Jonson's poverty at this and other stages of his life must have been attributable in part to his style of living. The generous habits that Drummond had noted in 1619 evidently continued into old age. James Howell, in the 1630s, speaks of a ‘solemn supper’ given by Jonson in which ‘there was good company, excellent cheer, choice wines, and jovial welcome’ (Life Records, 90). From September 1628 Jonson enjoyed a further income of 100 nobles (£33.6s. 8d.) a year as City Chronologer, being appointed in succession to Thomas Middleton ‘To collect and set down all memorable acts of this City and occurrences thereof’ (Life Records, 87). This task he evidently performed with such inefficiency that from November 1631 to September 1634 payment of the stipend was suspended. In 1630 Jonson's court pension was increased from 100 marks to £100 per year, augmented by a tierce (42 gallons) of Canary Spanish wine from Charles's store at Whitehall, but payment was often tardy. Izaak Walton gives a vivid glimpse of Jonson in his final years in his lodgings near the Abbey, tended by ‘a woman that governed him … and that neither he nor she took much care for next week; and would be sure not to want wine: of which he usually took too much before he went to bed, if not oftener and sooner’ (Electronic Edition, Early Lives).

Despite all difficulties, the last phase of Jonson's life was still remarkably productive, and his work still marked by fresh energy and invention. His two final masques at court, Love's Triumph through Callipolis (9 January 1631) and Chloridia (22 February 1631), ingeniously incorporate new structural elements derived from the French ballets de cour, and deftly allude to political issues of the day – including, domestically, the current transformations of London (figured as ‘Callipolis’, the ‘the fair city’), and abroad, the struggles of Marie de’ Médici and Cardinal Richelieu. Both masques show the guiding influence of Henrietta Maria, and figure the royal marriage as a harmonious and richly symbolic union (Britland, 2006). They also, however, mark the unhappy end of Jonson's long, turbulent, and highly productive collaboration with Jones. When Jones took objection to his name appearing after Jonson's on the title-page of Love's Triumph (‘The Inventors, Ben Jonson, Inigo Jones’), Jonson retaliated by omitting Jones's name entirely from the title-page of Chloridia and by ridiculing his scenic extravagances and social ambitions in a group of derisive poems, including ‘An Expostulation with Inigo Jones’.

The lingering effects of this quarrel are still plainly evident two years later in A Tale of a Tub, which was licensed for public performance only after the more wounding references to Jones had been removed. The play was ‘not likt’ when presented at court on 14 January 1634. Yet the wit and vigour of this rural comedy (long thought to have been an early work, but now accepted as the product of Jonson's final years) are decisively in evidence. In his entertainments written to regale King Charles on his progress to and from his coronation in Scotland, at Cavendish's neighbouring estates of Welbeck in Nottinghamshire on 31 May 1633 and Bolsover in Derbyshire on 30 July 1634, as in the unfinished pastoral, The Sad Shepherd, Jonson drew imaginatively on northern traditions, including the stories of Robin Hood, and on memories of his own Scottish journey many years earlier. In their rural settings and occasional employment of romance conventions, the comedies of Jonson's last period are strikingly different from the bustling city intrigues of his early maturity.

On 20 September 1632 Jonson's old acquaintance, the news-writer John Pory, noted the imminent performance of a new comedy by ‘Ben Jonson, who I thought had been dead’ (Life Records, 85). The Magnetic Lady was staged at Blackfriars by the King's Men in October 1632 with noisy disruptions from three of Jonson's old adversaries, Nathaniel Butter, Inigo Jones, and Alexander Gil. Gil later issued scoffing verses on the comedy (‘Is this the child of your bedridden wit / And none but the Blackfriars to foster it?’, etc.), to which Jonson pugnaciously replied (6.541–2). Players from the company were brought before the High Commission at Lambeth in November and accused of ‘uttering some profane speeches in abuse of scripture and holy things’. Evidently the play was seen to contain references critical of Laudian practice or ecclesiastical hierarchy. A year later the Master of the Revels, Sir Henry Herbert, who had originally authorized the play's performance, and Jonson himself were officially exonerated of any fault. Blame was laid instead on the players themselves, even though they attempted, under Herbert's direction, to purge ‘their plays of all offence’ (Bawcutt, 1996a, 184).

Jonson seldom acknowledged explicitly the ups and downs of his professional life, or his own experimental ventures into new artistic forms. The Boy who serves as the author's apologist in the Induction to The Magnetic Lady speaks blandly of the steady progress of Jonson's comic writing since the late 1590s to this present moment, as he approaches ‘the close or shutting up of his circle’ (80). Jonson's insistence, here as elsewhere, on the undeviating nature of his own artistic and moral life has tended to obscure the many shifts, experiments, and renewals to be found within his long career, and the sharp contradictions within his character.