Ben Jonson: A Life (review)

Ian Donaldson’s splendid biography puts paid to the eighteenth-century myth of an envious, pedantic, self-absorbed Jonson who played the foil to a magnanimous, intuitive, and deeply empathetic Shakespeare. In discarding this introverted prototype, which reached its logical conclusion with Edmund Wilson’s “Morose Ben Jonson,” Donaldson discovers his man amid a vast web of personal friends, collegial bonds, regional ties, and intellectual affinities. His Jonson is an intensely social animal. The biographer makes his case by increments, through the steady accumulation and juxtaposition of finely calibrated observations and details. In broad outline, his narrative roughly corresponds to the story we are accustomed to. The depth and originality of his book at once become apparent, however, as the reader lingers over this or that stretch of Jonson’s life.

Donaldson’s Life begins, oddly enough, with the poet’s journey by foot to Edinburgh in 1618, at a time when “Jonson was 46 years of age” and “at the height of his fame” (25). He explains his decision to commence “at this suggestive and puzzling moment” on the grounds that “Jonson’s attitude to the country of his forebears, his reasons and motives for journeying to Scotland in 1618–19, the nature of his encounter with William Drummond, pose problems of interpretation that are crucial to an understanding . . . of the larger pattern of Jonson’s life” (24). Donaldson’s way of solving these and other problems of interpretation is to surround them with commentary drawn from his inexhaustible knowledge of Jonson’s life records, literary and otherwise, encompassing both recently discovered documents and long-established landmarks.

Over the next three and a half pages (which I summarize with injurious brevity) Donaldson quotes Drummond, who wrote that Jonson intended “‘to write his foot pilgrimage here and call it A Discovery’” (26), a title that recalls the analogy between walking and learning in the letter of Seneca’s that determined the name of Jonson’s own commonplace book, or Discoveries; the metaphor applies as well to the cross-country walks that Jonson’s teacher William Camden and friend Robert Cotton undertook “in the name of chorography, a then fashionable branch of academic study combining geography, topography, folklore, and antiquarianism” (27). These observations in turn help explain the detailed references to rural lore and topography in the comedies and entertainments that Jonson wrote after his journey to Scotland, including a remarkable autobiographical passage in The New Inn (1629). In fact, Jonson and Camden had long since endorsed King James’s plan to consolidate England and Scotland into a united kingdom called Britain that could “be walked from end to end” (28). But Jonson and his Catholic coreligionists had initially resisted the influx of Scots who followed King James south from Edinburgh in 1603: witness the scandalous anti-Scots satire in Eastward Ho!, the comedy that Jonson coauthored in 1605. By 1618, however, Jonson had forged intimate friendships with a number of Scottish courtiers such as Sir Robert Aytoun and Esme Stuart, Seigneur d’Aubigny, while King James had recently granted him a handsome annual pension. Coming in the wake of James’s own long-delayed royal progress to Scotland in 1617, Jonson’s timely expedition counted as an act of fealty marking both his incorporation into James’s court and his belated embrace of his own Scottish ancestors. Last but not least, the walk was “in all likelihood a piece of fun” (29) along the lines of his friend Thomas Coryate’s trudge of nearly 2,000 miles across Europe, the actor Will Kemp’s 130-mile dance from London to Norwich, and the waterman John Taylor’s own walking trip to Scotland hard on the heels of Jonson, who told Drummond that “‘Taylor was sent along here to scorn him’” (45). If there were a book award for specific gravity, Ian Donaldson would win it hands down.

It gets better. Expeditions like Jonson’s tended to be underwritten by bettors, who gambled that the traveler would fail...