring a reader's sense that this is just an instance of the traditional mechanical prettification and diversion everyone is used to, this couplet eases its reader into some emotionally valuable, casual (and thus genuine) assumptions. This third couplet is not what it would be if line 5 reported that Mary died at the age of six months and line 6 began with the sort of distinction that "but" or "however" would make—the distinction Yet makes in line 3 between two separate frames of reference for considering the fact of death. Here consideration of the child's death and consideration of the future life of her soul cohabit in a single thought, casually joined by with . The fact that she died unstained by contact with earthly ambitions and temptations is relevant only in a theological frame of reference. Here (a) the fact that calls for comfort and (b) the comfortable thought that the child died freed, by baptism, of original sin and free of mortal sin as well are part and parcel of the single traditional metaphor of travel. Note also that the metaphor emerges gradually—first in the word hence (until which parted is effectively only a synonym for "died"), and, as I will explain shortly, fully in safety . The primary sense of with safety of her innocence is (and was) "with her innocence intact," but "a safety" was apparently "a passport," a document guaranteeing safe conduct to a traveler.30 The idea of the child setting forth with her innocence as a pass-port could have been presented in a full-blown conceit that would have advertised itself as a chosen, arbitrary, carefully closed way of thinking about the facts. As it is, with safety of her innocence does not transform the flat assertion that Mary died at the age of six months, but rather infuses it with an image of a young woman (someone old enough to travel alone) departing after a six-month visit—departing for somewhere else. As a reader progresses over the two lines, the child grows up—is conceived of as living out the life she lost—and does so in a clause that is nonetheless a statement of harsh fact rather than a fanciful, inevitably ineffectual substitute for it. The lines cause one to idly generate an adolescent or adult Mary in one's own mind; a comforting fancy becomes an incidental reality of the reader's experience of the facts. The difference between evoking that experience and openly presenting and recommending a way of thinking is the difference between rhetorical success (making a viewpoint on the facts inherent in them) and a merely admirable, merely interesting mere appeal. There is similar, and similarly unobtrusive, persuasiveness in the syntactical continuation in a subordinate clause of the logically complete sentence that closed in line 6 with the formal close of the couplet: At sixe moneths end, shee parted hence With safetie of her innocence;

Whose soule ... This is the first time that the conclusion of the couplet rhyme pattern has not been followed by a logically independent new clause. Like the life of the infant in the coffin, the sentence in lines 5 and 6 is finished—enclosed in its boxlike couplet. And, just as a reader's imagination has casually continued the child's life, the syntax of line 7 expands the syntax of the preceding couplet beyond limits that nonetheless remain in force. (If I did not fear seeming to interpret the syntax by wantonly and ingeniously suggesting a sort of syntactic equivalent of onomatopoeia, I would point out that the phrase "Whose soul" is to the body of the sentence apparently concluded at the end of line 6 as the departed soul is to the corpse.) The phrase whose soul also continues one's simultaneously fanciful and realistic thinking about Mary. The mention of soul in this context signals the expected statement that Mary's soul is in heaven. However else its particulars cause it also to be perceived, the completed clause (whose soul heaven's queen . . .hath placed amongst her virgin-train ) must be perceived as making that statement; and, as the pronoun that in while that severed doth remain indicates, the next clause proceeds as if it followed a simple assertion that her soul is in heaven. The whose soul construction, however, is very different from "her soul." The phrase at once preserves the distinction between the mortal, earthbound body and the immortal soul and also invites readers to continue conceiving physically of the Mary who departed for heaven. Bearing in mind that I am talking not about what one thinks but about how one thinks it, it is reasonable to say that the phrase whose soul asks one to think as one would if one were told that Mary and her soul were in heaven. That way of thinking is sustained by she, the pronoun at the end of line 7: Whose soule heauens Queene, (whose name shee beares ). Before following the subordinate clause that begins the fourth couplet (lines 7 and 8) to its verb in line 9, I want to comment on the incidental actions of the parenthetic second of the two whose clauses that constitute line 7. In its relation to the first half of the line, that second clause both duplicates and continues the physics of the preceding six lines. The two halves of the line, each beginning with whose, are urgently comparable; and, like a pair of rhyme words or the two lines paired in a couplet, are at the same time urgently different—different in that the two pronouns have different antecedents. The first whose refers to Mary Jonson and is followed by references to the Virgin Mary (heaven's queen ); the second whose refers to the Virgin Mary and is followed by reference to the infant Mary (she ). That a, b, b, a, pattern of the persons of the line (a pattern that–because, as the parenthetic clause points out, they have the same name—can be stated as a, á, á, a ) is internally unified. But— since the second whose expands ideationally from heaven's queen, an element in the syntactic expansion begun by the first whose —the same sequence participates in the poem's newfound freedom from the bounds of closed couplets. The sequence thus can contribute to a reader's vague sense of an analogous liberation of Mary from the finality of death. (Any parenthetic clause, after all, asserts and exercises a right and power to go beyond limits whose existence and validity it also acknowledges.) Structurally, the parenthetic clause is a self-confessedly gratuitous syntactic digression; and yet, at the same time, the repetition of whose suggests otherwise. The substance of this clause is also digressive; and yet naming is the primary action of tombstone inscriptions and of the first couplet of this poem—and bears, which here means only "carries," is in accidental relation to the topic of motherhood and birth (in fact, lines 7–9 end up having presented us with two mothers and a child who bears). Above everything else, the introduction of the parenthesis and of what it says generates a special kind of confusion—one that cannot possibly confuse the reader (anyone can follow a sentence interrupted by a brief parenthesis, and no one can ever have confused Mary the subject of this poem with Mary the queen of heaven), but a confusion of one line of thinking with another in a clause whose substance demands an easy, trivial, incidental exercise in perceiving that a word, "Mary," that says one thing also says another.

The fourth couplet is completed in another parenthesis. This one—line 8, In comfort of her mother's tears —is not set off in physical parentheses on the page, and this one is an immediately germane modifying phrase for the clause it interrupts, but line 8 is one more obstacle in the way of the long, structurally onomatopoeic climb toward grammatical predication in Hath placed amongst her virgin-train . The now-completed couplet, like all those that precede it, is very ordinary in import (this is just so much prettifying, just cute mythmaking, just sentimental hackwork); but this couplet now concerns three beings who are complexly like one another: two are mother and daughter; two are virgins named Mary; two are mothers tragically bereaved of their children. This plodding, perfunctory little poem is opening more and more paths of mental possibility. At sixe moneths end, shee parted hence With safetie of her innocence; Whose soule heauens Queene, (whose name shee beares) In comfort of her mothers teares, Hath plac'd amongst her virgin-traine: Virgin-train is a specific allusion to "the hundred and forty and four thousand" virgins —"they which were not defiled with women"—whom St. John describes as singing "before the throne," "redeemed from among men," and "without fault before the throne of God" (Revelation 14: 1–5). Although St. John's use of the word "virgins" is akin to the narrow one to which the word is limited in modern English, Jonson's contemporaries were used to understanding it less anatomically than we do and, in context of discussions of the salvation of infants, were used to hearing "virgins" used as we would use "innocents." The virgin choir in Revelation 14 had figured for several centuries in both formal theological and informal popular discussion of infant salvation. Virgintrain, then, is an easy, pretty, periphrasis by which the poet introduces another traditional particular of Christian comfort. Yes, but virgin-train appears here in company with another easy periphrasis, heaven's queen for the Virgin Mary. Together they constitute a quietly persuasive court metaphor that complements and continues the process by which the particulars of a series of pious commonplaces implies and embodies the happy, thriving adolescence of which the dead infant has been deprived. These lines fulfill just the sort of parental ambition that they supersede: they present Mary as she would have been had she achieved the likeliest secular fond ambition of a London parent: lady-in-waiting to the queen. When, in line 9, a reader reached the syntactic equivalent of salvation in arriving at long last at the verb of the clause begun in line 7, that clause concluded in the middle of a couplet. As the mortal finality of the first three couplets was superseded by a syntax that went on to report on the afterlife, that syntax has now come to rest at a point that cannot be final because, although the necessities of the couplet form have been superseded, they have not been neglected. Like the fact that the baby is dead, the fact remains that the poem cannot end until it reaches a rhyme for train . The necessary next line immediately sends a reader's mind back toward the facts of the other domain: Hath plac'd amongst her virgin-traine: Where, while that seuer'd doth remaine, This graue partakes the fleshly birth. Which couer lightly, gentle earth. That necessary line—line 10, Where, while that severed doth remain —does complete the couplet, but it also opens a new, still incomplete syntactic unit. The next line completes that, but it in its turn requires a rhyme for birth, a rhyme that the syntactically unnecessary last line provides. The last couplet thus presents us with one more miniature, purely literary, but nonetheless real experience of our capacity to deal matter-of-factly with the coexistence of mutually exclusive systems for perceiving simultaneous finality and infinity. The greatest achievement of which this poem makes its reader capable derives from the experience of following Jonson's sentence smoothly from virgin-train at the end of line 9 to This

