Writers
Writers
Ben Jonson was born in London and, thanks to a benefactor, attended Westminster School. After a short spell working in his stepfather’s trade – bricklaying – he joined the army, before becoming an actor and then a writer.
He experienced prison several times in his life. He was imprisoned in the Marshalsea in 1597 when his play Isle of Dogs (co-written with Thomas Nashe) scandalised the authorities. The play doesn’t survive, so it’s hard to know what was considered so ‘lewd’ and ‘seditious’ about the writing but Elizabeth I’s privy council ordered the players to be arrested and the playhouses to be closed. In 1598 Jonson was sent to Newgate, for killing fellow actor Gabriel Spence in a duel, and was tried for manslaughter. He escaped hanging by pleading ‘benefit of clergy’ and was branded on the thumb.
Jonson was a writer of poems, plays, pamphlets, pageants and masques, celebrated in his lifetime and often considered second only to Shakespeare. He is probably best known for his play The Alchemist and the poem To Celia (which begins ‘Drink to me only with thine eyes’). A good deal of his work survives thanks to Jonson himself. He took the unusual step of publishing a folio of many of his works.
Though they collaborated on two plays (Page of Plymouth and Robert II) Jonson’s working relationship with Dekker didn’t last. The two fell out when Jonson satirised Dekker (and fellow playwright John Marston) onstage. Dekker retaliated by satirising Jonson in his play Satiromastix, which served as the climax of a period known as ‘The War of the Theatres’ (also known as ‘The War of the Poets’).
“Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And I’ll not look for wine.”
— From To Celia by Ben Jonson
“A wise man poor
Is like a sacred book that’s never read, –
To himself he lives, and to all else seems dead.
This age thinks better of a gilded fool
Than of a threadbare saint in wisdom’s school.”
— From Old Fortunatus by Thomas Dekker
Like Jonson, Dekker is thought to have been born in London. Little is known for certain about his life. He was working as a writer by 1598, when he is mentioned for the first time in the diary (account book) of theatre manager and financier, Philip Henslowe.
He was imprisoned several times for debt (including a period of seven years in the King’s Bench prison).
Less of Dekker’s work survives but he was a prolific playwright (he wrote more than 40 plays), as well as a writer of pamphlets, and pageants. The sixteenth century writer and clergyman Frances Meres named him (along with Jonson and Shakespeare) as ‘one of our best for tragedy’. His work often featured characters who were neither from the classical world nor the aristocracy. He wrote both plays and pamphlets concerned with the lives of ordinary people and with the working city. He published several pamphlets which described the suffering of Londoners during the plague years.
“deeds and language such as men do use”
— From Every Man in His Humour by Ben Jonson
“Sin is a raven croaking her own fall”
— From The Noble Spanish Soldier by Thomas Dekker
Thomas Deloney was a silk weaver by trade who became well-known as a writer of popular ballads. At least two of the three ballads that tell the Page of Plymouth story have been attributed to him. Thomas Dekker used Deloney’s work as a source for his own writing several times.
The play Dekker is possibly best remembered for, The Shoemakers’ Holiday, used Deloney’s two-part prose work The Gentle Craft as its inspiration. His prose works celebrated the skills and virtues of artisans such as shoemakers and clothworkers.
