ABSTRACT

From January 14th, 1634, when the King and Queen witnessed A Tale of a Tub, to August 6th, 1637, when Ben Jonson died, the personal glimpses are few. Jonson, released from his theory of comedy, could delight in pastoral simplicities, in woods and flowers, in shepherds, young love and the coming of spring, was evident in his masks and occasional passages of his plays. Jonson is praised for his solidity, permanence, high-thinking and noble ethic. The authors have glanced at a theory that in the author of Volpone they are to look for a romantic poet who wilfully destroyed himself by inventing and practising the rigid theory of humours. Those who accept this view, in reading the early plays, will inevitably be drawn to it again in contrasting The Magnetic Lady, where the author lies stiff and stark in the strait-waistcoat of his method, with The Sad Shepherd, in which he escapes from his method into the green fields.