Ben Jonson and the Monarchy

Summary

BEN Jonson lived under three monarchs, Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I, and sought the patronage of each of them. With Charles, who came to the throne in the autumn of Jonson’s life, too late to be a formative influence on his writing, we are here only peripherally concerned. Jonson’s relations with Elizabeth and James were formative. Elizabeth spurned him. James, save at the beginning and perhaps at the end of his reign, gave him almost uninterrupted favour. The queen’s death in 1603 lifted a burden of bitterness and despair from Jonson. It gave him new hope, both for the condition of the monarchy and for his own fortunes. The hope was not unqualified. It was tempered by circumspection, unease, insecurity. Those attributes would never vanish. Even so the new reign modified his discontent. It also redirected it, so that the crown ceased to be its target.

The change was not sudden. If there is a dividing line in 1603 there is also a later one, in the autumn of 1605, the time both of the publication of his play Sejanus his Fall and of the Gunpowder Plot. Until then his political concerns were essentially the same as in the twilight of the Elizabethan regime. Those concerns are hard to square with some recent assessments of his politics. There is, as Tom Cain has remarked, ‘something approaching a consensus that Jonson’s work celebrates an absolutist political ideology’. That description, Cain sees, will not fit the Elizabethan Jonson. The late Elizabethan regime, like the Jacobean one after it, sought to establish the principle that monarchical sovereignty is absolute rather than mixed. The attempt provoked unease in Jonson’s circle. In the years around 1600 his friends John Donne and Richard Martin voiced fears lest the monarch’s power might be or become ‘unlimited’. The complaint of the Earl of Essex, the patron of many of Jonson’s associates, against Elizabeth – ‘Cannot princes err?’ – reflects the same unease. The warning in Jonson’s play Cynthia’s Revels (1600) against the predilection of courtiers for the maxim ‘all power is just’ (V.iv.630) reflects it too.

Jonson’s interest in such matters was not that of a constitutional theorist. He did not think in the conceptual or legal terms that informed Elizabethan and early Stuart disputes about absolutism (a doctrine which he never ‘celebrated’).