Henslowe consequent on this event may account for the production
of Every Man in his Humour by the rival company. In
prison Jonson was visited by a Roman Catholic priest, and the
result (certainly strange, if Jonson’s parentage is considered) was
his conversion to the Church of Rome, to which he adhered
for twelve years. Jonson was afterwards a diligent student of
divinity; but, though his mind was religious, it is not probable
that its natural bias much inclined it to dwell upon creeds and
their controversies. He pleaded guilty to the charge brought
against him, as the rolls of Middlesex sessions show; but, after
a short imprisonment, he was released by benefit of clergy,
forfeiting his “goods and chattels,” and being branded on his left
thumb. The affair does not seem to have affected his reputation;
in 1599 he is found back again at work for Henslowe, receiving together
with Dekker, Chettle and “another gentleman,” earnest-money
for a tragedy (undiscovered) called Robert II., King of
Scots. In the same year he brought out through the lord
chamberlain’s company (possibly already at the Globe, then
newly built or building) the elaborate comedy of Every Man out
of his Humour (quarto 1600; fol. 1616)—a play subsequently presented
before Queen Elizabeth. The sunshine of court favour,
rarely diffused during her reign in rays otherwise than figuratively
golden, was not to bring any material comfort to the most
learned of her dramatists, before there was laid upon her the
inevitable hand of which his courtly epilogue had besought death
to forget the use. Indeed, of his Cynthia’s Revels, performed by
the chapel children in 1600 and printed with the first title of The
Fountain of Self-Love in 1601, though it was no doubt primarily
designed as a compliment to the queen, the most marked result
had been to offend two playwrights of note—Dekker, with
whom he had formerly worked in company, and who had a
healthy if rough grip of his own; and Marston, who was perhaps
less dangerous by his strength than by his versatility. According
to Jonson, his quarrel with Marston had begun by the latter
attacking his morals, and in the course of it they came to blows,
and might have come to worse. In Cynthia’s Revels, Dekker is
generally held to be satirized as Hedon, and Marston as Anaides
(Fleay, however, thinks Anaides is Dekker, and Hedon Daniel),
while the character of Crites most assuredly has some features
of Jonson himself. Learning the intention of the two writers
whom he had satirized, or at all events of Dekker, to wreak
literary vengeance upon him, he anticipated them in The Poetaster
(1601), again played by the children of the queen’s chapel at the
Blackfriars and printed in 1602; Marston and Dekker are here
ridiculed respectively as the aristocratic Crispinus and the vulgar
Demetrius. The play was completed fifteen weeks after its plot
was first conceived. It is not certain to what the proceedings
against author and play before the lord chief justice, referred to
in the dedication of the edition of 1616, had reference, or when
they were instituted. Fleay’s supposition that the “purge,”
said in the Returne from Parnassus (Pt. II. act iv. sc. iii.) to
have been administered by Shakespeare to Jonson in return for
Horace’s “pill to the poets” in this piece, consisted of Troilus
and Cressida is supremely ingenious, but cannot be examined
here. As for Dekker, he retaliated on The Poetaster by the
Satiromastix, or The Untrussing of the Humorous Poet (1602).
Some more last words were indeed attempted on Jonson’s part,
but in the Apologetic Dialogue added to The Poetaster in the edition
of 1616, though excluded from that of 1602, he says he intends to
turn his attention to tragedy. This intention he apparently
carried out immediately, for in 1602 he received £10 from
Henslowe for a play, entitled Richard Crookbacke, now lost—unfortunately
so, for purposes of comparison in particular, even
if it was only, as Fleay conjectures, “an alteration of Marlowe’s
play.” According to a statement by Overbury, early in 1603,
“Ben Johnson, the poet, now lives upon one Townesend,”
supposed to have been the poet and masque-writer Aurelian
Townshend, at one time steward to the 1st earl of Salisbury,
“and scornes the world.” To his other early patron, Lord
Aubigny, Jonson dedicated the first of his two extant tragedies,
Sejanus, produced by the king’s servants at the Globe late in
1603, Shakespeare once more taking a part in the performance.
Either on its performance or on its appearing in print in 1605,
Jonson was called before the privy council by the Earl of Northampton.
But it is open to question whether this was the occasion
on which, according to Jonson’s statement to Drummond,
Northampton “accused him both of popery and treason” (see
Castelain, Appendix C). Though, for one reason or another,
unsuccessful at first, the endurance of its reputation is attested
by its performance, in a German version by an Englishman,
John Michael Girish, at the court of the grandson of James I. at
Heidelberg.
When the reign of James I. opened in England and an adulatory loyalty seemed intent on showing that it had not exhausted itself at the feet of Gloriana, Jonson’s well-stored brain and ready pen had their share in devising and executing ingenious variations on the theme “Welcome—since we cannot do without thee!” With extraordinary promptitude his genius, which, far from being “ponderous” in its operations, was singularly swift and flexible in adapting itself to the demands made upon it, met the new taste for masques and entertainments—new of course in degree rather than in kind—introduced with the new reign and fostered by both the king and his consort. The pageant which on the 7th of May 1603 bade the king welcome to a capital dissolved in joy was partly of Jonson’s, partly of Dekker’s, devising; and he was able to deepen and diversify the impression by the composition of masques presented to James I. when entertained at houses of the nobility. The Satyr (1603) was produced on one of these occasions, Queen Anne’s sojourn at Althorpe, the seat of Sir Robert Spencer, afterwards Lord Althorpe, who seems to have previously bestowed some patronage upon him. The Penates followed on May-day 1604 at the house of Sir William Cornwallis at Highgate, and the queen herself with her ladies played his Masque of Blackness at Whitehall in 1605. He was soon occasionally employed by the court itself—already in 1606 in conjunction with Inigo Jones, as responsible for the “painting and carpentry”—and thus speedily showed himself master in a species of composition for which, more than any other English poet before Milton, he secured an enduring place in the national poetic literature. Personally, no doubt, he derived considerable material benefit from the new fashion—more especially if his statement to Drummond was anything like correct, that out of his plays (which may be presumed to mean his original plays) he had never gained a couple of hundred pounds.
Good humour seems to have come back with good fortune. Joint employment in The King’s Entertainment (1604) had reconciled him with Dekker; and with Marston also, who in 1604 dedicated to him his Malcontent, he was again on pleasant terms. When, therefore, in 1604 Marston and Chapman (who, Jonson told Drummond, was loved of him, and whom he had probably honoured as “Virgil” in The Poetaster, and who has, though on doubtful grounds, been supposed to have collaborated in the original Sejanus) produced the excellent comedy of Eastward Ho, it appears to have contained some contributions by Jonson. At all events, when the authors were arrested on account of one or more passages in the play which were deemed insulting to the Scots, he “voluntarily imprisoned himself” with them. They were soon released, and a banquet at his expense, attended by Camden and Selden, terminated the incident. If Jonson is to be believed, there had been a report that the prisoners were to have their ears and noses cut, and, with reference apparently to this peril, “at the midst of the feast his old mother drank to him, and showed him a paper which she had intended (if the sentence had taken execution) to have mixed in the prison among his drink, which was full of lusty strong poison; and that she was no churl, she told him, she minded first to have drunk of it herself.” Strange to say, in 1605 Jonson and Chapman, though the former, as he averred, had so “attempered” his style as to have “given no cause to any good man of grief,” were again in prison on account of “a play”; but they appear to have been once more speedily set free, in consequence of a very manly and dignified letter addressed by Jonson to the Earl of Salisbury. As to the relations between Chapman and Jonson, illustrated by newly discovered letters, see Bertram Dobell in the Athenaeum
