The Project Gutenberg EBook of Sejanus: His Fall, by Ben Jonson

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Title: Sejanus: His Fall

Author: Ben Jonson

Release Date: March, 2004 [EBook #5232]
Posting Date: June 4, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SEJANUS: HIS FALL ***

Produced by Amy E Zelmer, Sue Asscher, and Robert Prince

SEJANUS: HIS FALL

By Ben Jonson

Transcriber's note: This play is based on events that happened a
millennium and a half before Jonson wrote it. Jonson added 247
scholarly footnotes to this play; all were in Latin (except
for a scattering of Greek). They, and the Greek quotation which
forms Tiberius Caesar's tag line in Scene II, Act II, have been
elided.

INTRODUCTION

THE greatest of English dramatists except Shakespeare, the first
literary dictator and poet-laureate, a writer of verse, prose,
satire, and criticism who most potently of all the men of his time
affected the subsequent course of English letters: such was Ben
Jonson, and as such his strong personality assumes an interest to
us almost unparalleled, at least in his age.

Ben Jonson came of the stock that was centuries after to give to
the world Thomas Carlyle; for Jonson's grandfather was of
Annandale, over the Solway, whence he migrated to England.
Jonson's father lost his estate under Queen Mary, "having been cast
into prison and forfeited." He entered the church, but died a
month before his illustrious son was born, leaving his widow and
child in poverty. Jonson's birthplace was Westminster, and the
time of his birth early in 1573. He was thus nearly ten years
Shakespeare's junior, and less well off, if a trifle better born.
But Jonson did not profit even by this slight advantage. His
mother married beneath her, a wright or bricklayer, and Jonson was
for a time apprenticed to the trade. As a youth he attracted the
attention of the famous antiquary, William Camden, then usher at
Westminster School, and there the poet laid the solid foundations
of his classical learning. Jonson always held Camden in
veneration, acknowledging that to him he owed,

"All that I am in arts, all that I know:"

and dedicating