Ben Jonson: A turbulent story of a poet in Renaissence

 Ben Jonson 

 

Ben Jonson, born between 1572 and 1573 and passing away in 1637, was a notable English playwright, poet, and literary critic of the early modern era. He is considered one of the most important figures in English Renaissance theatre, alongside William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe. He has risen from modest beginnings to become England's unofficial poet laureate, with a pension from the king and honorary degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge.  

 

Jonson was born in Westminster, London, to a Protestant family. He was educated at St. Martin's Church of England School and then became an apprentice bricklayer and took part in military service. Johnson's early life was quite turbulent. He escaped to join the English forces in Flander; he killed a man. When he came back to London, he attempted to make a living as an actor and playwright, but this endeavour almost ended in disaster. He was jailed in 1597 for collaborating with Thomas Nashe on the scandalous play The Isle of Dogs (now lost), and not long after his release he killed one of his fellow actors in a duel. Jonson was not executed on the gallows by pleading benefit of clergy (a medieval privilege exempting felons who could read Latin from the death penalty). Thanks to the influence of a priest imprisoned with him, he converted to Catholicism. Ben Jonson was becoming increasingly more of a marginal, not accepted by the society he had cleverly mocked in his past plays. In 1603 he was called before the Privy Council to answer charges of "popery and treason" found in his play Sejanus. He was in jail again for his part in the play Eastward Ho a little more than a year later, which openly mocked the king's Scots accent and propensity for selling knighthood. In 1605, he received the preparation to organize the Twelfth Night entertainment; The Masque of Blackness was the first of twenty-four masques he would produce for the court, most of them in collaboration with the architect and scene designer Inigo Jones. In the same years that he kept on writing the masques, he produced his greatest works for the public theatre. His first successful play, Every Man in His Humor (1598), inaugurated the so-called comedy of humour, which ridicules the eccentricities or passions of the characters.   

 

Despite his antagonistic nature, Jonson had a great friendship with Shakespeare, Donne, Francis Bacon, and John Selden. While Shakespeare is known as the greatest playwright of the English Renaissance, Jonson's work is often seen as more intellectually challenging and sophisticated. Jonson was also known for his role as a literary critic and his work in establishing the first English literary tradition. Ben Jonson died in 1637 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. His legacy as a playwright and poet continues to be celebrated today. 

 

Ben Jonsons’ major plays are the comedies  

Every Man in His Humour (1598) 

Volpone (1605)  

Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman (1609) 

The Alchemist (1610) 

Bartholomew Fair (1614). 

Christopher Marlowe: Elizabethan Drama

Christopher Marlowe 

 

Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) was an influential English playwright, poet, and translator who had a great impact on Elizabethan drama. The son of a Canterbury shoemaker, Christopher Marlowe, was born two months before William Shakespeare. Marlowe attended Cambridge University and was renowned for his aptitude in languages such as Latin, Greek and French. In 1580, he was granted a scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, which was typically given to those who were studying to become ministers. He was granted the scholarship for a maximum of six years, though he never took holy orders. Instead, he began to write plays. He wrote various plays, including "Tamburlaine the Great," "Doctor Faustus," and "The Jew of Malta." His plays were known for their bold and unconventional themes, such as the pursuit of power, the struggle for identity, and the conflict between desire and morality. In addition to his plays, Marlowe was also known for his poetry, including "Hero and Leander," a tragic love story, and his translations of Ovid's "Amores" and "The Art of Love." Marlowe was a contemporary and rival of William Shakespeare, and his work is considered to have had a significant influence on the development of Elizabethan dram. He is also known for his poetry, which includes the famous poem "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.". In Marlowe's play, there are few if any glimpses of a transcendent design. His hero is the vehicle for the expression of boundless energy and ambition. The English theatre audience had never heard such a resonant, vastly energetic blank verse. The great period of Elizabethan drama was launched by what Ben Jonson called "Marlowe's mighty line."  

Marlowe was twenty-three when he got his first theatrical success. Marlowe had only six years to live. They were not peaceful years. In 1589 he was involved in a brawl with one William Bradley, in which the poet Thomas Watson intervened and killed Bradley. Both poets were imprisoned, but Watson got off on a plea of self-defence, and Marlowe was released. In 1591, Marlowe was living in London with playwright Thomas Kyd. Later, Kyd accused Marlowe of atheism and treason under torture when he gave information to the Privy Council. On May 30, 1593, an individual named Bichard Baines submitted a note to the Council, claiming that Marlowe had made statements showing atheism, sedition, and homosexuality. Four days later, at an inn in the London suburb of Deptford, Marlowe was killed by a dagger thrust, purportedly in an argument over the bill. Despite his short career, Marlowe's work continues to be studied and performed today, and he is regarded as one of the greatest dramatists of the English Renaissance. 

REFERENCES 

Abrams, M.H., Greenblatt, Stephen, David, Alfred and Lewalski, Barbara K. (1987). The Norton Anthology of English Literature. The Major Athuors (6 ed.). London: Norton & Company Ltd. 

