CHAPTER II.

FIRST PERIOD OF MANHOOD.

JONSON'S duel with Gabriel Spencer concludes the first chapter of his life. The same incident, by cutting him adrift from Henslowe, and forcing him to seek support elsewhere, determined the next stage of his literary career. This begins with the production of Every Man in his Humour,' at the close of 1598, and ends with his temporary withdrawal from the theatre in 1616. During this second broad period, Jonson developed his dramatic style, and produced all the masterpieces on which his fame now rests. Professionally, he was attached to no one company. We find him writing in turn for the Chamberlain's men, for the Children of the Chapel Royal, for the Admiral's men, for the Children of her Majesty's Revels, for the Lady Elizabeth's servants; but most frequently of all, for the Chamberlain's men, or, as they came to be called, the King's men-that is to say, for Shakespeare's company.

I may here pause to consider the effect of Jonson's early training on his genius. Of all the playwrights who were his contemporaries, he was the only born Londoner. If we except the brief episode of his soldiering in the Low Countries, he had hardly quitted the

purlieus of the Tower and Westminster. His time, as a boy, passed between severe studies at school and perambulations of the City streets. Though the country at that period neighboured so closely on the capital that an active lad might escape into the fields between school-hours, yet the dominant influences of Jonson's growing years were far from rural. Town-bred and bred to scholarship, he underwent influences very different from those which shaped the mind of Shakespeare in his home at Stratford. We ought not to insist too crudely on this contrast. Temperament must in all cases be reckoned more powerful than education; and it may be remembered that Keats was a cockney. Yet no fair critic will contend that the brilliant parallel drawn by Mr. Swinburne between 'Bartholomew Fair' and 'The Merry Wives of Windsor'-'the purely farcical masterpieces of the town-bred schoolboy and the country lad is overstrained. Jonson, exploring the classics with Camden for his guide in the heyday of the English Renaissance, formed an ideal of art different from that of his great comrade, who learned 'small Latin and less Greek' under the ferule of some village Holofernes. Hours of leisure passed at Smithfield, or among the wherries of the Thames, developed sensibilities and powers of observation in Jonson alien to those which expanded in the soul of Shakespeare upon the banks of Avon, or in the glades of Charlcote.

We have good right to maintain that Jonson's first real start in his playwright's craft was given him by Shakespeare. Henslowe cast him adrift after September 1898. Before the end of that year, Every Man in his Humour' had been put upon the stage by the Cham

berlain's men. Old tradition affirms that Shakespeare induced his company to buy and represent the play. It is certain that he acted in it. Nothing, therefore, fits the facts so well as this tradition, which may consequently be accepted as authentic. Shakespeare was Jonson's elder by nine years. He was now in full possession of the public, having already produced some of the best work in his first manner, and risen to a post of influence and emolument in the company which used the Curtain, the Globe, and the Blackfriars. He had no reason to be jealous of Jonson, or to fear him as a literary rival. His interests as a shareholder in the theatres he worked for, made him rather eager to secure the first-fruits of rising genius for his troop. We can see nothing strange in Shakespeare's welcoming so robust a recruit as Jonson. Yet, if one should deign to remember the nonsense vented by purblind critics at the end of the last century touching Jonson's animosity against Shakespeare, it is pleasant to be able to believe that their intimacy began by an act of kindness and of business-like discernment on the latter's part.

I shall take this occasion to express my firm conviction that Jonson harboured no envy, malignity, or hostile feeling of any kind for Shakespeare. The two poets differed in their method as playwrights. Jonson was not the man to acknowledge that Shakespeare's method was superior to his own; nor did the opinion of cultivated people in their times tend to this conclusion. He therefore felt himself at liberty to criticise a dramatist, whom now we place in all essential points above him. But when we examine his critique of Shakespeare, what do we find? The enthusiastic panegyric

which introduces Heminge and Condell's folio of Shakespeare's plays, and which is reproduced in Jonson's 'Underwoods,' proves that though his ideal of art differed from that of Shakespeare, though he rated himself highly on attainments which the nobler poet lacked, yet he hailed in his great comrade a tragic and a comic dramatist, born 'not of an age but for all time,' who might compete with 'all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome sent forth,' and with all that had been furnished. from their ashes by the feebler poets of a colder clime. In his Discoveries,' those 'last drops from Jonson's quill,' as they have been quaintly styled, he censured Shakespeare in very moderate terms for unpruned luxuriance and careless control over his own powers of wit and eloquence. Who will now contend that Jonson was not justified in this criticism? Yet he immediately added: 'I loved the man, and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any. He was indeed honest, and of an open and full nature; had an excellent phantasy, brave notions, and gentle expressions; wherein he flowed with that facility, that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped: Sufflaminandus erat, as Augustus said of Haterius.' If we remember that Jonson said of himself to Drummond, that of all styles he loved most to be named Honest,' it will appear that he meant in the passage I have just quoted to pay the highest tribute to Shakespeare as a man. And could any poet say more of a brother poet's genius than is expressed in those apostrophes, the most impassioned Jonson ever penned ?-Sweet Swan of Avon!' Soul of the age!' 'Thou star of poets!'

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It was under Shakespeare's auspices, and with 'Every

Man in his Humour,' then, that Jonson made his first decisive mark upon the public stage of London. This is the earliest comedy which he acknowledged; for 'The Case is Altered' was not included in his own folio edition of plays. The facts are noticeable. As the title of the comedy indicates, Jonson now entered upon his peculiar field of humours. It is our business to understand what was the common meaning of this phrase in his time, and how he thought fit to employ it. At the date when he was writing, humour was on everybody's lips to denote whim, oddity, conceited turn of thought, or special partiality in any person. We may remember the fatiguing use which Nym makes of it in Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor': 'He was gotten in drink : is not the humour conceited?' 'The good humour is to steal at a minute's rest.' 'The anchor is deep: will that humour pass?' The humour rises; it is good: humour me the angels.' 'I will discuss the humour of this love to Page.' Lucky instinct made Jonson choose a word so much in vogue to designate the kind of comedy he aimed at. It helped to bring his play into notice, and it also defined the region of his art. In the prologue to 'Every Man in his Humour' he tells the audience that it is the proper end of the comedian

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To sport with human follies, not with crimes.

Here he seems to have imagined that by 'humour' the public would understand 'human folly,' as differenced from mere affectation on the one hand, and from crime on the other. Soon, however, he felt the necessity of explaining more precisely his own interpretation of the leading phrase. This he did in the induction to 'Every