grave partakes in line 11. The logical hinge on which the passage turns is the word Where . The action of that word is the most difficult thing in the poem to talk about. Readers have no trouble with Where or with the logic of the lines. Once again, my evidence for saying so is the nearly universal silence of editors and commentators. I suspect that line 10 is effortlessly understood as "while that severed doth remain there " would be. And yet, once again, the words on the page are there and are read, and the words say "amongst her virgin train: / Where . . .this grave partakes the fleshly birth." I still insist that the lines make easy, ready sense, but I also insist that the construction is meaningless—unreasonable, the assertion of a physical impossibility, an impossibility as great as being dead and alive or in heaven and on Earth. If my experience of talking about these lines with students and colleagues holds true, you should now have looked back at the lines to see just where and how I have misread them. You are an intelligent person and, if you read essays like this one, surely a careful reader. The issue between us here, I think, is not whether the lines, which seem straightforward, are straightforward: in things made of words seeming is being. The issue is whether or not the lines, which seem straightforward, can be demonstrated to be so according to the probabilities of semantics and syntax. The thing that makes the action of Where so hard to talk about here is that, when—under pressure from my analysis—one goes back to prove to oneself that the lines contain a semantically and syntactically acceptable sense, one can find a reading as straight-forward in theory as the lines are in fact. "Where" often had the sense "whereas" (it still does; I have systematically used it that way throughout this essay). And that reading of Where not only makes sense but makes the general sense that I argue is derived suprasyntactically on the basis of contextual probabilities (on the basis of what one comes to the poem already knowing about heaven, Earth, there, and here): "amongst her virgin-train. Whereas . . .this grave...." I do not, however, believe that any reader reads, or ever read, Where as "whereas" in line 10 of this poem. For one thing, modern editors who gloss that use of where in line 99 of Jonson's "On the Famous Voyage" do not gloss the word here. For another, those of my colleagues with whom I have discussed the word Where in this poem do not come up with the "whereas" explanation until we have been talking, puzzling, and squabbling for some time. Most: important, I doubt that readers actually read Where as "whereas" because its context is so insistently one of place. The poem is concerned throughout with here, where Mary lies, and there, where her soul has gone; and the principal overall action of line 10 is to reassert the initial focus on here —is to reassert the physical facts: the grave and the corpse. Lines 5–9 have more efficiently blurred a reader's focus on the painful facts of earthly reality than any comforting words I know. Now Jonson attempts, and succeeds in taking, a daring but necessary further step toward effective comfort. Had Jonson left his readers where line 9 delivers them, the poem's achievement would have been less because, although lines 5–8 start from the facts of physical death, they leave them behind; the consolation the lines embody is therefore vulnerable to resurgent awareness that a poor little baby is dead. To succeed fully, the poem must persist in including the ugly facts that evoked it, the inescapable facts that one would like to escape. One way to characterize this poem would be to say that it substitutes "and" (the baby is dead and immortal) for "but." The poem deals constantly with separation—both in its substance (the child is divided from the parents, as is her soul from her body ), and in its stylistic incidentals (for instance, the unity inherent in the word parents ' in line 1 is qualified by the each her construction, and the philosophical father and emotional mother are considered both separately and differently in the body of the poem). But—as the fused realities and overlapping organizational systems in lines 5–9 illustrate and as the poem's abundance of genitives witnesses—the poem just as persistently demonstrates a unity in divided things. Reading this poem is a mentally miraculous exercise in practical paradox. That exercise

culminates in line 10. Line 10 is syntactically conjunctive. And it reconnects consideration of metaphysical fact with consideration of physical fact. And, thus, it reasserts the distinction between the two. And, if I am right about the way our minds deal with Where, line 10 enables its readers momentarily to think as they would if they were capable of confusing here and there—capable of thinking of one creature as physically present in two places at once—and capable of conceiving of body and soul as physically separated and physically one, and capable of conceiving of Earth and heaven as absolutely distinct and absolutely indistinct from one another. Line 10 evokes a sort of syntactic pre-experience of the reunion of bodies and souls on resurrection day. Line 10 lets the poem do what the grand verbal double-shuffle of "the glory of the terrestrial" and "the glory of the celestial" and of "the natural body" and "the spiritual body" in 1 Corinthians 15 only suggests can be done. This is 1 Corinthians 15:50–54 as it appeared in the Anglican burial service (note the seeming contradictions about corruption and uncorruption): This I say brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, neither doth corruption inherit uncorruption. Behold, I show you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, and that in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye by the last trump. For the trump shall blow, and the dead shall rise incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. When this corruptible hath put on incorruption, and this mortal hath put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. What the action of the word Where imitates, the rest of line 10 specifically alludes to: while that severed doth remain . Once again, words that insist on severance also suggest union. Here that suggestion is in the word while, a word whose action is emblematic of the larger stylistic paradox in which it participates. While here means "for as long as" and thus points forward toward resurrection day. And while here means "at the same time as" and thus asserts the distinction between the concurrent realities of body and soul. Moreover, like the word that precedes it, while has latent potential as a word meaning "whereas" and indicating a distinction in logic ("whereas the soul remains severed"). Like the final couplet of "On My First Son," the last two lines of this poem adapt and improve on an ostentatiously epigrammatic, syntactically isolated pair of conclusive closing lines at the end of a poem by Martial. And like the final couplet of "On My First Son," the last two lines of this poem are a syntactical continuation of the lines that precede them and also feel as isolated and emotionally summary as their models in Martial. The final couplet of "On My First Daughter" is variously comparable to the first. Where the first couplet, a syntactically independent two-line unit, was extended logically by Yet in line 3 and included in a four-line unit determined by phonic and polyptotonic relationships among ruth, youth, due, and rue, the last couplet, also capable of syntactic independence, is introduced as an appendage of the preceding syntax and, as the rhyme words of the second couplet repeated the vowel sound of ruth and youth, the final rhyme pair, birth, earth, repeats the concluding consonantal sound from the first pair. The last couplet establishes an overall 2-8-2 pattern—a sort of down-up-down pattern—for the twelve lines of "On My First Daughter": two lines on physical graveside fact; eight lines on the spiritual facts of the case; and two final terrestrial lines that, except for the implication of a spiritual realm inherent in the specificity of fleshly, limit themselves entirely to the material world. This graue partakes the fleshly birth. Which couer lightly, gentle earth. The distinction between the last lines and those that immediately precede them is also established in a new heightening of a reader's sense of the ugliness of the mortal facts of burial and decay—and, in a similarly intense new intellectual refuge from physical reality, the openly fanciful cradle image of the last line. Jonson's insistence on the grimness he has sought to alleviate begins in line 10 with the word severed, which—though it functions here as a legalistic synonym for "separated"—carries with it connotations of suddenness and force (OED, 5).

