Ben Jonson: A Life

Ian Donaldson’s Ben Jonson: A Life (2012) provides a full, up-to-date account of the life of the late sixteenth-century playwright, a contemporary of Shakespeare’s whose life is much better documented than his more famous peer’s. Donaldson draws on a number of texts unknown to previous biographers, including the journal of a young man who accompanied Jonson on his famous journey on foot from London to Scotland.

Donaldson opens his biography by quoting the earliest biography of Jonson, John Aubrey’s Life: “He lies buried in the north aisle in the path of square stone… with this inscription only on him, in a pavement square of blue marble about fourteen inches square: O RARE BEN JONSON.” Donaldson observes that the precise facts of Jonson’s burial represent just about the only precision to be found in Aubrey’s Life. He adds that even this limited certainty has proven dubious over time: Jonson’s bones have been disturbed three times.

The exact place and date of Jonson’s birth are uncertain. Donaldson offers as his best estimate June 11, 1572, in or around the City of London. His father died a month before Jonson was born, and he was raised by his mother’s second husband, a well-to-do bricklayer. His childhood was spent in a “maze of alleys and courtyards” in central London (where Trafalgar Square is now). His education began at Westminster School, where the teaching was in Latin. Jonson must have excelled, and Donaldson finds evidence that he started at St John’s College, Cambridge, although he never graduated.



Instead, Jonson followed his stepfather into the Tylers and Bricklayers’ Guild. Sometime in the 1590s, he ran away to fight on the continent, and when he returned he began to make his theatrical career. Like Shakespeare, his earliest works include a collaboration with Thomas Nashe, called The Isle of Dogs, which got Jonson in serious trouble with the political authorities. His first surviving play, The Case is Altered (1557), demonstrates that the young writer had formidable talent.

Donaldson stresses the many contradictions in Jonson’s life and personality, beginning with his attitude to the theatre, which he called “the loathèd stage.” He insisted on publishing his plays (which at the time was unusual and not very lucrative), despite being nearly as suspicious of the publishing trade as he was of the stage.

Another aspect of Jonson’s personality that comes to the fore in Donaldson’s account is his streak of roughness and even violence. Just as his theatrical career was taking off, Jonson endangered his own life when he killed an actor, Gabriel Spencer, in a duel. As an educated man, he was able to escape execution, but for the rest of his life, he bore the “M” brand of a murderer.



It was probably shortly after this event that Jonson converted to Catholicism. Donaldson draws out the complexity and danger of negotiating Catholic loyalties in a society deeply suspicious of “papists.” In Jonson’s lifetime, the Catholic poet Robert Southwell had been hanged, drawn, and quartered as a traitor. However, here again, the contradictions of Jonson’s life come to the fore. He had some shadowy involvement in the Catholic Gunpowder Plot against the life of James I, and yet he also seems to be have been a particular favorite of the king’s, frequently commissioned to write for the royal court.

Donaldson dives into Jonson’s literary achievement, offering new readings of all his major plays, Bartholomew Fair, Volpone, The Alchemist, as well as the less-studied tragedies: Sejanus, His Fall and Catiline, His Conspiracy.

By the time he was in his forties, Jonson was Britain’s most famous writer (in his lifetime, his reputation was deemed to have eclipsed Shakespeare’s). He was a large man, weighing nearly twenty stone, and he remained a man of contradictions. Having struggled to bear witness to his Catholic faith for twelve years, he returned to Anglicanism at a time when to do so was less to his advantage than it would have been at any time during the previous decade. In 1618-19, he walked to Scotland and back, and no one knows why, although Donaldson speculates that it was most likely a bet. Donaldson draws heavily on William Drummond’s account of Jonson’s stay in Hawthornden Castle in Scotland.



Jonson once remarked that his theatrical writing earned him less than £200 in his lifetime, and Donaldson stresses that Jonson was always impecunious, unlike the more financially-sensible Shakespeare. Jonson’s involvement in the publication of Shakespeare’s collected works may well have been motivated, in part, by monetary gain. Jonson often wrote for money, including many poems in praise of wealthy patrons, and Donaldson takes the trouble to examine this verse, and consider its literary merits.

By the 1620s, Jonson was in decline, and his plays were increasingly poorly received. Nevertheless, his reputation remained strong, and the young playwrights inspired by his work were known as the “Tribe of Ben.” When Jonson died in 1637, he was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Called “deeply researched but happily readable” by the New York Times, Donaldson’s biography is the go-to biographical resource for students of Jonson and ordinary readers interested in Shakespeare’s lesser-known contemporary.