Shakespeare and Ben Jonson: A Comparative Study

Shakespeare and Ben Jonson were two celebrated dramatists of Elizabethan England, but they differed sharply. Ben Jonson was a great dramatist but his fame and greatness have been eclipsed in the shadow of Shakespeare, the greatest dramatist of England. Dryden writes in his Essay on Dramatic Poesy: "As for Jonson ...... I think him the most learned and judicious writer which any theatre ever had ..... He was deeply conversant in the Ancients, both Greek and Latin, and he borrowed deeply from them...... If I would compare him with Shakespeare, I must acknowledge him the more correct poet, but Shakespeare the greater wit. Shakespeare was the Homer, or father of our dramatic poets, Jonson was the Virgil, the" pattern of elaborate writing; I admire him but I love Shakespeare.”
Shakespeare is romantic, Ben Jonson is classicist. David Daiches Writes: "Shakespeare, with a largeness of vision and flexibility of technique, worked with the popular dramatic tradition of his time and produced a poetic English drama which owed nothing to external doctrine of correctness but which developed, out of the pressure of its own vitality, its own kind of form and unity. Jonson, more learned and deeply concerned with classical precedent, approached his art from a quite different point of view. With him the classical formula came first and the classical model was the source of formula. He knew in advance what the function of comedy was and what sort of humour was proper to it."
Jonson, for all his concern with classical rule and precedent, often has less artistic unity in his plays than Shakespeare. The reason is easy to see: Shakespeare developed the unity appropriate to his original art form while Jonson often imposed an external unity on his material. As a classicist and realist Ben Jonson revolted against the romantic conception of comedy, which reached the highest of excellence in Shakespeare. He found the romantic drama a curious jumble of incompatible things and he set out to restore the classic simplicity which the ancients practised and which Sidney had advocated. The basic principle which the ancients had taught was that comedy "should be patterned after real life." It should use, to quote Jonson's words: "deeds and language such as men do use." Comedy should be "a copy of life, a mirror of custom, a representation of truth." Ben Jonson observed the three classical unities of time, place and action, and allowed no admixture of the comic and the tragic elements. As against this Shakespeare, like other Elizabethan dramatists, wrote his comedies not to present a picture of contemporary life but to entertain and to present a vision of life. He was the distinguished exponent of romantic drama. He ignored the three classical unities of time, place and action, and allowed the admixture of the comic and the tragic elements in order to present a comprehensive view of life.
Ben Jonson is a moralist and social reformer first and then an artist. Shakespeare is first and primarily a superb dramatic artist. "The rare Ben" hurled "instructive fire about the world." Shakespeare was more interested in providing amusement to the audience than to "winning of mind from wickedness to virtue". Unlike Shakespeare whose plays show no moral purpose, Jonson selected the satirical comedy as his chosen instrument to set society right.
Shakespeare's plays are the result principally of the exercise of a powerful imagination following no set pattern or rule. Jonson's are of a logical mind, therefore, we find a certain coldness in his plays. Rickett writes: "The matter seems to be that his mind and imagination never fused with the white heat of creative passion as was the case with Shakespeare. His intellect tyrannised over his imagination."
Unlike Shakespeare, Ben Jonson deals with human life in sections rather than as a whole, being content to satirise manners rather than to paint men and women. S. A. Brooke writes: "The drama in Shakespeare's hands had been the painting of the whole of human nature, the painting of characters as they were built up by their natural bent, by the play of circumstance upon them. The drama in Ben Jonson's hands was the painting of particular phases of human life, especially of his own age, and his characters are men and women as they may become when they are completely mastered by a special bias of mind or humour." Rickett also writes: "There is no more elaborate painter of London life than Jonson‑Shakespeare paints with a bigger brush, but for detailed effect Jonson is supreme.”
Jonson’s characters are static and types, Shakespeare's are dynamic and highly individualized.
Dryden remarks: "I will take the pattern of a perfect play from Ben Jonson who was careful and learned observer of dramatic laws." Shakespeare could not be so analysed, as he drew on images of Nature "not laboriously but luckily"; "he needed not the spectacle of books to read Nature; he looked inwards and found here and there."