Partakes is a similar case. It contains the sound "part," which echoes parted in line 5 and complements the idea remain expresses in line 10, and which, like parted and severed, is extrasyntactically pertinent to a poem that persistently concerns itself with parts and wholes. The word partakes also contains "takes" and thus sustains and continues the idea of rightful seizure introduced in line 3. Here partakes is effectively glossed by a reader's knowledge of the function of graves (set between grave and fleshly birth, any verb at all would be taken as intending to say "contains"). And that sense is an ideational neighbor of a standard sense of "to partake": "to share in." But the verb "to partake" was already permanently colored by its repeated use in the Communion service, from which "partakes of"—"share in"—came to imply the specialized sense "share in eating ."In conjunction with fleshly birth, the word partakes infuses the line with the traditional idea of death and the grave as devourers. In fleshly birth, birth has the now-archaic, and never common, sense "baby," "child" (for which OED cites Coverdale's version of Jeremiah 20:17: "That the byrth might not have come out, but remayned still in her" and this collective use from Chapman's Homer: "When you come to banquet with your wife and birth at home"). Jonson's phrase (perhaps the accidental product of his need to rhyme earth ) can infuse the line with a vague analogy between little mortal Mary and the incarnate Christ, but its principal action is to insist upon the horrible fact of a tiny, fragile corpse hideously decomposing in the ground—to insist graphically on—and thus fully acknowledge and include—the horror that the poem tries to overcome. On the other hand, the subordinate clause with which the poem ends literalizes—and thus debases—the Christian idea of the afterlife, presents it in a way generically akin to the cheapest, sentimental twaddle: "She is only sleeping." However, as in the lines on Mary in heaven, Jonson does not ask us to "look at it this way"; he causes us actually and voluntarily to include the idea of a sleeping baby in our conception of the situation in which the speaker gives instructions to the earth. What Jonson does is wrap a gauzy, sentimental fancy so willfully flimsy as to be trivial in a plain one that does not involve any falsification of the essential facts of death. Graves are indeed covered with earth. And direct address to personified inanimate elements is so common, so mild, and so undemanding an appeal to the emotional energy of the pathetic fallacy that one accepts the poet's impotent imperative as a simple and traditionally expressed assertion of strong feeling about conditions beyond human control. However, this particular instance of the stock poetic posture occurs in a context (a baby is lying in a grave; graves are obviously and traditionally bedlike)—whereas the verb "to cover" automatically calls up the cheerful analogy of a sleeping baby who will later awaken (as this one will in fact on resurrection morning). The key element in this line's success is not so much the word cover as the epithet gentle; it intensifies the personification of Earth and particularizes it. Gentle, which repeats some of the ideational content of lightly and thus gives a rhymelike feel of supralogical rightness and quasi-physical, quasi-natural complexity to the line, was a stock epithet of polite address—one that Shakespeare's plays have made familiar to all probable modern readers of Jonson's poem and one that carried with it an inherent implication of benign condescension to the person addressed. The epithet, never in any way insulting, was applied, like "good," to servants, and commonly preceded a request by a speaker in a position to command. Here it personifies earth as a nurse or nursery maid in whose care the departing parent casually and confidently leaves the child. Jonson's achievement in the couplet is emblematic of his achievement in the whole poem. He does not deny—or ask us to deny—any of the truth of the situation. He does not offer us alternative ways of thinking about the child. Instead, he makes the stuff of comfortable conceits inherent to the process of registering insistently bare facts. The poem is artistically daring. And it is most so in daring also to be pedestrian and to use its careful insufficiency as a means of making the poor, category-bound human mind superior to its own limitations—the limitations that language reflects and services—and sufficient to an impossible mental task that remains impossible to us even as we perform it. Heaven's Due: A Comparison of Ben Jonson’s 

On My First Daughter and On My First Son by: Michael Vance “Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy . . .” Ben Jonson, “On My First Son” Born the posthumous son of a clergyman on June 11, 1572, Ben Jonson became one  of the most colorful literary figures of his time. In 1597, while working as an actor and  playwright,  he was imprisoned  for  sedition  for his  part  in a satire  entitled,  The Isle  of   Dogs”.   The   following   year,   he   killed   fellow   actor   Gabriel   Spencer   in   a   duel.   Only   by  pleading   “Benefit  of  Clergy”   was  Jonson   able  to   avoid   the   sentence   of   death.  In   1598,   Jonson’s first success, Every Man in his Humour, debuted with fellow actor and playwright  William Shakespeare appearing in the cast. He went on to write many plays and poems and  in later years, to write Masques for the royal court and serve as royal historian. His public  feuds with notables of his age were infamous. As William Drummond described Jonson in  1619, "He is a great lover and praiser of himself, a contemnor and Scorner of others, given  rather to loose a friend than a jest, jealous of every word and action of those about him  (especially after drink), which is one of the elements in which he liveth, a dissembler of ill   parts which raigne in him, a bragger of some good that he wanteth...." Despite   his   rough   demeanor   and   raucous   relations   with   others,   Jonson   was   an  accomplished poet. Jonson wrote a poem after the loss of a daughter and another after the  loss of a son. Both poems are very touching and describe the author’s grief at these tragic  events. Nevertheless, the poems are fundamentally different from each other in terms of the  author’s   depth   of   perceived   loss   from   each   death.   It’s   evident   in   reading  On   My   First   Daughter, that although his daughter’s death was a painful experience, Jonson found some  degree of comfort in the idea that his daughter was returning to heaven. He clearly states   these feelings when he writes; “Yet all heaven’s gifts being heaven’s due, It makes the father   less   to   rue.”   He   is   expressing   here   gratitude   for   the   brief   time   he   had   with   her;   and   furthermore, he is accepting the fact that he had to return her. In the poem,  On My First Son, Jonson states similar views of life being a gift from  God. As he writes “ Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay, exacted by thy fate, on  the just day.” In this passage, Jonson again expresses the idea that his time with his son was  a gift. However, he does not sound grateful for the precious time he was able to spend with  this boy, nor does he seem comforted by the idea that his son will be in heaven. In fact, he  seems desperate and disillusioned, as if he has given up on his own life. In the first line of   this poem, “Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;” he is not only saying goodbye  to his son, he is saying goodbye to his happiness as well. He can’t conceive himself as being  happy without his son. His hopes and dreams died with his son, “My sin was too much hope  of thee, loved boy…” He further referred to his son as, “…his best piece of poetry.’” On   My   First   Daughter  also   describes   his   pain.   However,   he   seems   to   share   this  anguish with his wife. The fist line of this poem, “Here lies, to each her parents’ ruth…” is  quite different from “…my right hand…” The loss Jonson expresses in regards to his son is   a lonely one. In the ode to his son’s passing, he does not divide his grief with the child’s  mother. Throughout this work, Jonson makes no reference to any person other than himself  and his late son. To be fair to the author, it must be remembered that his daughter died at the age of   six months during a period of human history in which less than 50% of children lived to see  their first birthdays. It may be that he had not attached himself to her very much. His son   on   the   other   hand,   lived   up   to   the   day   of   his   seventh   year.   He   might   well   have   been  expected to outlive his father at that point, magnifying the loss immensely.

Ben Jonson Biography:

Ben Jonson, after Abraham Blyenberch, c. 1617. Born c. 11 June 1572 Westminster, London, England Died 6 August 1637(1637-08-06) (aged 65) Westminster, London, England Occupation Dramatist, poet and actor

Benjamin Jonson (c. 11 June 1572 – 6 August 1637) was an English Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor. A contemporary of William Shakespeare, he is best known for his satirical plays, particularly Vol pone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, which are considered his best, and his lyric poems. A man of vast reading and a seemingly insatiable appetite for controversy, Jonson had an unparalleled breadth of influence on Jacobean and Caroline playwrights and poets.

Biography  Early life Jonson claimed his family was of Scottish Border country descent, and this claim may have been supported by the fact that his coat of arms bears three spindles or rhombi, a device shared by a Borders family, the Johnstones of Annandale. His father died a month before Ben's birth, and his mother remarried two years later, to a master bricklayer. Jonson attended school in St. Martin's Lane, and was later sent to Westminster School, where one of his teachers was William Camden. Jonson remained friendly with Camden, whose broad scholarship evidently influenced his own style, until the latter's death in 1623. On leaving, Jonson was once thought to have gone on to the University of Cambridge, but Jonson himself contradicts this, saying that he did not go to university, but was put to a trade, probably bricklaying, immediately: a legend recorded by Thomas Fuller indicates that he worked on a garden wall in Lincoln's Inn. He soon had enough of the trade and spent some time in the Low Countries as a volunteer with the regiments of Francis Vere. In conversations with poet William Drummond of Hawthornden, subsequently published as the Hawthornden Manuscripts, Jonson reports that while in the Netherlands he killed an opponent in

single combat and stripped him of his weapons. Jonson married, some time before 1594, a woman which he described to Drummond as "a shrew, yet honest." His wife has not been definitively identified, but she is sometimes identified as the Ann Lewis who married a Benjamin Jonson at St Magnus-the-Martyr, near London Bridge. The registers of St. Martin's Church state that his eldest daughter Mary died in November 1593, when she was six months old. His eldest son Benjamin died of the plague ten years later (Jonson's epitaph to him On My First Sonne was written shortly after), and a second Benjamin died in 1635. For five years somewhere in this period, Jonson lived separately from his wife, enjoying the hospitality of Lord Aubigny.

