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Life of Ben Jonson

Ian Donaldson

a contemner and scorner of others, given rather to lose a friend than a jest, jealous of every word and action of those about him (especially after drink, which is one of the elements in which he liveth), a dissembler of ill parts which reign in him, a bragger of some good that he wanteth, thinketh nothing well but what either he himself or some of his friends and countrymen hath said or done. He is passionately kind and angry, careless either to gain or keep, vindicative, but, if he be well answered, at himself. (Informations, 554–60)

By early May 1619 Jonson was back in London, where he was warmly welcomed by King James, who had taken a close interest in his northern travels. For a period following his return Jonson devoted himself to quiet scholarship, removed from the pressures of public life. While in Scotland he had informed Drummond that ‘He was Master of Arts in both the universities, by their favour, not his study’ (Informations, 191). No records concerning Jonson's honorary degree from Cambridge or of the Oxford conferral survive, but in July 1619 Jonson was formally inducted into the Oxford degree, and, according to Anthony à Wood, spent some time in residence at Christ Church at the invitation of his old friend, Richard Corbett (Electronic Edition, Early Lives). Jonson later extended the circle of his Oxford friendships to include the learned group (of which Thomas Hobbes, William Chillingworth, and Edward Hyde, the future Earl of Clarendon, were prominent members) which gathered at the house of Lucius Cary, Lord Falkland, at Great Tew.

Whether Anne Jonson was still alive in the 1620s is doubtful. The marriage of ‘Benjamyne Johnson and Hester Hopkins’ recorded in the register of St Giles Cripplegate on 27 July 1623 might just possibly be that of the poet, but there is no other evidence to support the idea that he remarried about this time. In a testimony given in a chancery case on 20 October 1623 he is described as ‘Beniamin Johnson of Gresham Colledge in London gent. aged 50. yeares and vpwards’ (Life Records, 70). C. J. Sisson (1951) has conjectured that Jonson may have remained for a period of time at Gresham College, deputizing for Henry Croke, who held the office of Professor of Rhetoric from 1619 to 1627, and that Jonson's commonplace book, Discoveries, may represent notes for lectures he delivered at that time. This conjecture could apply only at best to certain parts of Discoveries, other sections of which can be dated later than 1627, or present improbable material for lectures on rhetoric. Possibly Jonson was merely taking temporary refuge at the College after the fire that damaged his library late in 1623. In ‘An Execration upon Vulcan’ (Und. 43) Jonson ruefully lists a number of his unpublished writings that perished in the fire, including a history of the reign of Henry V, a commentary on Horace's Ars Poetica, a translation of Barclay's Latin romance Argenis, a version of his English Grammar, and the works he had begun on his Scottish journey. How far these works had actually progressed, whether the fire was deeply or superficially damaging to his writing, it is impossible now to tell. By 1624 Jonson appears to have resumed work on The English Grammar, which may have been completed the same year or shortly thereafter (Britton, 7.299); it was eventually to be published posthumously in Jonson's 1640–1 folio. While his ‘observations upon Horace his Art of Poesie’ (promised many years earlier in the address ‘To the Readers’ of Sejanus in 1605) were never to be rewritten, two translations of the Ars Poetica itself, the earlier probably dating from c. 1604, were also to be published in the second folio of 1640–1.