Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/109

Rh by himself and the "university wits," Ben Jonson had already turned his eyes in another direction, and begun what he trusted would prove a revolution in English play-writing. Single-handed he had begun to "correct" English comedy, and was preparing to render the same service to tragedy. The lack of biographical material for the history of the Elizabethan drama prevents us from tracing the process by which Jonson reached his clear-cut and resolutely sustained conception of the proper end of comedy, and the means by which that end was to be attained; for the plays which embody this conception, and which alone he acknowledged, were by no means all he wrote. Of Scottish ancestry, born at Westminster in 1573, educated under Camden,—

"Most reverent head to whom I owe                 All that I am in arts, all that I know,"—

for some time perhaps a bricklayer apprenticed to his stepfather, certainly a soldier in the Low Countries, Jonson was in 1597 a player and playwright to the "Admiral's Men." His fatal duel in 1598, his imprisonment, conversion to Romanism and re-conversion, are familiar to every reader of literary history.