Ben Jonson (1572 – 1637)
English Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor, most famous for his plays Volpone and The Alchemist, his lyrics, his influence on Jacobean and Caroline poets, his theory of humours, his contentious personality, and his friendship and rivalry with William Shakespeare.
The players often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, "Would he had blotted a thousand".
Folly often goes beyond her bounds; but Impudence knows none.
For if I thought my judgment were of years,
I should commit thee surely with thy peers,
And tell how far thou didst our Lily outshine,
Or sporting Kyd, or Marlow's mighty line.
And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,
From thence to honour thee, I will not seek
For names…
Of all wild beasts preserve me from a tyrant; and of all tame, a flatterer.
His opinion of verses.
That he wrote all his first in prose, for so his master Camden had learned him.
Shakespeare, in a play, brought in a number of men saying they had suffered shipwreck in Bohemia, where there is no sea by some 100 miles.
Have paid scot and lot there any time this eighteen years.
Reader, look,
Not at his picture, but his book.
Where dost thou careless lie,
Buried in ease and sloth?
Knowledge that sleeps, doth die;
And this security,
It is the common moth,
That eats on wits and arts, and oft destroys them both.
The Devil is an Ass, I do acknowledge it.
Still to be neat, still to be drest,
As you were going to a feast.
Rhyme, the rack of finest wits,
That expresseth but by fits,
True conceit,
Spoiling senses of their treasure,
Cozening judgement with a measure,
But false weight.
Wresting words from their true calling;
Propping verse, for fear of falling
To the ground.
Jointing syllables, drowning letters,
Fastening vowels, as with fetters
They were bound!
Underneath this stone doth lie
As much beauty as could die;
Which in life did harbor give
To more virtue than doth live.
Yet must I not give nature all: thy art,
My gentle Shakspeare, must enjoy a part.
For though the poet's matter nature be,
His art doth give the fashion. And that he
Who casts to write a living line, must sweat,
(Such as thine arc) and strike the second heat
Upon the muses anvil; turn the fame,
And himself with it, that he thinks to frame;
Or for the laurel, he may gain a scorn,
For a good poet's made, as well as born.
And such wert thou. Look how the father's face
Lives in his issue, even so the race
Of Shakspeare's mind and manners brightly shines
In his well-turned, and true filed lines:
In each of which he seems to shake a lance,
As brandish'd at the eyes of ignorance.
Calumnies are answered best with silence.
Truth is the trial of itself
And needs no other touch,
And purer than the purest gold,
Refine it ne'er so much.
If he were
To be made honest by an act of parliament
I should not alter in my faith of him.
I loved the man and do honor his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any.
It is an art to have so much judgment as to apparel a lie well, to give it a good dressing.
He cursed Petrarch for redacting verses to sonnets, which he said were like that tyrant's bed, where some who were too short were racked, others too long cut short.