Jonson, Ben

The notable playwright, collaborator, actor, and friend of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson (1572–1637) was a cantankerous man who lived adventurously, killing a fellow actor in a duel, converting to Catholicism while in prison, leaving and reconsorting with his wife, and having an indeterminate number of children, not all of them legitimate. Consistently in trouble with the authorities for his daring theatrical satires, he was imprisoned several times. Yet he was made Poet Laureate, enjoyed royal favor and a pension, was awarded an honorary degree from Oxford University, and finally laid to rest in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. None of these honors was accorded to Shakespeare, in comparison with whom Jonson is in general more savagely satirical and disturbing.

Jonson’s work varied greatly: he could write in a severe classical style, create exquisite lyrics, or use the coarsest imaginable register. He created realistic and cynical urban comedies often set in London and coarse-veined satires using the idioms and language of the street to great effect. Many authorities have commented on “the vigour and flamboyance of popular speech” in his finest plays (Thomson and Salgado 1985, 244). Jonson himself insisted, in the Prologue to his comedy Everyman in His Humour (performed 1598, with Shakespeare in the cast) on exploiting “deeds and language such as men do use” (l. 21), rather than rarefied, poetic, and polysyllabic diction.

Swearing and foul language form overt features of several of his plays. A considerable proportion of Everyman in His Humour focuses on the contemporary incidence of swearing by means of ironic exposés and disapproving commentaries. Thus the elder Kno’well observes ironically that the education of infants is marked, not by repression of swearing, but by encouragement:

 Their first words
We form their tongues with, are licentious jests.
Can it call whore? Cry bastard? Oh then kiss it,
A witty child! Can’t swear? The father’s darling!
Give it two plums.
(II iii 19-23)

When Cob, a water bearer, utters the blasphemous expletive “for God’s sake,” Clement, the major authority-figure in the play, corrects him soberly with the reproof, “Nay, God’s precious” (III iii 103-4). Bobadill, cast in the stereotype of the miles gloriosus , or boasting soldier, is predictably given the most exuberant swearing role in the play, using such original expletives are base cullion [testicle], whoreson filthy slave , and a dungworm, an excrement! Though Jonson had more of a classical education than Shakespeare, he enjoyed dropping classical names into coarse speech and juxtaposing Christian and pagan elements, as in Body o’ Caesar! and the absurd oath by the foot of Pharaoh . In Bartholomew Fair (1614), containing an Epilogue addressed to King James on the subject of profanity and license, Wasp comes out with such earthy vituperation as Turd I’ your teeth! and Shit o’ your head!

The Alchemist (1610) is, according to the introductory Argument, about “A cheater and his punk,” that is, a confidence trickster and his prostitute. The play opens in the middle of a furious row between Face and Subtle, who crudely dismisses his opponent with the insult “I fart at thee” (l. 2). They continue to trade insults vehemently:

Subtle:                                                         Cheater!

Face: Bawd!

Subtle:             Cowherd!

Face:                                Conjurer!

Subtle:                                                    Cutpurse!

Face:                                                                          Witch!

Eventually the prostitute Doll Common separates the combatants, berating them savagely:

‘Sdeath, you abominable pair of stinkards,
Leave off your barking (I i 105-18)

Jonson fell foul of the stringent dramatic censorship of the times on two occasions. He and his coauthors were imprisoned in 1605 for libelous and satirical references to Scotland in Eastward Ho! Much later a performance of The Magnetic Lady (1632) led to a charge of blasphemy. Since the text had been approved by the Master of the Revels, Sir Henry Herbert (brother of the poet George Herbert), Jonson was mystified. In the court proceedings (from which he was excused, since he had suffered a stroke), the actors eventually confessed that they had found the dialogue insufficiently racy and had larded it with their own interpolations. Whether these were “excessive use of oaths” or for “uttering some profane speeches in abuse of the Scriptures” is still in dispute (Happé 2000, 25). The Archbishop of Canterbury finally attributed all blame to them (Gildersleeve 1908, 79, 126). This episode explains part of Hamlet’s famous advice to the Players: “And let those who play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them” (III ii 42-43). However, the pressure told, and when Jonson prepared his plays for the press he toned down many oaths. Thus “by Jesu” became “believe me,” “by heaven” is changed to “by these hilts,” and “faith” is replaced by “marry” or “indeed”; even the pagan gods are banished, so that “by the gods” is watered down to “by my sword” or “by my life” (Gildersleeve 1908, 128-29).

Several four-letter words are found in Jonson’s savage satires, castigating the activities of “the servants of the groin” of his materialistic and hypocritical times. In “An Epistle to a Friend,” sexual congress is consistently presented in crude animalistic images. Thus there are references to “pound a prick,” to “a saut [randy] Lady Bitch” and to “Stallion [Sir Stud] who has spent so much for his Court-bred filly” that she must “fall upon her back in admiration” and

must lie down: Nay more,
‘Tis there civilitie to be a whore.
(ll. 47-54)

The epigram On Sir Voluptuous Beast is amazingly open in its exposé of cruel sexual games:

While Beast instructs his fair and innocent wife
         In the past pleasures of his sensual life,
Telling the motions of each petticoat,
         And how his Ganymede moved and how his goat,
And now her, hourly, her own cuckquean makes
         In varied shapes, which for his lust she takes.
(ll. 1-6)

Jonson is the first major author to introduce “alternative” sexual vocabulary. Ganymede is a classically derived word for a catamite or male concubine, while cuckquean is an even rarer term for a female cuckold. To satisfy her husband’s fantasies, the innocent wife is forced to impersonate other lovers, thereby cuckolding herself. ( Quean is an old term for a prostitute.) The term tribade , the earliest word for a lesbian, was also first introduced by Jonson in 1601.

His scatological poem written under the ironic title “The Famous Voyage” (1614) mentions “the grave fart, late let in Parliament” and the discharging into a London sewer of a “merdurinous load” (l. 65), a curious lexical combination of French merde (“shit”) and Latin urine . Unsurprisingly, this is a nonce-word or unique formation. It is typical of Jonson’s capacity to scrape the bottom of the lexical barrel in an original fashion.