 Career By summer 1597, Jonson had a fixed engagement in the Admiral's Men, then performing under Philip Henslowe's management at The Rose. John Aubrey reports, on uncertain authority, that Jonson was not successful as an actor; whatever his skills as an actor, he was evidently more valuable to the company as a writer. By this time Jonson had begun to write original plays for the Lord Admiral's Men; in 1598 he was mentioned by Francis Meres in his Palladis Tamia as one of "the best for tragedy." None of his early tragedies survives, however. An undated comedy, The Case is Altered, may be his earliest surviving play. In 1597 a play which he co-wrote with Thomas Nashe, The Isle of Dogs, was suppressed after causing great offence. Arrest warrants for Jonson and Nashe were issued by Elizabeth's socalled interrogator, Richard Topcliffe. Jonson was jailed in Marshalsea Prison and charged with "Leude and mutynous behavior", while Nashe managed to escape to Great Yarmouth. A year later, Jonson was again briefly imprisoned, this time in Newgate Prison, for killing another man, the actor Gabriel Spenser, in a duel on 22 September 1598 in Hogsden Fields, (today part of Hoxton). Tried on a charge of manslaughter, Jonson pleaded guilty but was subsequently released by benefit of clergy, a legal ploy through which he gained leniency by reciting a brief bible verse (the neck-verse ), forfeiting his 'goods and chattels' and being branded on his left thumb. In 1598 Jonson produced his first great success, Every Man in his Humour, capitalising on the vogue for humour plays which George Chapman had started with An Humorous Day's Mirth. William Shakespeare was among the first cast. Jonson followed the next year with Every Man Out of His Humour, a pedantic attempt to imitate Aristophanes. It is not known whether this was a success on stage, but when published, it proved popular and went through several editions. Johnson's other work for the theatre in the last years of Elizabeth I's reign was marked by fighting and controversy. Cynthia's Revels was produced by the Children of the Chapel Royal at Blackfriars Theatre in 1600. It satirised both John Marston, who Jonson believed had accused him of lustfulness, possibly in Histrio-Mastix, and Thomas Dekker, against whom Jonson's animus is not known. Jonson attacked the two poets again in 1601's Poetaster. Dekker responded with Satiromastix, subtitled "the untrussing of the humorous poet". The final scene of this play, whilst certainly not to be taken at face value as a portrait of Jonson, offers a caricature that is recognisable from Drummond's report – boasting about himself and condemning other poets, criticising performances of his plays, and calling attention to himself in any available way. This "War of the Theatres" appears to have ended with reconciliation on all sides. Jonson collaborated with Dekker on a pageant welcoming James I to England in 1603 although Drummond reports that Jonson called Dekker a rogue. Marston dedicated The Malcontent to Jonson and the two collaborated with Chapman on Eastward Ho, a 1605 play whose anti-Scottish sentiment briefly landed both authors in jail.

 Royal Patronage At the beginning of the reign of James I of England in 1603 Jonson joined other poets and playwrights in welcoming the new king. Jonson quickly adapted himself to the additional demand for masques and entertainments introduced with the new reign and fostered by both the king and his consort Anne of Denmark. In addition to his popularity on the public stage and in the royal hall, he enjoyed the patronage of aristocrats such as Elizabeth Sidney (daughter of Sir Philip Sidney) and Lady Mary Wroth. This connection with the Sidney family provided the impetus for one of Jonson's most famous lyrics, the country house poem To Penshurst. In 1603 Thomas Overbury reported that Jonson was living on Aurelian Townsend and "scorning the world." Perhaps this explains why his trouble with English authorities continued. That same year he was questioned by the Privy Council about Sejanus, a politically-themed play about corruption in the Roman Empire. He was again in trouble for topical allusions in a play, now lost, in which he took part. After the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, he appears to have been asked by the Privy Council to attempt to prevail on a certain priest to cooperate with the government; the priest he found was Father Thomas Wright, who heard Fawkes's confession (Teague, 249). At the same time, Jonson pursued a more prestigious career, writing masques for James' court. The Satyr (1603) and The Masque of Blackness (1605) are two of about two dozen masques which Jonson wrote for James or for Queen Anne; The Masque of Blackness was praised by Algernon Charles Swinburne as the consummate example of this now-extinct genre, which mingled speech, dancing, and spectacle. On many of these projects he collaborated, not always peacefully, with designer Inigo Jones. For example, Jones designed the scenery for Jonson's masque Oberon, the Faery Prince performed at Whitehall on 1 January 1611 in which Prince Henry, eldest son of James I, appeared in the title role. Perhaps partly as a result of this new career, Jonson gave up writing plays for the public theatres for a decade. He later told Drummond that he had made less than two hundred pounds on all his plays together. In 1616 Jonson received a yearly pension of 100 marks (about £60), leading some to identify him as England's first Poet Laureate. This sign of royal favour may have encouraged him to publish the first volume of the folio collected edition of his works that year. Other volumes followed in 1640–41 and 1692. (See: Ben Jonson folios) In 1618 Jonson set out for his ancestral Scotland on foot. He spent over a year there, and the best-remembered hospitality which he enjoyed was that of the Scottish poet, Drummond of Hawthornden, in April of 1619, sited on the River Esk. Drummond undertook to record as much of Jonson's conversation as he could in his diary, and thus recorded aspects of Jonson's personality that would otherwise have been less clearly seen. Jonson delivers his opinions, in Drummond's terse reporting, in an expansive and even magisterial mood. Drummond noted he was "a great lover and praiser of himself, a contemner and scorner of others". In Edinburgh, Jonson is recorded as staying with a John Stuart of Leith. While there he was made an honorary citizen of Edinburgh. On returning to England, he was awarded an honorary Master of Arts degree from Oxford University. From Edinburgh he travelled west and lodged with the Duke of Lennox where he wrote a play based on Loch Lomond. The period between 1605 and 1620 may be viewed as Jonson's heyday. By 1616 he had produced all the plays on which his present reputation as a dramatist is based, including the tragedy Catiline (acted and printed 1611), which achieved limited success, and the comedies Volpone, (acted 1605 and printed in 1607), Epicoene, or the Silent Woman (1609), The Alchemist (1610), Bartholomew Fair (1614) and The Devil is an Ass (1616). The Alchemist and Volpone were immediately successful. Of Epicoene, Jonson told Drummond of a satirical verse which reported

that the play's subtitle was appropriate, since its audience had refused to applaud the play (i.e., remained silent). Yet Epicoene, along with Bartholomew Fair and (to a lesser extent) The Devil is an Ass have in modern times achieved a certain degree of recognition. While his life during this period was apparently more settled than it had been in the 1590s, his financial security was still not assured.

