Ben in the World

Abstract

Ian Donaldson's admiring and admirable new biography of Ben Jonson begins by comparing itself to the exhumations of Jonson's corpse, which was apparently buried vertically, and (even more oddly) head-down in Westminster Abbey. This overture turns out to be a kind of palinode: after multiple exhumations the bodily remains are uncertain, and Donaldson seems less determined to put flesh back on the bones than to follow T. S. Eliot's model and put a literary corpus back into its times. Apart from some poignant remarks about ageing, this is a rather disembodied biography, considering what a physically appetitive and aggressive person Jonson seems to have been: boozing heavily all his life, swelling to twenty stone, fathering illegitimate children, and killing in single combat and then in a duel, along with other notorious brawls and drunken displays. When Jonson was ‘strucken with the palsy’ (probably a stroke paralysing one side of his body, though Donaldson does not mention this contemporary report by Thomas Fuller) that disabled him for the final eight years of his life, an acquaintance observed that it ‘made a deep impression upon [Jonson's] body and his mind’; but what kind of impression, or what it had to do with the artistic and financial struggles of that final phase, Donaldson silently declines to speculate.