s new audience. They lacked
not only Shakespeare's genius, but his broad charity, his moral insight
into life. With the exception of Ben Jonson, they neglected the simple fact
that man in his deepest nature is a moral being, and that only a play which
satisfies the whole nature of man by showing the triumph of the moral law
can ever wholly satisfy an audience or a people. Beaumont and Fletcher,
forgetting the deep meaning of life, strove for effect by increasing the
sensationalism of their plays; Webster reveled in tragedies of blood and
thunder; Massinger and Ford made another step downward, producing evil and
licentious scenes for their own sake, making characters and situations more
immoral till, notwithstanding these dramatists' ability, the stage had
become insincere, frivolous, and bad. Ben Jonson's ode, "Come Leave the
Loathed Stage," is the judgment of a large and honest nature grown weary of
the plays and the players of the time. We read with a sense of relief that
in 1642, only twenty-six years after Shakespeare's death, both houses of
Parliament voted to close the theaters as breeders of lies and immorality.

BEN JONSON (1573?-1637)

Personally Jonson is the most commanding literary figure among the
Elizabethans. For twenty-five years he was the literary dictator of London,
the chief of all the wits that gathered nightly at the old Devil Tavern.
With his great learning, his ability, and his commanding position as poet
laureate, he set himself squarely against his contemporaries and the
romantic tendency of the age. For two things he fought bravely,--to restore
the classic form of the drama, and to keep the stage from its downward
course. Apparently he failed; the romantic school fixed its hold more
strongly than ever; the stage went swiftly to an end as sad as that of the
early dramatists. Nevertheless his influence lived and grew more powerful
till, aided largely by French influence, it resulted in the so-called
classicism of the eighteenth century.

LIFE. Jonson was born at Westminster about the year 1573. His father, an
educated gentleman, had his property confiscated and was himself thrown
into prison by Queen Mary; so we infer the family was of some prominence.
From his mother he received certain strong characteristics, and by a single
short reference in Jonson's works we are led to see the kind of woman she
was. It is while Jonson is telling Drummond of the occasion when he was
thrown into prison, be