 Decline and death Jonson began to decline in the 1620s. He was still well-known; from this time dates the prominence of the Sons of Ben or the "Tribe of Ben", those younger poets such as Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace, and Sir John Suckling who took their bearing in verse from Jonson. However, a series of setbacks drained his strength and damaged his reputation. He resumed writing regular plays in the 1620s, but these are not considered among his best. They are of significant interest, however, for their portrayal of Charles I's England. The Staple of News, for example, offers a remarkable look at the earliest stage of English journalism. The lukewarm reception given that play was, however, nothing compared to the dismal failure of The New Inn; the cold reception given this play prompted Jonson to write a poem condemning his audience (the Ode to Myself), which in turn prompted Thomas Carew, one of the "Tribe of Ben," to respond in a poem that asks Jonson to recognise his own decline. The principal factor in Jonson's partial eclipse was, however, the death of James and the accession of King Charles I in 1625. Jonson felt neglected by the new court. A decisive quarrel with Jones harmed his career as a writer of court masques, although he continued to entertain the court on an irregular basis. For his part, Charles displayed a certain degree of care for the great poet of his father's day: he increased Jonson's annual pension to £100 and included a tierce of wine. Despite the strokes that he suffered in the 1620s, Jonson continued to write. At his death in 1637 he seems to have been working on another play, The Sad Shepherd. Though only two acts are extant, this represents a remarkable new direction for Jonson: a move into pastoral drama. During the early 1630s he also conducted a correspondence with James Howell, who warned him about disfavour at court in the wake of his dispute with Jones. Jonson died on 6 August 1637 and his funeral was held on 9 August. He is buried in the north aisle of the Nave in Westminster Abbey, with the inscription "O Rare Ben Johnson" (sic) set in the slab over his grave. It has been suggested that this could be read "Orare Ben Jonson" (pray for Ben Jonson), which would indicate a deathbed return to Catholicism, but the carving shows a distinct space between "O" and "rare". Researchers suggest that the tribute came from William D’Avenant, Jonson’s successor as Poet Laureate, as the same phrase appears on D'Avenant's nearby gravestone.The fact that he was buried in an upright grave could be an indication of his reduced circumstances at the time of his death, although it has also been written that Jonson asked for a grave exactly 18 inches square from the monarch and received an upright grave to fit in the requested space. The same source claims that the epitaph came from the remark of a passerby to the grave.

His work 

Drama

Apart from two tragedies, Sejanus and Catiline, that largely failed to impress Renaissance audiences, Jonson's work for the public theatres was in comedy. These plays vary in some respects. The minor early plays, particularly those written for boy players, present somewhat looser plots and less-developed characters than those written later, for adult companies. Already in the plays which were his salvos in the Poet's War, he displays the keen eye for absurdity and hypocrisy that marks

his best-known plays; in these early efforts, however, plot mostly takes second place to variety of incident and comic set-pieces. They are, also, notably ill-tempered. Thomas Davies called Poetaster "a contemptible mixture of the serio-comic, where the names of Augustus Caesar, Maecenas, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Tibullus, are all sacrificed upon the altar of private resentment." Another early comedy in a different vein, The Case is Altered, is markedly similar to Shakespeare's romantic comedies in its foreign setting, emphasis on genial wit, and love-plot. Henslowe's diary indicates that Jonson had a hand in numerous other plays, including many in genres such as English history with which he is not otherwise associated. The comedies of his middle career, from Eastward Ho to The Devil is an Ass are for the most part city comedy, with a London setting, themes of trickery and money, and a distinct moral ambiguity, despite Jonson's professed aim in the Prologue to Volpone to "mix profit with your pleasure". His late plays or "dotages", particularly The Magnetic Lady and The Sad Shepherd, exhibit signs of an accommodation with the romantic tendencies of Elizabethan comedy. Within this general progression, however, Jonson's comic style remained constant and easily recognisable. He announces his programme in the prologue to the folio version of Every Man in His Humour: he promises to represent "deeds, and language, such as men do use." He planned to write comedies that revived the classical premises of Elizabethan dramatic theory—or rather, since all but the loosest English comedies could claim some descent from Plautus and Terence, he intended to apply those premises with rigour. This commitment entailed negations: after The Case is Altered, Jonson eschewed distant locations, noble characters, romantic plots, and other staples of Elizabethan comedy, focussing instead on the satiric and realistic inheritance of new comedy. He set his plays in contemporary settings, peopled them with recognisable types, and set them to actions that, if not strictly realistic, involved everyday motives such as greed and jealousy. In accordance with the temper of his age, he was often so broad in his characterisation that many of his most famous scenes border on the farcical (as William Congreve, for example, judged Epicoene.) He was more diligent in adhering to the classical unities than many of his peers—although as Margaret Cavendish noted, the unity of action in the major comedies was rather compromised by Jonson's abundance of incident. To this classical model Jonson applied the two features of his style which save his classical imitations from mere pedantry: the vividness with which he depicted the lives of his characters, and the intricacy of his plots. Coleridge, for instance, claimed that The Alchemist had one of the three most perfect plots in literature.

 Poetry Jonson's poetry, like his drama, is informed by his classical learning. Some of his betterknown poems are close translations of Greek or Roman models; all display the careful attention to form and style that often came naturally to those trained in classics in the humanist manner. Jonson largely avoided the debates about rhyme and meter that had consumed Elizabethan classicists such as Thomas Campion and Gabriel Harvey. Accepting both rhyme and stress, Jonson used them to mimic the classical qualities of simplicity, restraint, and precision. “Epigrams” (published in the 1616 folio) is an entry in a genre that was popular among lateElizabethan and Jacobean audiences, although Jonson was perhaps the only poet of his time to work in its full classical range. The epigrams explore various attitudes, most from the satiric stock of the day: complaints against women, courtiers, and spies abound. The condemnatory poems are short and anonymous; Jonson’s epigrams of praise, including a famous poem to Camden and lines to Lucy Harington, are longer and are mostly addressed to specific individuals. Although it is an epigram in the classical sense of the genre, "On My First Sonne" is neither satirical nor very short; the poem, and others like it, resemble what a later age sometimes called "lyric poetry", and it is almost in the form of a Sonnet, however there are some elements missing. It is possible that the title symbolises this with the spelling of 'son' as 'Sonne'. Johnson's poems of “The Forest” also appeared in the first folio. Most of the fifteen poems are addressed to Jonson’s aristocratic supporters, but the

most famous are his country-house poem “To Penshurst” and the poem “To Celia” (“Come, my Celia, let us prove”) that appears also in ‘’Volpone.’’ Underwood, published in the expanded folio of 1640, is a larger and more heterogeneous group of poems. It contains A Celebration of Charis, Jonson’s most extended effort at love poetry; various religious pieces; encomiastic poems including the poem to Shakespeare and a sonnet on Mary Wroth; the Execration against Vulcan and others. The 1640 volume also contains three elegies which have often been ascribed to Donne (one of them appeared in Donne’s posthumous collected poems).

Relationship with Shakespeare There are many legends about Jonson's rivalry with Shakespeare, some of which may be true. Drummond reports that during their conversation, Jonson scoffed at two apparent absurdities in Shakespeare's plays: a nonsensical line in Julius Caesar, and the setting of The Winter's Tale on the non-existent seacoast of Bohemia. Drummond also reported Jonson as saying that Shakespeare "wanted (i.e. lacked) art." Whether Drummond is viewed as accurate or not, the comments fit well with Jonson's well-known theories about literature. In Timber, which was published posthumously and reflects his lifetime of practical experience, Jonson offers a fuller and more conciliatory comment. He recalls being told by certain actors that Shakespeare never blotted (i.e., crossed out) a line when he wrote. His own response, "Would he had blotted a thousand," was taken as malicious. However, Jonson explains, "He was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature, had an excellent phantasy, brave notions, and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped". Jonson concludes that "there was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned." Also when Shakespeare died he said "He was not of an age, but for all time." Thomas Fuller relates stories of Jonson and Shakespeare engaging in debates in the Mermaid Tavern; Fuller imagines conversations in which Shakespeare would run rings around the more learned but more ponderous Jonson. That the two men knew each other personally is beyond doubt, not only because of the tone of Jonson's references to him but because Shakespeare's company produced a number of Jonson's plays, at least one of which (Every Man in his Humour) Shakespeare certainly acted in. However, it is now impossible to tell how much personal communication they had, and tales of their friendship cannot be substantiated. Jonson's most influential and revealing commentary on Shakespeare is the second of the two poems that he contributed to the prefatory verse that opens Shakespeare's First Folio. This poem, "To the memory of my beloved, The AUTHOR, Mr. William Shakespeare: And what he hath left us," did a good deal to create the traditional view of Shakespeare as a poet who, despite "small Latine, and lesse Greeke", had a natural genius. The poem has traditionally been thought to exemplify the contrast which Jonson perceived between himself, the disciplined and erudite classicist, scornful of ignorance and sceptical of the masses, and Shakespeare, represented in the poem as a kind of natural wonder whose genius was not subject to any rules except those of the audiences for which he wrote. But the poem itself qualifies this view: Yet must I not give Nature all: Thy Art, My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part. Some view this elegy as a conventional exercise, but others see it as a heartfelt tribute to the "Sweet Swan Of Avon," the "Soul of the Age!" It has been argued that Jonson helped to edit the First Folio, and he may have been inspired to write this poem by reading his fellow playwright's works, a number of which had been previously either unpublished or available in less satisfactory versions, in a relatively complete form.

