The Thammasat University Library has newly acquired a book that should be useful for students interested in literature, English history, cultural studies, and related fields.
The Alchemist and Other Plays is by the English poet and playwright Ben Jonson.
The TU Library collection also includes other books by and about Ben Jonson.
Ben Jonson is generally considered the second most important English dramatist of his era, after William Shakespeare.
Jonson was a classically educated, well-read and cultured man of the English Renaissance with an appetite for controversy whose cultural influence was considerable.
His comedies are still performed internationally.
Jonson’s Volpone is a satire on greed that remains current today.
The title character worships gold to the point where he is dehumanized by it.
The English author John Addington Symonds wrote about Jonson:
After middle life Jonson’s health seems to have gradually yielded to a variety of infirmities. He was a man of massive build, high stature, and, to use his own phrase, ‘ungainly gait.’ From his parents he inherited scorbutic affections, which impoverished his blood, and externally displayed their effects upon his seamed and swollen features.
As time went on, and larger opportunities of indulgence offered, he succumbed more and more to the seductions of the table and the wine-cup.
On careful scrutiny of the evidence before us, I do not believe that Jonson can be justly taxed with gluttony or habitual sottishness. But he led a student’s sedentary life, frequented the houses of the wealthy, and revelled in Homeric drinking bouts. His own frank admissions, the direct testimony of Drummond, and a considerable mass of tolerably authentic tradition, place beyond doubt the fact that he drank wine to excess.
His unhealthy constitution craved alcoholic stimulus, and his social habits made the recourse to it too easy. The consequences of this ill-regulated diet became apparent, and Jonson was the first, with customary candour, to acknowledge them. When he sent Drummond a portrait of himself, some humorous verses accompanied the gift, [referring to his] ‘mountain belly, and my rocky face.’
To the same half-humorous, half-melancholy lamentations over his vast girth and personal unwieldiness he frequently returns in poems of occasion […]
Those who have most deeply studied Jonson and most truly felt his power, will hesitate the longest before pronouncing a decisive judgment on the place he occupies among the foremost poets of our literature. One thing, however, can be considered as certain in any estimate which we may form.
His throne is not with the Olympians but with the Titans; not with those who share the divine gifts of creative imagination and inevitable instinct, but with those who compel our admiration by their untiring energy and giant strength of intellectual muscle. What we most marvel at in his writings, is the prodigious brain-work of the man, the stuff of constant and inexhaustible cerebration they contain.
Moreover, we shall not be far wrong in saying that, of all the English poets of the past, he alone, with Milton and Gray, deserves the name of a great and widely learned scholar.
Here are some observations by Jonson from books, some of which are in the TU Library collection:
True happiness
Consists not in the multitude of friends,
But in the worth and choice.
- Cynthia’s Revels (1600), Act III, scene ii
Of all wild beasts preserve me from a tyrant; and of all tame, a flatterer.
- Sejanus (1603), Act I
Calumnies are answered best with silence.
- Volpone (1606), Act II, scene ii
Reader, look,
Not at his picture, but his book.
- To the Reader [On the portrait of Shakespeare prefixed to the First Folio] (1618), lines 9-10
Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy!
My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy.
Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O, could I lose all father now. For why
Will man lament the state he should envy?
To have soon ‘scaped world’s and flesh’s rage,
And, if no other misery, yet age!
Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry:
For whose sake, henceforth, all his vows be such,
As what he loves may never like too much.
- XLV, On My First Son, lines 1-12
Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup
And I’ll not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
Doth ask a drink divine;
But might I of Jove’s nectar sup,
I would not change for thine.
I sent thee late a rosy wreath,
Not so much honoring thee
As giving it a hope that there
It could not withered be.
But thou thereon didst only breathe,
And sent’st it back to me;
Since when it grows and smells, I swear,
Not of itself, but thee.
- Song, To Celia, lines 1-16;
He was not of an age, but for all time.
Soul of the age!
The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage!
My Shakespeare, rise; I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie
A little further, to make thee a room;
Thou art a monument, without a tomb,
And art alive still, while thy book doth live,
And we have wits to read, and praise to give. […]
Sweet swan of Avon! what a sight it were
To see thee in our water yet appear,
And make those flights upon the banks of Thames,
That so did take Eliza, and our James.
But stay, I see thee in the hemisphere
Advanc’d, and made a constellation there!
Shine forth, thou star of poets, and with rage,
Or influence, chide, or cheer the drooping stage,
Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourn’d like night,
And despairs day, but for thy volumes light.
- To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare (1618)
Opinion is a light, vain, crude, and imperfect thing.
A good life is a main argument.
They say princes learn no art truly, but the art of horsemanship. The reason is, the brave beast is no flatterer. He will throw a prince as soon as his groom.
Talking and eloquence are not the same: to speak, and to speak well, are two things. A fool may talk, but a wise man speaks…
- Timber: or Discoveries
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)