To sum up, Ben Jonson's fame as a dramatist is eclipsed by Shakespeare. He is unreceptive of sensations, and fails to sound the depths of emotions of fear, love and hatred, as Shakespeare does in play after play. The appeal of Shakespearean drama has been universal. Ben Jonson is for the learned few, Shakespeare's appeal is unlimited.
II
JOHN WEBSTER (1575-1624)
(i) Introduction: The life and literary career of Webster are still shrouded in mystery. He appears as one of the greatest and most brilliant tragic dramatists of post-Elizabethan period. His genius found its superb expression in the sombre and macabre, dreadful and terrible exhibition of the anguishes of human spirit enmeshed in evils, murder and bloodshed, in the psychological delineation of characters and in the presentation of his moral vision which is an integral part of his tragic conception. His two tragedies The White Devil (1609-12) and The Duchess of Malfi (161344) have earned for him an outstanding place in post-Shakespearean drama. Fredric Allan writes that Webster "is to be accounted one of the greatest artists in the Elizabethan theatre, in subtlety of thought and reality of tragic passion he is second to none amongst his contemporaries save Shakespeare alone."
(ii) Webster and the Revenge-Horror Tradition: The revenge-horror tragedy was popular in Elizabethan England. This type of tragedy dealt with the theme of revenge as a sacred duty, series of inhuman deeds of cruelty, diabolical intrigues and colossal physical suffering. The lurid atmosphere is sometimes further augmented by the addition of super­natural terrors. The playwrights adopted every conceivable means to stir the passions and excite the feelings of the audience. The dark, dismal and lurid atmosphere of these tragedies is occasionally relieved by playing on finer sympathies by means of pathetic interludes and lyric utterances; as the exhibition of mother's agony, a child's trust in his murderer, etc. But the flow of such mellow human emotions is restricted only to minor scenes, intended to relieve the tremendous tension, that is created by scenes of successive horrors. A villain, usually known as "malcontent villain" who interprets his blood business with meditations that range from the solemn seriousness of Ecclesiastes to the filthy merriment of the gutter, plays a significant role.
The Elizabethans took their revenge themes, their ghosts and their horrors from Seneca. Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy provided the pattern of revenge-horror tragedy to the playwrights.
Webster was one of the last practitioners of the blood-horror tragedy. In The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi he emerges as a scrupulous and painstaking artist who had in them refined the material and motives of the earlier tragedies of blood and gloom, and wrought all that he look into something much richer, much more subtly wonderful. He had, in a word, converted melodrama into tragedy.
Both The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi are based on revenge motif. In the first play the traditional motive is conceived in its most conservative form as exacting of blood for blood. In The Duchess of Malfi the revenge is seen in its ugliest form. The revengeful brothers are both villains who carry their villainy to the farthest verge of human depravity. The victim, the Duchess of Malfi, is all goodness and innocence. She is driven to madness and death by her brothers, Cardinal and 'Ferdinand because she married Antonio against their wishes. The tragedy is full of Shakespearean echoes. The Duchess of Malfi is a powerful play but it is not a tragedy of a high order because Webster substitutes for psychology "a search for pathos inherent in situations and even in material effects." He has a strange power of evoking shudders and there are shudders throughout in the play. However, the play is saved by the poetry of melancholy and death which dominates the whole tragedy. Webster is a true poet throughout, in the very of his style, "are images, funereal in mood, which have the breath of graveyard upon them, yet strike and stir the heart." Antonio, who was fatally wounded, is made to philosophise the fate of man:
In all our quest of greatness
Like wanton boys, whose pastime is their care
We follow like bubbles blown in the air.
Borola, the villain, says
We are merely the stars' tennis balls,
struck and bandied
Which way we please them.
The character of the Duchess, though not striking in the beginning is "transfigured by persecution and becomes in her despair a solemn figure." She remains beautiful, noble and heroic in death. She knows no wavering and her dignity never forsakes her.