Reception and influence During most of the 17th century Jonson was a towering literary figure, and his influence was enormous. Before the English Civil War, the "Tribe of Ben" touted his importance, and during the Restoration Jonson's satirical comedies and his theory and practice of "humour characters" (which are often misunderstood; see William Congreve's letters for clarification) was extremely influential, providing the blueprint for many Restoration comedies. In the 18th century Jonson's status began to decline. In the Romantic era, Jonson suffered the fate of being unfairly compared and contrasted to Shakespeare, as the taste for Jonson's type of satirical comedy decreased. Jonson was at times greatly appreciated by the Romantics, but overall he was denigrated for not writing in a Shakespearean vein. In the 20th century, Jonson's status rose significantly.

 Drama As G. E. Bentley notes in Shakespeare and Jonson: Their Reputations in the Seventeenth Century Compared, Jonson's reputation was in some respects equal to Shakespeare's in the 17th century. After the English theatres were reopened on the Restoration of Charles II, Jonson's work, along with Shakespeare's and Fletcher's work, formed the initial core of the Restoration repertory. It was not until after 1710 that Shakespeare's plays (ordinarily in heavily revised forms) were more frequently performed than those of his Renaissance contemporaries. Many critics since the 18th century have ranked Jonson below only Shakespeare among English Renaissance dramatists. Critical judgment has tended to emphasise the very qualities that Jonson himself lauds in his prefaces, in Timber, and in his scattered prefaces and dedications: the realism and propriety of his language, the bite of his satire, and the care with which he plotted his comedies. For some critics, the temptation to contrast Jonson (representing art or craft) with Shakespeare (representing nature, or untutored genius) has seemed natural; Jonson himself may be said to initiate this interpretation in the second folio, and Samuel Butler drew the same comparison in his commonplace book later in the century. At the Restoration, this sensed difference became a kind of critical dogma. Charles de SaintÉvremond placed Jonson's comedies above all else in English drama, and Charles Gildon called Jonson the father of English comedy. John Dryden offered a more common assessment in the Essay of Dramatic Poesie, in which his Avatar Neander compares Shakespeare to Homer and Jonson to Virgil: the former represented profound creativity, the latter polished artifice. But "artifice" was in the 17th century almost synonymous with "art"; Jonson, for instance, used "artificer" as a synonym for "artist" (Discoveries, 33). For Lewis Theobald, too, Jonson “ow[ed] all his Excellence to his Art,” in contrast to Shakespeare, the natural genius. Nicholas Rowe, to whom may be traced the legend that Jonson owed the production of Every Man in his Humour to Shakespeare's intercession, likewise attributed Jonson's excellence to learning, which did not raise him quite to the level of genius. A consensus formed: Jonson was the first English poet to understand classical precepts with any accuracy, and he was the first to apply those precepts successfully to contemporary life. But there were also more negative spins on Jonson's learned art; for instance, in the 1750s, Edward Young casually remarked on the way in which Jonson’s learning worked, like Samson’s strength, to his own detriment. Earlier, Aphra Behn, writing in defence of female playwrights, had pointed to Jonson as a writer whose learning did not make him popular; unsurprisingly, she compares him unfavorably to Shakespeare. Particularly in the tragedies, with their lengthy speeches abstracted from Sallust and Cicero, Augustan critics saw a writer whose learning had swamped his aesthetic judgment. In this period, Alexander Pope is exceptional in that he noted the tendency to exaggeration in these competing critical portraits: "It is ever the nature of Parties to be in extremes; and nothing is so probable, as that because Ben Johnson had much the most learning, it was said on the one hand that Shakespear had none at all; and because Shakespear had much the most wit and fancy, it was

retorted on the other, that Johnson wanted both."For the most part, the 18th century consensus remained committed to the division that Pope doubted; as late as the 1750s, Sarah Fielding could put a brief recapitulation of this analysis in the mouth of a "man of sense" encountered by David Simple. Though his stature declined during the 18th century, Jonson was still read and commented on throughout the century, generally in the kind of comparative and dismissive terms just described. Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg translated parts of Peter Whalley's edition into German in 1765. Shortly before the Romantic revolution, Edward Capell offered an almost unqualified rejection of Jonson as a dramatic poet, who (he writes) "has very poor pretensions to the high place he holds among the English Bards, as there is no original manner to distinguish him, and the tedious sameness visible in his plots indicates a defect of Genius." The disastrous failures of productions of Volpone and Epicoene in the early 1770s no doubt bolstered a widespread sense that Jonson had at last grown too antiquated for the contemporary public; if he still attracted enthusiasts such as Earl Camden and William Gifford, he all but disappeared from the stage in the last quarter of the century. The romantic revolution in criticism brought about an overall decline in the critical estimation of Jonson. Hazlitt refers dismissively to Jonson’s “laborious caution.” Coleridge, while more respectful, describes Jonson as psychologically superficial: “He was a very accurately observing man; but he cared only to observe what was open to, and likely to impress, the senses.” Coleridge placed Jonson second only to Shakespeare; other romantic critics were less approving. The early 19th century was the great age for recovering Renaissance drama. Jonson, whose reputation had survived, appears to have been less interesting to some readers than writers such as Thomas Middleton or John Heywood, who were in some senses “discoveries” of the 19th century. Moreover, the emphasis which the romantic writers placed on imagination, and their concomitant tendency to distrust studied art, lowered Jonson's status, if it also sharpened their awareness of the difference traditionally noted between Jonson and Shakespeare. This trend was by no means universal, however; William Gifford, Jonson's first editor of the 19th century, did a great deal to defend Jonson's reputation during this period of general decline. In the next era, Swinburne, who was more interested in Jonson than most Victorians, wrote, “The flowers of his growing have every quality but one which belongs to the rarest and finest among flowers: they have colour, form, variety, fertility, vigour: the one thing they want is fragrance” – by “fragrance,” Swinburne means spontaneity. In the 20th century, Jonson’s body of work has been subject to a more varied set of analyses, broadly consistent with the interests and programmes of modern literary criticism. In an essay printed in The Sacred Wood, T.S. Eliot attempted to repudiate the charge that Jonson was an arid classicist by analysing the role of imagination in his dialogue. Eliot was appreciative of Jonson's overall conception and his "surface," a view consonant with the modernist reaction against Romantic criticism, which tended to denigrate playwrights who did not concentrate on representations of psychological depth. Around mid-century, a number of critics and scholars followed Eliot’s lead, producing detailed studies of Jonson’s verbal style. At the same time, study of Elizabethan themes and conventions, such as those by E. E. Stoll and M. C. Bradbrook, provided a more vivid sense of how Jonson’s work was shaped by the expectations of his time. The proliferation of new critical perspectives after mid-century touched on Jonson inconsistently. Jonas Barish was the leading figure among critics who appreciated Jonson's artistry. On the other hand, Jonson received less attention from the new critics than did some other playwrights and his work was not of programmatic interest to psychoanalytic critics. But Jonson’s career eventually made him a focal point for the revived sociopolitical criticism. Jonson’s works, particularly his masques and pageants, offer significant information regarding the relations of literary production and political power, as do his contacts with and poems for aristocratic patrons; moreover, his career at the centre of London’s emerging literary world has been seen as exemplifying the development of a fully commodified literary culture. In this respect he is seen as a

transitional figure, an author whose skills and ambition led him to a leading role both in the declining culture of patronage and in the rising culture of mass consumption.

