Sejanus: His Fall | Page 8

as in the city, was not the least element
of Jonson's contemporary popularity.
But Jonson had by no means given up the popular stage when he turned
to the amusement of King James. In 1605 "Volpone" was produced,
"The Silent Woman" in 1609, "The Alchemist" in the following year.
These comedies, with "Bartholomew Fair," 1614, represent Jonson at
his height, and for constructive cleverness, character successfully
conceived in the manner of caricature, wit and brilliancy of dialogue,
they stand alone in English drama. "Volpone, or the Fox," is, in a sense,
a transition play from the dramatic satires of the war of the theatres to
the purer comedy represented in the plays named above. Its subject is a
struggle of wit applied to chicanery; for among its 'dramatis personae',
from the villainous Fox himself, his rascally servant Mosca, Voltore
(the vulture), Corbaccio and Corvino (the big and the little raven), to
Sir Politic Would-be and the rest, there is scarcely a virtuous character
in the play. Question has been raised as to whether a story so
forbidding can be considered a comedy, for, although the plot ends in
the discomfiture and imprisonment of the most vicious, it involves no
moral catastrophe. But Jonson was on sound historical ground, for
"Volpone" is conceived far more logically on the lines of the ancients'
theory of comedy than was ever the romantic drama of Shakespeare,
however repulsive we may find a philosophy of life that facilely
divides the world into the rogues and their dupes, and, identifying
brains with roguery and innocence with folly, admires the former while
inconsistently punishing them.
"The Silent Woman" is a gigantic farce of the most ingenious
construction. The whole comedy hinges on a huge joke, played by a
heartless nephew on his misanthropic uncle, who is induced to take to
himself a wife, young, fair, and warranted silent, but who, in the end,
turns out neither silent nor a woman at all. In "The Alchemist," again,
we have the utmost cleverness in construction, the whole fabric
building climax on climax, witty, ingenious, and so plausibly presented

that we forget its departures from the possibilities of life. In "The
Alchemist" Jonson represented, none the less to the life, certain
sharpers of the metropolis, revelling in their shrewdness and rascality
and in the variety of the stupidity and wickedness of their victims. We
may object to the fact that the only person in the play possessed of a
scruple of honesty is discomfited, and that the greatest scoundrel of all
is approved in the end and rewarded. The comedy is so admirably
written and contrived, the personages stand out with such lifelike
distinctness in their several kinds, and the whole is animated with such
verve and resourcefulness that "The Alchemist" is a new marvel every
time it is read. Lastly of this group comes the tremendous comedy,
"Bartholomew Fair," less clear cut, less definite, and less structurally
worthy of praise than its three predecessors, but full of the keenest and
cleverest of satire and inventive to a degree beyond any English
comedy save some other of Jonson's own. It is in "Bartholomew Fair"
that we are presented to the immortal caricature of the Puritan,
Zeal-in-the-Land Busy, and the Littlewits that group about him, and it
is in this extraordinary comedy that the humour of Jonson, always open
to this danger, loosens into the Rabelaisian mode that so delighted King
James in "The Gipsies Metamorphosed." Another comedy of less merit
is "The Devil is an Ass," acted in 1616. It was the failure of this play
that caused Jonson to give over writing for the public stage for a period
of nearly ten years.
"Volpone" was laid as to scene in Venice. Whether because of the
success of "Eastward Hoe" or for other reasons, the other three
comedies declare in the words of the prologue to "The Alchemist":
"Our scene is London, 'cause we would make known No country's
mirth is better than our own."
Indeed Jonson went further when he came to revise his plays for
collected publication in his folio of 1616, he transferred the scene of
"Every Man in His Humou r" from Florence to London also, converting
Signior Lorenzo di Pazzi to Old Kno'well, Prospero to Master Welborn,
and Hesperida to Dame Kitely "dwelling i' the Old Jewry."
In his comedies of London life, despite his trend towards caricature,
Jonson has shown himself a genuine realist, drawing from the life about
him with an experience and insight rare in any generation. A happy
comparison has been suggested between Ben Jonson and Charles

Dickens. Both were men of the people, lowly born and hardly bred.
Each knew the London of his time as few men knew it; and each
represented it intimately and in elaborate detail. Both men were