(iii) Webster's Moral Vision: Webster equally impresses us with clarity of moral vision. Throughout the spectacle of greed, jealousy dnd rapine, a healthy moral outlook on life is maintained. It is not vitiated by the dark, cynical, dismal atmosphere of the play. In his plays evil breeds evil and finally consumes itself. David Cecil writes: "God is not mocked, the evil doer is caught in the net he has woven for others. And he realises why. It is in the stress that he lays on this realisation that the religious boundation of Webster's view of life strikingly appears. His wickedest characters are never moral idiots who do not understand the enormity of their own crimes. They may profess to disbelieve in virtue or pour contempt on scruple; but it is against the instinctive promptings of their natures. Before they die they are always forced to recognise the supremacy of the Divine Law, against which they have offended." Flamian cries with his dying breath: "My life was a black charnel." His gorgeous and baleful sister also, at the point of death, recognises the operation of Divine justice:
Oh, my greatest sin lay in my blood,
Now my blood pays for it.
The villains in The Duchess of Malfi are also aware of their sinfulness. The pangs of outraged conscience drive Cardinal to despair and send Ferdinand raving mad. Bosola's sense of guilt leads him at last to repent. Always at the end of Webster's plays the Divine Law is vindicated. The final scene of both his plays presents a new and virtuous generation ready to re-establish that moral order which has been destroyed by the acts of sin, which have caused the tragedy. Mom law cannot be thwarted indefinitely. Evil destroys itself and justice is vindicated. Webster cautions the guilty in The White Devil:
Let guilty men remember their back deeds,
Do lean on crutches made of slender reeds.
The last lines of The Duchess of Malfi propound the truth:
Integrity is fame's best friend
Which nobly, beyond death, shall crown the end.
(iv) Characterisation: Webster's range of characterisation is limited. He took for his province the delineation of the extremes of wrong and violence, monstruous revenge and murder, cruelty and madness. Within his favourite sphere, he works with perfect mastery. Webster had thorough psychological insight of the workings of human mind in sin and virtue. He has depicted strong, masterly human characters with great intensity. In his capacity to touch the deepest and loftiest of human emotions, Webster stands next only to Shakespeare. The boldness of imagination with which Webster has drawn the picture of corrupt humanity, and the variety of mean motives by which they are corrupted, and the sureness with which he touches the main springs of violent crimes, is very impressive. The passionate, frenzied Ferdinand, too weak to with­stand the burdens imposed upon him by his avarice and unrestrained passion, is finely contrasted with his deeper, deadlier brother, the Cardinal. The two brothers, the Duke and the Cardinal and their sister, the Duchess, who are
......three fair medals
Cast in one figure, of so different temper
are delineated with fineness of touch and depth of insight. Bosola, the malcontent villain, is also portrayed with great psychological insight.
(v) Plot Construction: Webster's plots are based on moral considerations. The plots of The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi are simple and well organised from the beginning to the end. The entire course of action is so well managed as to run to the inevitable denouement. In The Duchess of Malfi the theme is womanly pride, virtue and constancy in suffering, and horror arising from the infliction of a wanton and demoniac revenge. The plot is symmetrical.
The fourth Act of the play, which marks the climax, is of great dramatic significance. It is noticeable for dramatic irony. Schelling writes about this Act: " ..... the Act abounds in those marvellous touches, of which Webster is a master, the most powerful of them all is the sudden thrill of pity in the heart of the brother who had commanded her death. He is found weeping when he sees her body, and Bosola with his characteristic cynical wisdom assures him:
Do not weep
Other sins only speak, murder shrieks out;
The element of water moistened the earth
But blood flies upwards and bedews the heavens.
Ferdinand is so overpowered with remorse that he shouts out: "Cover her face, mine eyes dazzle, she died young."