 Poetry If Jonson's reputation as a playwright has traditionally been linked to Shakespeare, his reputation as a poet has, since the early 20th century, been linked to that of John Donne. In this comparison, Jonson represents the cavalier strain of poetry, emphasising grace and clarity of expression; Donne, by contrast, epitomised the metaphysical school of poetry, with its reliance on strained, baroque metaphors and often vague phrasing. Since the critics who made this comparison (Herbert Grierson for example), were to varying extents rediscovering Donne, this comparison often worked to the detriment of Jonson's reputation. In his time Jonson was at least as influential as Donne. In 1623, historian Edmund Bolton named him the best and most polished English poet. That this judgment was widely shared is indicated by the admitted influence he had on younger poets. The grounds for describing Jonson as the "father" of cavalier poets are clear: many of the cavalier poets described themselves as his "sons" or his "tribe." For some of this tribe, the connection was as much social as poetic; Herrick described meetings at "the Sun, the Dog, the Triple Tunne." All of them, including those like Herrick whose accomplishments in verse are generally regarded as superior to Jonson's, took inspiration from Jonson's revival of classical forms and themes, his subtle melodies, and his disciplined use of wit. In these respects Jonson may be regarded as among the most important figures in the prehistory of English neoclassicism. The best of Jonson's lyrics have remained current since his time; periodically, they experience a brief vogue, as after the publication of Peter Whalley's edition of 1756. Jonson's poetry continues to interest scholars for the light which it sheds on English literary history, such as politics, systems of patronage, and intellectual attitudes. For the general reader, Jonson's reputation rests on a few lyrics that, though brief, are surpassed for grace and precision by very few Renaissance poems: "On My First Sonne"; "To Celia"; "To Penshurst"; and the epitaph on boy player Solomon Pavy.

Johnson's works  Plays • A Tale of a Tub, comedy (ca. 1596? revised? performed 1633; printed 1640) • The Case is Altered, comedy (ca. 1597–98; printed 1609), with Henry Porter and Anthony Munday? • Every Man in His Humour, comedy (performed 1598; printed 1601) • Every Man out of His Humour, comedy ( performed 1599; printed 1600) • Cynthia's Revels (performed 1600; printed 1601) • The Poetaster, comedy (performed 1601; printed 1602) • Sejanus His Fall, tragedy (performed 1603; printed 1605) • Eastward Ho, comedy (performed and printed 1605), a collaboration with John Marston and George Chapman • Volpone, comedy (ca. 1605–06; printed 1607) • Epicoene, or the Silent Woman, comedy (performed 1609; printed 1616) • The Alchemist, comedy (performed 1610; printed 1612) • Catiline His Conspiracy, tragedy (performed and printed 1611) • Bartholomew Fair, comedy (performed 31 October 1614; printed 1631)

The Devil is an Ass, comedy (performed 1616; printed 1631) The Staple of News, comedy (performed Feb. 1626; printed 1631) The New Inn, or The Light Heart, comedy (licensed 19 January 1629; printed 1631) The Magnetic Lady, or Humors Reconciled, comedy (licensed 12 October 1632; printed 1641) • The Sad Shepherd, pastoral (ca. 1637, printed 1641), unfinished • Mortimer his Fall, history (printed 1641), a fragment • • • •

 Masques • The Coronation Triumph, or The King's Entertainment (performed 15 March 1604; printed 1604); with Thomas Dekker • A Private Entertainment of the King and Queen on May-Day (The Penates) (1 May 1604; printed 1616) • The Entertainment of the Queen and Prince Henry at Althorp (The Satyr) (25 June 1603; printed 1604) • The Masque of Blackness (6 January 1605; printed 1608) • Hymenaei (5 January 1606; printed 1606) • The Entertainment of the Kings of Great Britain and Denmark (The Hours) (24 July 1606; printed 1616) • The Masque of Beauty (10 January 1608; printed 1608) • The Masque of Queens (2 February 1609; printed 1609) • The Hue and Cry after Cupid, or The Masque at Lord Haddington's Marriage (9 February 1608; printed ca. 1608) • The Entertainment at Britain's Burse (11 April 1609; lost, rediscovered 2004) • The Speeches at Prince Henry's Barriers, or The Lady of the Lake (6 January 1610; printed 1616) • Oberon, the Faery Prince (1 January 1611; printed 1616) • Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly (3 February 1611; printed 1616) • Love Restored (6 January 1612; printed 1616) • A Challenge at Tilt, at a Marriage (27 December 1613/1 January 1614; printed 1616) • The Irish Masque at Court (29 December 1613; printed 1616) • Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists (6 January 1615; printed 1616) • The Golden Age Restored (1 January 1616; printed 1616) • Christmas, His Masque (Christmas 1616; printed 1641) • The Vision of Delight (6 January 1617; printed 1641) • Lovers Made Men, or The Masque of Lethe, or The Masque at Lord Hay's (22 February 1617; printed 1617) • Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (6 January 1618; printed 1641) The masque was a failure; Jonson revised it by placing the anti-masque first, turning it into: • For the Honour of Wales (17 February 1618; printed 1641) • News from the New World Discovered in the Moon (7 January 1620: printed 1641) • The Entertainment at Blackfriars, or The Newcastle Entertainment (May 1620?; MS) • Pan's Anniversary, or The Shepherd's Holy-Day (19 June 1620?; printed 1641) • The Gypsies Metamorphosed (3 and 5 August 1621; printed 1640) • The Masque of Augurs (6 January 1622; printed 1622) • Time Vindicated to Himself and to His Honours (19 January 1623; printed 1623) • Neptune's Triumph for the Return of Albion (26 January 1624; printed 1624) • The Masque of Owls at Kenilworth (19 August 1624; printed 1641)

• • • • •

The Fortunate Isles and Their Union (9 January 1625; printed 1625) Love's Triumph Through Callipolis (9 January 1631; printed 1631) Chloridia: Rites to Chloris and Her Nymphs (22 February 1631; printed 1631) The King's Entertainment at Welbeck in Nottinghamshire (21 May 1633; printed 1641) Love's Welcome at Bolsover ( 30 July 1634; printed 1641)

 Other works • • • • • • • • • • •

Epigrams (1612) The Forest (1616), including To Penshurst A Discourse of Love (1618) Barclay's Argenis, translated by Jonson (1623) The Execration against Vulcan (1640) Horace's Art of Poetry, translated by Jonson (1640), with a commendatory verse by Edward Herbert Underwood (1640) English Grammar (1640) Timber, or Discoveries made upon men and matter, as they have flowed out of his daily readings, or had their reflux to his peculiar notion of the times, a commonplace book On My First Sonne (1616), elegy To Celia (Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes), poem

As with other English Renaissance dramatists, a portion of Ben Jonson's literary output has not survived. In addition to The Isle of Dogs (1597), the records suggest these lost plays as wholly or partially Jonson's work: Richard Crookback (1602); Hot Anger Soon Cold (1598), with Porter and Henry Chettle; Page of Plymouth (1599), with Dekker; and Robert II, King of Scots (1599), with Chettle and Dekker. Several of Jonson's masques and entertainments also are not extant: The Entertainment at Merchant Taylors (1607); The Entertainment at Salisbury House for James I (1608); and The May Lord (1613–19). Finally, there are questionable or borderline attributions. Jonson may have had a hand in Rollo, Duke of Normandy, or The Bloody Brother, a play in the canon of John Fletcher and his collaborators. The comedy The Widow was printed in 1652 as the work of Thomas Middleton, Fletcher and Jonson, though scholars have been intensely sceptical about Jonson's presence in the play. A few attributions of anonymous plays, such as The London Prodigal, have been ventured by individual researchers, but have met with cool responses. ➢ Principles of poetry according to New Classicism : Like Dr. JONSON and the people who lived until the 18th century. 1. it is the age of rationalism. Reasoning about everything. 2. The words which are chosen should balance each other. 3. There must be an argument. 4. There must be some kind of symmetry in the structure of the poem.