 

History of Britain and Ireland: The Definitive Visual Guide 

Restoration Theatre; An introduction

 

Restoration Theatre 

 

The Restoration Period points out to a period in English history between 1660 and 1688. After the collapse of Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth, with the return of Charles to the English throne, this period began. During this age; arts, literature, and culture flourished and underwent restoration in England. In addition to cultural changes, the Restoration Period witnessed significant political and social changes such as theatre, and many folk rituals were banned by Puritans in 1642. The monarchy was restored, and the power of the aristocracy increased. Generally, the Restoration Period was a significant period in English history in terms of cultural, artistic, and intellectual pursuits, as well as important political and social developments.  

 

The literature of the Restoration period dealt with themes of love, sexual matters, and politics. During the time between Charles's Restoration and the start of sentimental comedy in the 1700s, comedy reigned, but there was plenty of heroic tragedy. One of the most famous writers of this period is John Dryden, who is known for his poetry and plays. He is considered the leading literary figure of the Restoration era. Other known writers include Aphra Behn, Samuel Pepys, John Wilmot and Earl of Rochester. Restoration literature provided the cultural and social alterations that happened during this time in English history. 

 

Restoration Comedy is known as artificial or comedy of manners. Restoration comedies often focused on the social codes of the middle and upper classes; sexual matters and aristocratic characters, including their affairs, marriages of convenience, and other romantic entanglements. 

Reconstruction based on a drawing of Drury Lane by Christopher Wren, the theatre's architect (1674) 

 

A Frame of William Shakespeare's Life: Style of his works and Sonnets #2

 William Shakespeare 

 

In the late 16th century, William Shakespeare began his career as a playwright by writing such as tragedies, comedies, and historical plays. He was inspired by Holinshed's Chronicles, his plays based on Holinshed. These chronicles are vital for a theatre of this time.  

  

Most of the plays by Shakespeare are historical characters written by Shakespeare which represent real persons. There are many examples such as Henry IV, Henry V, and King Lear, but at the same time, he published romantic comedies such as As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Shakespeare is famous for tragedies. Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear and Othello can be good examples. These works had themes, such as honour, revenge, death, betrayal etc. His comedies are quite different, they are related to romanticism, happiness and love. However, we can say that his comedies as "problem plays" or "dark comedies." 

 

Shakespeare developed a poetic style which was a remarkably fluid, dreamlike sense of plot and a poetic style. Now it is commonly known as "romances." These plays depict interest in moral and emotional life. Thanks to his contributions, English developed noticeably, so his works and endeavours are vital in terms of the history of the English language. He was a master of vocab and he derived many new words. Even today, he has quite an importance and contribution to modern English. 

Shakespeare himself apparently had no interest in preserving for posterity the sum of his writings, let alone in clarifying the chronology of his works or in specifying which plays he wrote alone and which with collaborators. He wrote plays for performance by his company, and his scripts existed in his own handwritten manuscripts or in scribal copies, in playhouse prompt books, and probably in pirated texts based on shorthand reports of performance or on reconstructions from memory by an actor or spectator. None of these manuscript versions has survived. Eighteen of his plays were published during his lifetime in the small-format, inexpensive books called quartos; to these were added eighteen other plays, never before printed, in the large, expensive folio volume of Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, Tragedies (1623) 

  

Sonnets 

In Elizabethan England aristocratic patronage, with the money, protection, and prestige it alone could provide, was probably a professional writer's most important asset. This patronage, or at least Shakespeare's quest for it, is most visible in his dedication in 1593 and 1594 of his narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, to the wealthy young nobleman Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton. What return the poet got for his exquisite offerings is unknown. We do know that among wits and gallants the narrative poems won Shakespeare a fine reputation as an immensely stylish and accomplished poet. This reputation was enhanced as well by manuscript circulation of his sonnets, which were mentioned admiringly in print more than ten years before they were published in 1609 (apparently without his personal supervision and perhaps without his consent). 

 

Shakespeare's sonnets are quite unlike the other sonnet sequences of his day, notably in his almost unprecedented choice of a beautiful young man (rather than a lady) as the principal object of praise, love, and idealizing devotion and in his portrait of a dark, sensuous, and sexually promiscuous mistress (rather than the usual chaste and aloof blond beauty). Nor are the moods confined to what the Renaissance thought were those of the despairing Petrarchan lover: they include delight, pride, melancholy, shame, disgust, and fear. Shakespeare's sequence suggests a story, although the details are vague, and there is even doubt whether the sonnets as published are in an order established by the poet himself. Though there are many variations, Shakespeare's most frequent rhyme scheme in the sonnets is abab cdcd efef gg. This so-called Shakespearean pattern often (though not always) calls attention to three distinct quatrains (each of which may develop a separate metaphor), followed by a closing couplet that may either confirm or pull sharply against what has gone before. They are also remarkably dense, written with a daunting energy, concentration, and compression. Often the main idea of the poem may be grasped quickly, but the precise movement of thought and feeling, the links among the shifting images, the syntax, tone, and rhetorical structure prove immensely challenging. These are poems that famously reward rereading.