(vi) Webster's Style: Webster's style fulfils his dramatic purpose. His motive in the selection of language and imagery is to awaken terror and awe. He employs similes and metaphors which have rare subtlety and illusttative power. "Mournful, uncanny and mysterious they distil their essence through the play and so combine with the supernatural elements of omens and presentiments, and with the abnormal mental condition of insanity, to create the peculiar atmosphere of awe and uncanny horror that persuades the work so cold a kiss of anxious lip is, by wonderful stroke of tragic irony, made the announcement of desolation and death:
Your kiss is colder
Than that I have seen a holy anchorite
Give to a dead man's skull.
Webster could create ghastly effect of death and decay by using highly suggestive similes:
Methinks, her fault and beauty
Blended together, show like leprosy
The whiter, the fouler.
Webster's system is precise, succinct and pointed; for example:
(i) Glories like glow worms, afar off shim, bright,
But looked to near, have neither heat nor light.
(ii) Sorrow is held the eldest son of sin.
(iii) Integrity of life is fame's best friend
Which nobly beyond death, shall crown the end.
(vii) Webster's Shortcomings: There is crudeness and awkward­ness in the management of the plot. There are certain uncouth mannerisms in his plays, "that have an effect which halts between archaisms and a kind of childish awkwardness." Webster's indiscriminate use of soliloquies, asides, and other devices, for revealing the motives of actors or situation in the plot, sometimes appear almost childish. He not only uses soliloquies and asides to reveal character or to create the atmosphere, but also to tell the details of the plot. Lastly, his practice of asserting generalisations in the flow of dramatic action of intensity, stress and storm often tends to vitiate the totality of dramatic effect. He seems to delight in the enunciation of general rules, which the particular instances illustrate, to such an extent, that the last in The Duchess of Malfi has become a "string of passionate generalities". Very akin to this is his constant preoccupation with the sinister and dark side of life. "The tendency to brood over what is ghostly belonged to Webster's idiosyncrasy" to such an extent that even for a simile or metaphor, he draws upon the tragic aspect of life: "Pleasure of life ! What is it? only the good hour of an ague."
(viii) Conclusion: Webster ranks very high in the post-Shakespearean drama. T. S. Eliot calls him "a very great literary and dramatic genius directed towards chaos." Albert praises him for his remarkable power of characterisation: "The most striking follower of Senecan revenge tradition, Webster turns from the mere horror of event to the deep and subtle analysis of character." "No dramatist", says Collins, "even not Shakespeare showed more consummate ability in heightening the terrible effects, in laying bare the inner mysteries of crime, remorse and pain in his tragedies." Schelling remarks: "Webster is less lyrical than either Marlowe or Fletcher; more gnomic, though less destructively the moralist than Jonson; less manifold than Shakespeare, yet as intense in his moods. The power of Webster, at his best, is the revealing power of the highest order of poetry."
III
FRANCIS BEAUMONT (1584-1616) AND
JOHN FLETCHER (1579-1625)
These two dramatists combined to produce a great number of plays. They produced some of their finest plays in collaboration. W.J. Long says: "Tradition has it that Beaumont supplied the judgement and the solid work of play, while Fletcher furnished the high-coloured sentiment and the lyric poetry, without which an Elizabethan play would be incomplete." Their typical comedies are A King and No King (1611), The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), and The Scornful Lady (1613-16). Their tragedies are The Maid's Tragedy (1610) and Philaster (1611). The Faithful Shepherdress was written by Fletcher alone. These plays are tragi-comedies which have artificial and complicated plots, with little unity of purpose. They are conspicuous for remote romantic settings. Characters lack in individuality. Edward Albert says: "Full of witty dialogue, the plays attain a high level of lucidity and simplicity in their style, but they lack the Shakespearean wealth of imagery."
IV
GEORGE CHAPMAN (1559-1634)
Chapman's The Blind Beggar of Alexandaria (1596), Bussyd' Ambois (1604), Charles, Duke of Byron (1608) and The Tragedy of Chabot (1613) are historical plays dealing with events nearly contemporary with his time. Chapman's comedies include All Fools Day (1605) and Eastward Hoe! (1605). In Chapman's plays we find a rich fund of Jonsonian humour and the presence of Jonsonian characters. He was a classicist, who wrote with firmness, competence and variety.
