h of Shakespeare his greatest
successor in the English drama was born in London. Jonson outlived
Shakespeare twenty-one years and helped to usher in the decline of the
drama.

Ben Jonson, the son of a clergyman and the stepson of a master
bricklayer, received a good education at Westminster School. Unlike
Shakespeare, Jonson learned much Latin and Greek. In one respect
Jonson's training was unfortunate for a poet. He was taught to write
prose exercises first and then to turn them into poetry. In this way
he acquired the habit of trying to express unpoetical ideas in verse.
Art could change the prose into metrical riming lines, but art could
not breathe into them the living soul of poetry. In after times Jonson
said that Shakespeare lacked art, but Jonson recognized that the
author of _Hamlet_ had the magic touch of nature. Jonson's pen rarely
felt her all-embracing touch.

If Jonson served an apprenticeship as a bricklayer, as his enemies
afterward said, he did not continue long at such work. He crossed the
Channel and enlisted for a brief time as a soldier in the Netherlands.
He soon returned to London and became a writer for the theater, and
thenceforth lived the life of an author and a student. He loved to
study and translate the classics. In fact, what a novice might think
original in Jonson's plays was often borrowed from the classics. Of
his relations to the classical writers, Dryden says, "You track him
everywhere in their snow." Jonson was known as the most learned poet
of the age, because, if his plays demanded any special knowledge, no
subject was too hard, dry, or remote from common life for him to
attempt to master it. He knew the boundaries of Bohemia, and he took
pleasure in saying to a friend: "Shakespeare in a play brought in a
number of men saying they had suffered shipwreck in Bohemia, where is
no sea near, by some hundred miles."

Jonson's personal characteristics partly explain why he placed himself
in opposition to the spirit of the age. He was extremely combative. It
was almost a necessity for him to quarrel with some person or with
some opinion. He killed two men in duels, and he would probably have
been hanged, if he had not pleaded benefit of clergy. For the greater
part of his life, he was often occupied with pen and ink quarrels.

When James I. ascended the throne in 1603, Jonson soon became a royal
favorite. He was often employed to write masques, a peculiar species
of drama which called