![]() Jonson was a large and raw-boned lad he became by his own account in time exceedingly bulky. John’s College, Cambridge.” He tells us that he took no degree, but was later “Master of Arts in both the universities, by their favour, not his study.” When a mere youth Jonson enlisted as a soldier, trailing his pike in Flanders in the protracted wars of William the Silent against the Spanish. ![]() It is doubtful whether Jonson ever went to either university, though Fuller says that he was “statutably admitted into St. “All that I am in arts, all that I know ”Īnd dedicating his first dramatic success, “Every Man in His Humour,” to him. Jonson always held Camden in veneration, acknowledging that to him he owed, As a youth he attracted the attention of the famous antiquary, William Camden, then usher at Westminster School, and there the poet laid the solid foundations of his classical learning. His mother married beneath her, a wright or bricklayer, and Jonson was for a time apprenticed to the trade. But Jonson did not profit even by this slight advantage. ![]() He was thus nearly ten years Shakespeare’s junior, and less well off, if a trifle better born. Jonson’s birthplace was Westminster, and the time of his birth early in 1573. ![]() Jonson’s father lost his estate under Queen Mary, “having been cast into prison and forfeited.” He entered the church, but died a month before his illustrious son was born, leaving his widow and child in poverty. ![]() THE greatest of English dramatists except Shakespeare, the first literary dictator and poet-laureate, a writer of verse, prose, satire, and criticism who most potently of all the men of his time affected the subsequent course of English letters: such was Ben Jonson, and as such his strong personality assumes an interest to us almost unparalleled, at least in his age.īen Jonson came of the stock that was centuries after to give to the world Thomas Carlyle for Jonson’s grandfather was of Annandale, over the Solway, whence he migrated to England. ![]()
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