Ben in the World

Ian Donaldson's admiring and admirable new biography of Ben Jonson begins by comparing itself to the exhumations of Jonson's corpse, which was apparently buried vertically, and (even more oddly) head-down in Westminster Abbey. This overture turns out to be a kind of palinode: after multiple exhumations the bodily remains are uncertain, and Donaldson seems less determined to put flesh back on the bones than to follow T. S. Eliot's model and put a literary corpus back into its times. Apart from some poignant remarks about ageing, this is a rather disembodied biography, considering what a physically appetitive and aggressive person Jonson seems to have been: boozing heavily all his life, swelling to twenty stone, fathering illegitimate children, and killing in single combat and then in a duel, along with other notorious brawls and drunken displays. When Jonson was 'strucken with the palsy' (probably a stroke paralysing one side of his body, though Donaldson does not mention this contemporary report by Thomas Fuller) that disabled him for the final eight years of his life, an acquaintance observed that it 'made a deep impression upon [Jonson's] body and his mind'; but what kind of impression, or what it had to do with the artistic and financial struggles of that final phase, Donaldson silently declines to speculate.

Donaldson's narrative is thus much more the story of a career and a community than of a creature; it might more aptly be entitled Ben Jonson: A Social History. Jonson's famous poem accompanying the engraving of Shakespeare in the First Folio urges readers to 'looke Not on his Picture, but his Booke'. Ben Jonson: A Life neither conjures Jonson vividly as a person nor – perhaps because Donaldson knows how much is in the eagerly awaited Cambridge edition of Jonson's works, of which he is general editor – does it comment expansively on Jonson's published writings. The great virtue of Donaldson's carefully researched telling is also its limitation: a strong focus on Jonson's circumstances renders the man himself blurry. To identify 'constancy and change' as the dual theme of Jonson's life and work is to surrender anything very particular to him, and perhaps to efface the more vivid conflict between Jonson's persistent fawning on aristocrats who could aid him and his costly, defiant outbursts against them. Donaldson manages to explain some instances of this split personality as Jonson gambling on competing court factions, but attention to Jonson's conflicting addresses to Cecilia Bulstrode might have provided an occasion to mitigate the inevitably masculine emphasis of the story, and to explore Jonson's misogyny, which may be underplayed here precisely because it hardly stands out against the social milieu in which Donaldson seeks to immerse himself and his subject. The stark discrepancy between Jonson's self-presentation as the agent of Horatian rationality and moderation, and his lifelong record of impetuosity and outlandish hungers – a discrepancy no less glaring in his writings than in his doings – goes largely unremarked.

Still, this is an indispensable study of one of the very greatest figures in the history of English literature, and the chorus of high praise from its distinguished early reviewers is quite understandable. Unlike many modern biographies, it is generous without any sentimentality, and the writing is as handsome as the colour plates are lovely. I could wish the analysis were a little more literary, more invested in the imaginative mind – Donaldson omits Jonson's seemingly irresistible report that 'He hath consumed a whole night in lying looking to his great toe, about which he hath seen Tartars and Turks, Romans and Carthaginians, fight in his imagination' – but there are plenty of other books for that.

The telling of Jonson's life begins with a lengthy exposition of his well-publicised 1618-19 walk to Scotland, which is a surprising place to begin the story of a literary man and lifelong London resident born in 1572. Perhaps 'an astonishing recent find' of a detailed itinerary of...