V
THOMAS MIDDLETON (1570-1627),
Middleton was one of the most original dramatists of his time. He could deftly present improbable situations in a real and convincing manner. He was a keen observer of the vices of his time, and he exposed them with a tinge of satire. His light farcical comedies like A Mad World My Masters and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside are remarkable for their vivacity and justify Legouis' remark that Middleton is "the most modern of the humorists of Renaissance". Changeling (1624) is his most powerful play. His other memorable plays are Women Beware Women (1622), The Witch which resembles Macbeth, and The Spanish Gypsy, a romantic comedy which reminds us of As You Like It.
VI
THOMAS HEYWOOD (1575-1650)
Heywood who himself claimed to have written two hundred and twenty plays, cared more for quantity than for quality. Only twenty-three of his plays have survived. He excelled in pictures of London life and manners. His best play is A Woman Killed With Kindness (1603), which is considered as a fine specimen of the domestic tragedy. It contains some strongly pathetic scenes. His other plays are The Loyal King and The Loyal Subject (1602), King Edward the Fourth (1597-99), The Captives (1624) and The English Traveller (1633).
VII
THOMAS DEKKER (1572-1632)
Dekker wrote realistic comedies which present vivid pictures of middle and low classes of society. His Shoe Maker's Holiday (1599) presents a realistic picture of the followers of the craft. The Honest Whore (1604) gives us a glimpse of the underworld of London and records the trials and experiences of a whore who is determined to live an honest life. Dekker's characters are vivid and true to life. They are drawn with sympathy and insight. His female characters have grace, tenderness and delicacy. He skilfully blends different elements—the realistic and the romantic, the courtly and the rural. His plays are distinguished by lyric quality and the songs in his plays are light, delicate and musical. The plots of his plays are ill-constructed, and are marred by coarseness and licentiousness. Edward Albert writes: "His plays, chiefly comedies, have an attraction quite unusual for the time. They have a sweetness, an arch sentimentality, and an intimate knowledge of common men and things that has led to his being called the Dickens of the Elizabethan Age."
VIII
JOHN MARSTON (1575-1634)
AND CYRIL TOURNEUR (1575-1626)
Marston wrote violent and melodramatic tragedies after the Senecan model. His plays are Antonio and Mellida (1599) and Antonio's Revenge (1602).
Tourneur wrote The Revenger's Tragedy (1600) and The Atheist's Tragedy (1607-11). His plays are melodramatic to the highest degree. He is also a follower of the Senecan school.
IX
MASSINGER, FORD AND SHIRLEY
W. J. Long writes: "These three men mark the end of the Elizabethan drama. Their work, done largely while the struggle was on between the actors and the corrupt court, on the one side, and on the Puritans on the other, shows a deliberate turning away not only from Puritan standards but from the high ideals of their art to ponder to the corrupt taste of the upper classes."
Philip Massinger (1584-1640) was a dramatic poet of great natural ability. His plays are based on artificial and strained plots and situations. His memorable plays are A New Way to Pay Old Debts, The Great Duke of Florence, The Virgin Martyr and The Maid of Honour.
John Ford (1586-1942) has left us little of permanent interest. His plays are unnatural and tiresome. Ford's best play is The Broken Heart (1633).
Shirley (1596-1666) was mainly given to imitation of his pre­decessors. His play Hyde Bark reflects the fashionable gossipy talk of the day. It contains frivolous, realistic dialogue.
The playwrights of decadence, in the words of Lamb, "spoke nearly the same language, and had a set of moral feelings and notions in common." With James Shirley, who retained the fire and passion of the old times, and some of its delicate poetry, the Elizabethan drama died. Sir John Suckling and Davenant, who wrote plays before the Commonwealth, can scarcely be called even decadent Elizabethans. In 1642 the theatres were closed during the calamitous times of the Civil War. With the closing of theatre the glorious tradition of Elizabethan drama also came to a close.