As G. E. Bentley notes in
Shakespeare and Jonson: Their Reputations in the Seventeenth Century Compared, Jonson's reputation was in some respects equal to Shakespeare's in the seventeenth century. After the English theatres were reopened on the
Restoration of
Charles II, Jonson's work, along with Shakespeare's and
Fletcher's work, formed the initial core of the Restoration repertory. It was not until after 1710 that Shakespeare's plays (ordinarily in heavily revised forms) were more frequently performed than those of his Renaissance contemporaries. Many critics since the eighteenth century have ranked Jonson below only Shakespeare among
English Renaissance dramatists. Critical judgment has tended to emphasize the very qualities that Jonson himself lauds in his prefaces, in Timber, and in his scattered prefaces and dedications: the realism and propriety of his language, the bite of his satire, and the care with which he plotted his comedies.
For some critics, the temptation to contrast Jonson (representing art or craft) with Shakespeare (representing nature, or untutored genius) has seemed natural; Jonson himself may be said to initiate this interpretation in his poem on Shakespeare.
Leonard Digges echoed this line of thought in his verses affixed to the second folio, and
Samuel Butler drew the same comparison in his
commonplace book later in the century.
At the Restoration, this sensed difference became a kind of critical dogma.
Saint-Évremond, indeed, placed Jonson's comedies above all else in English drama, and
Charles Gildon called Jonson the father of English comedy.
John Dryden offered a more common assessment in the Essay of Dramatic Poesie, in which his
avatar Neander compares Shakespeare to
Homer and Jonson to
Virgil: the former represented profound creativity, the latter polished artifice. But "artifice" was in the seventeenth century almost synonymous with "art"; Jonson, for instance, used "artificer" as a synonym for "artist" (
Discoveries, 33). For
Lewis Theobald, too, Jonson “ow[ed] all his Excellence to his Art,” in contrast to Shakespeare, the natural genius.
Rowe, to whom may be traced the legend that Jonson owed the production of
Every Man in his Humour to Shakespeare's intercession, likewise attributed Jonson's excellence to learning, which did not raise him quite to the level of genius. A consensus formed: Jonson was the first English poet to understand classical precepts with any accuracy, and he was the first to apply those precepts successfully to contemporary life. But there were also more negative spins on Jonson's learned art; for instance, in the 1750s,
Edward Young casually remarked on the way in which Jonson’s learning worked, like Samson’s strength, to his own detriment. Earlier,
Aphra Behn, writing in defence of female playwrights, had pointed to Jonson as a writer whose learning did not make him popular; unsurprisingly, she compares him unfavorably to Shakespeare. Particularly in the tragedies, with their lengthy speeches abstracted from
Sallust and
Cicero, Augustan critics saw a writer whose learning had swamped his
aesthetic judgment.
In this period,
Alexander Pope is exceptional in that he noted the tendency to exaggeration in these competing critical portraits: "It is ever the nature of Parties to be in extremes; and nothing is so probable, as that because Ben Johnson had much the most learning, it was said on the one hand that Shakespear had none at all; and because Shakespear had much the most wit and fancy, it was retorted on the other, that Johnson wanted both." For the most part, the eighteenth century consensus remained committed to the division that Pope doubted; as late as the 1750s,
Sarah Fielding could put a brief recapitulation of this analysis in the mouth of a "man of sense" encountered by David Simple.
Though his stature declined during the eighteenth century, Jonson was still read and commented on throughout the century, generally in the kind of comparative and dismissive terms just described.
Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg translated parts of Peter Whalley's edition into German in 1765. Shortly before the Romantic revolution,
Edward Capell offered an almost unqualified rejection of Jonson as a dramatic poet, who (he writes) "has very poor pretensions to the high place he holds among the English Bards, as there is no original manner to distinguish him, and the tedious sameness visible in his plots indicates a defect of Genius." The disastrous failures of productions of
Volpone and
Epicoene in the early 1770s no doubt bolstered a widespread sense that Jonson had at last grown too antiquated for the contemporary public; if Jonson still attracted enthusiasts such as
Earl Camden and
William Gifford, he all but disappeared from the stage in the last quarter of the century.
The
romantic revolution in criticism brought about an overall decline in the critical estimation of Jonson. Hazlitt refers dismissively to Jonson’s “laborious caution.” Coleridge, while more respectful, describes Jonson as psychologically superficial: “He was a very accurately observing man; but he cared only to observe what was open to, and likely to impress, the senses.” Coleridge placed Jonson second only to Shakespeare; other romantic critics were less approving. The early nineteenth century was the great age for recovering Renaissance drama. Jonson, whose reputation had survived, appears to have been less interesting to some readers than writers such as
Thomas Middleton or
John Heywood, who were in some senses “discoveries” of the nineteenth century. Moreover, the emphasis the romantic writers placed on imagination, and their concomitant tendency to distrust studied art, lowered Jonson's status, if it also sharpened their awareness of the difference traditionally noted between Jonson and Shakespeare. This trend was by no means universal, however;
William Gifford, Jonson's first editor of the nineteenth century, did a great deal to defend Jonson's reputation during this period of general decline. In the next era,
Swinburne, who was more interested in Jonson than most
Victorians, wrote, “The flowers of his growing have every quality but one which belongs to the rarest and finest among flowers: they have colour, form, variety, fertility, vigour: the one thing they want is fragrance” — by “fragrance,” Swinburne means spontaneity.
In the twentieth century, Jonson’s body of work has been subject to a more varied set of analyses, broadly consistent with the interests and programmes of modern literary criticism. In an essay printed in
The Sacred Wood T.S. Eliot attempts to repudiate the charge that Jonson was an arid classicist by analysing the role of imagination in his dialogue. Eliot was appreciative of Jonson's overall conception and his "surface," a view consonant with the modernist reaction against Romantic criticism, which tended to denigrate playwrights who did not concentrate on representations of psychological depth. Around mid-century, a number of critics and scholars followed Eliot’s lead, producing detailed studies of Jonson’s verbal style. At the same time, study of Elizabethan themes and conventions, such as those by
E.E. Stoll and
M. C. Bradbrook, provided a more vivid sense of how Jonson’s work was shaped by the expectations of his time.
The proliferation of new critical perspectives after mid-century touched on Jonson inconsistently. Jonas Barish was the leading figure in a group of critics that was appreciative of Jonson's artistry. On the other hand, Jonson received less attention from the new critics than did some other playwrights and his work was not of programmatic interest to psychoanalytic critics. But Jonson’s career eventually made him a focal point for the revived
sociopolitical criticism. Jonson’s work, particularly his masques and pageants, offers significant information regarding the relations of literary production and political power, as do his contacts with and poems for aristocratic patrons; moreover, his career at the centre of London’s emerging literary world has been seen as exemplifying the development of a fully commodified literary culture. In this respect, Jonson has been seen as a transitional figure, an author whose skills and ambition led him to a leading role both in the declining culture of
patronage and in the rising culture of mass consumption.
