Line #20 Creator/BenJonson


1	[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/benjamin_jonson_by_abraham_van_blyenberch.jpg]]
2	[[caption-width-right:350:Portrait of Jonson by Abraham Blyenberch]]
3	Benjamin Jonson (11 June 1572 – 16 August 1637) was an English playwright and poet. He also made a good deal of money as an author of masques, visual/musical spectacles with staged recitations.
4
5	Like Creator/ChristopherMarlowe, Jonson lived a sometimes rambunctious life. Like Marlowe, he is known to have killed another man--Gabriel Spenser--in a duel, and was for a time scheduled to be executed. But where Marlowe died very young (unless you believe [[ConspiracyTheorist he didn't]]) Jonson lived to the fairly ripe old age of 65 during the reign of Charles the I. This means that he missed by a few years living into the republican reign of Oliver Cromwell which--as a sensualist and intermittent Roman Catholic--he'd have been unlikely to enjoy.
6
7	Another great English dramatist whom Jonson outlived was, of course Creator/WilliamShakespeare. The relationship between the two authors, to the degree that we can piece it together, was complex. Jonson was not afraid to criticize his peer from Stratford. On one occasion an actor told him that Shakespeare never blotted a line, and he replied, "Would that he had blotted a thousand!"[[note]]You'd still have a lot left.[[/note]] But he seems to have had a healthy respect for Shakespeare's work in general, and an elegy poem of his entitled "[[To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare and What He Hath Left Us" appears in Shakespeare's first folio.
8
9	Jonson's rivalry with Shakespeare--a mixture of reality and perception--may have negatively affected his posthumous reputation. In his own time and a little afterwards he had a great influence on the British Cavalier poets, some of whom even identified themselves as the "Tribe of Ben." Through the end of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth century Jonson was considered the superior playwright. Eventually their positions started to reverse, and the {{Romantic\|ism}} movement of the early nineteenth century permanently enshrined the Bard at Jonson's expense.
10
11	In a fair assessment the work of the two is just different. Compared to Shakespeare Jonson's plays were much more concentrated on comedy, in part because the few tragedies he did write weren't as well received in his lifetime. In some ways he is more a traditionalist, adhering to the [[Creator/{{Aristotle}} Aristotelian]] unities of time, place, and action that the Elizabethans had inherited from Greco-Roman theatre. But Jonson broke with tradition in eschewing noble/royal protagonists and giving many of his plays familiar, nearby settings. In addition, he played up the artificiality of theatrical conventions in a way that presaged Modernism.
12
13	----
14	!!Notable works by Jonson:
15	* ''A Tale of a Tub'' (1596)
16	* ''The Isle of Dogs'' (1597, w/ Thomas Nashe)
17	* ''Every Man in His Humour'' (1598)
18	* ''Every Man out of His Humour'' (1599)
19	* ''Cynthia's Revels'' (1600)
20	* ''Eastward Ho!'' (1605)
21	* ''Theatre/{{Volpone}}'' (1605-06)
22	* ''Theatre/TheAlchemist'' (1610)
23	* ''Catiline His Conspiracy'' (1611)
24	* ''Theatre/BartholomewFair'' (1614)
25	* ''The Devil is an Ass'' (1616)
26	* ''The Staple of News'' (1626)
27	* ''Theatre/TheNewInn'' (1629)
28
29	!!Representations of Jonson
30	* Jonson and Shakespeare are presented as drinking buddies who complain to each other about writing in Edward Bond's 1973 play ''Bingo''.
31	* Creator/NeilGaiman includes cameo appearances by Jonson in his Shakespeare-themed standalones in ''ComicBook/TheSandman1989''. Jonson comes off the crasser and more mercenary of the two, but affable.
32	* A short story in the Franchise/{{Whoniverse}} posits Jonson and the Fourth Doctor as InexplicablyIdenticalIndividuals. From surviving portraits Jonson does seem to have borne a resemblance to Creator/TomBaker, although he wasn't nearly as slender as Baker was when filming most of his ''Series/DoctorWho'' stories.
33
34	!!Tropes associated with Jonson and his work:
35	* AnimalThemeNaming: ''Volpone'' and the name of its protagonist are taken from "volpe", Italian for "fox." The play also features such characters as Mosca (fly) and Voltore (vulture).
36	* CrossReferencedTitles: ''Every Man in His Humour'' and ''Every Man out of His Humour'', intended as a compare/contrast.
37	* MissingEpisode: ''The Isle of Dogs'' which Jonson co-wrote with Thomas Nashe was immediately suppressed by the government when staged in 1597 and Jonson himself arrested and imprisoned for a time (Nashe was out of London at the time but his papers were seized.) As the play appears to be completely lost there is some debate on it's content but there is some suggestion Queen Elizabeth I herself was satirised.
38

Context Creator / BenJonson