5. When we think about anything, it must be controlled. Our feelings are controlled by our reason.

A Brief Biography of Ben Johnson:

Ben   Jonson  was   born   around   June   11,   1572,   the  posthumous   son   of   a   clergyman.   He   was   educated   at  Westminster   School  by  the  great  classical  scholar  William  Camden  and worked in his stepfather's trade, bricklaying.  The trade did not please him in the least, and he joined the  army,   serving   in   Flanders.   He   returned   to   England   about  1592 and married Anne Lewis on November 14, 1594. Jonson   joined   the   theatrical   company   of  Philip  Henslowe  in   London   as   an   actor   and   playwright   on   or  before   1597,   when   he   is   identified   in   the   papers   of  Henslowe. In 1597 he was imprisoned in the  Fleet Prison  for   his   involvement   in   a   satire   entitled  The   Isle   of   Dogs,  declared   seditious   by   the   authorities.   The   following   year   Jonson   killed   a   fellow   actor,  Gabriel   Spencer,   in   a   duel   in   the   Fields   at   Shoreditch   and   was   tried   at   Old   Bailey   for   murder. He escaped the gallows only by pleading benefit of clergy. During his subsequent  imprisonment he converted to Roman Catholicism only to convert back to Anglicism over a  decade later, in 1610. He was released forfeit of all his possessions, and with a felon's brand  on his thumb. Jonson's second known play,  Every Man in His Humour, was performed in 1598 by  the  Lord Chamberlain's Men  at the Globe with  William Shakespeare  in the cast. Jonson  became a celebrity, and there was a brief fashion for 'humours' comedy, a kind of topical   comedy   involving   eccentric   characters,   each   of   whom   represented   a   temperament,   or  humor,   of   humanity.   His   next   play,  Every   Man   Out   of   His   Humour  (1599),   was   less  successful.  Every   Man   Out   of   His   Humour  and  Cynthia's   Revels  (1600)   were   satirical  comedies displaying Jonson's classical learning and his interest in formal experiment. Jonson's explosive temperament and conviction of his superior talent gave rise to  "War of the Theatres". In The Poetaster (1601), he satirized other writers, chiefly the English  dramatists Thomas Dekker and John Marston. Dekker and Marston retaliated by attacking  Jonson in their Satiromastix (1601). The plot of Satiromastix was mainly overshadowed by  its   abuse   of   Jonson.   Jonson   had   portrayed   himself   as   Horace   in  The   Poetaster,   and   in  Satiromastix  Marston and Dekker, as Demetrius and Crispinus ridicule Horace, presenting  Jonson   as   a   vain   fool.   Eventually,   the   writers   patched   their   feuding;   in   1604   Jonson  collaborated   with   Dekker   on  The   King's   Entertainment  and   with   Marston   and  George  Chapman on Eastward Ho. Jonson's next play, the classical tragedy  Sejanus, His Fall  (1603), based on Roman  history and offering an astute view of dictatorship, again got Jonson into trouble with the  authorities. Jonson was called before the Privy Council on charges of 'popery and treason'.  Jonson did not, however, learn a lesson, and was again briefly imprisoned, with Marston  and   Chapman,   for   controversial   views   ("something   against   the   Scots")   espoused   in 

Eastward Ho  (1604). These two incidents jeopardized his emerging role as court poet to  King   James   I.   Having   converted   to   Catholicism,   Jonson   was   also   the   object   of   deep  suspicion after the Gunpowder Plot of Guy Fawkes (1605). In 1605, Jonson began to write  masques  for the entertainment of the court. The  earliest of his masques,  The Satyr  was given at Althorpe, and Jonson seems to have been  appointed Court Poet shortly after. The masques displayed his erudition, wit, and versatility  and contained some of his best lyric poetry. Masque of Blacknesse (1605) was the first in a  series of  collaborations  with  Inigo   Jones, noted  English  architect and  set  designer. This  collaboration produced masques such as  The Masque of Owles,  Masque of Beauty  (1608),  and Masque of Queens (1609), which were performed in Inigo Jones' elaborate and exotic  settings. These masques ascertained Jonson's standing as foremost writer of masques in the  Jacobean   era.   The   collaboration   with   Jones   was   finally   destroyed   by   intense   personal  rivalry. Jonson's enduring reputation rests on the comedies written between 1605 and 1614.  The first of these, Volpone, or The Fox (performed in 1605­1606, first published in 1607) is  often regarded as his masterpiece. The play, though set in Venice, directs its scrutiny on the  rising merchant classes of Jacobean London. The following plays,  Epicoene: or, The Silent   Woman  (1609),  The Alchemist  (1610), and  Bartholomew Fair  (1614) are all peopled with  dupes and those who deceive them. Jonson's keen sense of his own stature as author is  represented   by   the   unprecedented   publication   of   his  Works,   in   folio,   in   1616.   He   was  appointed as poet laureate and rewarded a substantial pension in the same year. In 1618, when he was about forty­five years old, Jonson set out for Scotland, the  home of his ancestors. He made the journey entirely by foot, in spite of dissuasion from   Bacon, who "said to him he loved not to see poesy go on other feet than poetical dactyls and  spondæus." Jonson's prose style is vividly sketched in the notes of  William Drummond of  Hawthornden, who recorded their conversations during Jonson's visit to Scotland 1618­ 1619. Jonson himself was sketched by Hawthornden: " He is a great lover and praiser of  himself ; a contemner and scorner of others ; given rather to lose a friend than a jest ; . . .   he is passionately kind and angry ; careless either to gain or keep ; vindictive, but, if he be   well   answered,   at   himself   .  .   .   ;   oppressed   with   fantasy,   which   hath   ever  mastered   his   reason."1 After his return, Jonson received an honorary Master of Arts degree from Oxford   University and lectured on rhetoric at Gresham College, London. The comedy The Devil is an Ass (1616) had turned out to be a comparative flop. This  may have discouraged Jonson, for it was nine years before his next play, The Staple of News  (1625), was produced. Instead, Jonson turned his attention to writing masques. Jonson's  later   plays  The   New   Inn  (1629)   and  A   Tale   of   a   Tub  (1633)   were   not   great   successes,  described harshly, but perhaps justly by Dryden as his "dotages." Despite these apparent failures, and in spite of his frequent feuds, Jonson was the  dean and the leading wit of the group of writers who gathered at the Mermaid Tavern in  the Cheapside district of London. The young poets influenced by Jonson were the self­styled  'sons'   or   'tribe'   of   Ben,   later   called   the  Cavalier   poets,   a   group   which   included,   among  others, Robert Herrick, Thomas Carew, Sir John Suckling, and Richard Lovelace. Jonson was appointed City Chronologer of London in 1628, the same year in which  he   suffered   a  severe   stroke.   His  loyal  friends  kept   him   company   in   his  final   years  and   attended the King provided him some financial comfort. Jonson died on August 6, 1637  and was buried in Westminster Abbey  under a plain slab  on which was later carved the  words,   "O   Rare   Ben   Jonson!"   His   admirers   and   friends   contributed   to   the   collection   of 

memorial elegies,  Jonsonus virbius, published in 1638. Jonson's last play,  Sad Shepherd's   Tale, was left unfinished at his death and published posthumously in 1641. 1.English   Literature:   An   Illustrated   Record.   Vol   II,   part   II.   Richard   Garnett   and  Edmund Gosse, Eds. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1904. Bibliography:  •Bamborough, J. B. Ben Jonson (1970) •Barish, J. A.,Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy (1970) •Barish, J. A., ed.,Ben Jonson: A Collection of Critical Essays (1963) •Chute, Marchette. Ben Jonson of Westminster. (1953) •Craig, D. H.,Ben Jonson: The Critical Heritage (1990) •Davis, Joe Lee. The Sons of Ben: Jonsonian Comedy in Caroline England  (1967) •Hereford, C. H., et al., Eds. Ben Jonson: The Man and His Work, 11 vols.  (1925­52) •Jackson, Gabriele Bernhard. Vision and judgment in Ben Jonson's drama  (1968) •MacLean, Hugh, Ed. Ben Jonson And The Cavalier Poets (1974) •Miles, Rosalind.Ben Jonson: His Life and Work (1986) •Miles, Rosalind.Ben Jonson: His Craft and Art (1990) •Nichols, J. G. Poetry of Ben Jonson (1969) •Orgel, S. The Jonsonian Masque (1965; repr. 1981) •Partridge, E. B. The Broken Compass: A Study of the Major Comedies of  Ben Jonson (1958; repr. 1976) •Riggs, David. Ben Jonson: A Life (1989) •Trimpi, Wesley. A Study of Ben Jonson's Poems (1962) •Watson, R. N.,Ben Jonson's Parodic Strategy (1987) •Wolf, William Dennis. Reform of the fallen world : The "virtuous prince" in  Jonsonian tragedy and comedy. (1973)

You can find good information about 17th century literature here: http://cla.calpoly.edu/~dschwart/engl331/donne.html