pissing off the pancake man
Or, an extended dunk on Ben Jonson's life, art, and personality because I hate him.
Hi friends!
One exciting bit of book news before we get into the dirtbaggery: Let the Dead Bury the Dead has a cover now! And it’s available for preorder!
I’m eternally grateful to designer Emily Mahon and artist Roberts Rurans for collaborating to put together this literal piece of art for my second book. (Yes, there is a judgy owl in this book. She is the spooky queen of the narrative and I’m so glad she’s side-eyeing me on the cover. It’s what she deserves.)
LTDBTD will be available in the US and Canada on October 17, which is ironically appropriate as it’s equal parts the book of my heart and a direct fuck-you to the 2017 Tony Awards. Some writers I deeply respect have said very kind things about it, which remains A Lot emotionally for me. I’ll be talking about it much more in the months to come, but here’s the logline from my publisher:
“An urgent, immersive alternate history set in an imperial Russia on the brink of disaster, following a surprising cast of characters seeking a better future as Saint Petersburg struggles in the wake of Napoleon’s failed invasion.”
It’s about loyalty and betrayal and love and trust and magic and queerness and socialism, and there’s one scene with a house made out of human bones that I’m extremely passionate about. I really hope you enjoy it.
You can preorder from wherever you buy books! I’m working on pulling together a preorder campaign that will include a signed book and a special little gift I’ve had sitting in my dining room for a few months now, so watch this space, and if you order now, save your receipts.
Thanks for your attention. I know I announced the sale of this book 15 calendar months ago. It really is happening, I promise. Wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey publishing etc.
Now! Onward!
If you’ve read my first book, you know I spent many years thinking about basically nothing but Early Modern English poetry and drama. So this week’s edition might feel a little like a personal grudge I’m holding against a guy I encountered repeatedly in my studies. That would be because it is.
I hate this man and I think his plays are trash and I would say I wanna fight him except he was more than six feet tall and would physically and temperamentally kick my ass, so I’ll have to settle for slandering him in newsletter form 400 years after the fact. That’s right, English majors of the world…
It’s Time to Shit-Talk Ben Jonson, England’s First Poet Laureate!
Jonson was born in 1572 shortly after the death of his father, though his mother remarried a bricklayer soon after. He went to school until he was about 17, at which point his stepfather enlisted him into the bricklaying trade, and he spent a long dull series of years making walls and stuff. Many of the articles I read in preparation for this newsletter specified individual walls he built for some reason.
I’m probably supposed to feel bad for Jonson in a very High School Musical sort of way, where he just wanted to perform in the theater but his mean dad wanted him to do sports slash lay bricks. But based on the stuff he would go on to write, I feel like the walls would have been more useful, so.
After a few years in the wall trade, Jonson joined the army to fight in the Dutch wars and stab Catholics for Queen Elizabeth, as was the fashion at the time. He definitely did murder a guy during these wars, a theme we will return to later.
When Jonson returned from the wars, he put his bricklaying days behind him and joined the wild and wonderful world of London theater. He started out as an actor, but before long made his way as one of the writers on retainer for noted theatrical impresario Philip Henslowe. I’ve tried and failed to find a good synonym for “impresario” for basically a decade now. Long story short, if Elizabethan London was the film Moulin Rouge, Philip Henslowe was Harold Ziegler. I hope that helps.
Little Miss Excess of Black Bile
What sort of stuff was Jonson writing for Henslowe’s Early Modern Spectacular Spectacular, you ask?
Well, I’ll tell you. It was shit and I hate it.
His first big hit, in 1598, was a play called Every Man in His Humor, which I can best describe by saying it’s like if you got a dozen of these guys:
and put them onstage for two hours to tell misogynist jokes at each other. He also wrote the sequel Every Man Out of His Humor, which is the same thing except more so and worse. The one I had to read in college was Epicœne, which I would sum up as “if Twelfth Night wasn’t funny and hated trans people.” I hope I’m being clear about how much I dislike his oeuvre.
Jonson’s other theatrical claim to fame was that he wrote masques, which became popular in the court of Royal Weirdo King James I. Masques were basically shallow spectacles with flashy costumes and special effects that would be put on at James’s court when everyone was either too drunk or too afraid of being burned as a witch to pay any attention to them.
One of these was done entirely in blackface, with the plot twist being that the actors were “cleansed of their Blackness” by the king at the end. And for all of you who are about to say something like “judge by the standards of the time,” even at the time members of court thought this was yikes.
Somehow, though, Jonson conned everyone into thinking he was good at poetry, and in 1616 he was named England’s first poet laureate. This fact is personally offensive to me. Ben Jonson probably thought it was well-deserved, as this is the title page he designed for the first edition of his collected works:
For all the English majors in my audience (which I assume is roughly 25% of you), I will concede that Ben Jonson wrote one good poem, “To My Young Son,” for his son who died of plague at age seven. It’s beautiful and very sad. A broken clock is right twice a day and all that.
He’s Obnoxious and Disliked
It might sound like I’m insulting Jonson out of pocket here. But let me tell you, I’m not saying Ben Jonson had a shitty personality and wrote bad plays without any sources. When I slander, I do it with receipts.
Renaissance playwrights were gossipy little bitches, and they all hated Jonson. William Drummond famously described Jonson as “a great lover and praiser of himself, and a great scorner and condemner of others,” while my boy Thomas Dekker wrote an entire play starring a boastful poet who’s obviously supposed to be Ben Jonson and spends the whole time swaggering around telling everyone how great he is. Dekker isn’t exactly your guy for hard-hitting topical satire—his most famous play is a comedy about pancakes—so the fact that even he was like “fuck Ben Jonson” is really saying a lot, I feel.
Last personal complaint about Jonson before we get back to the facts is that no one knows for sure what his wife’s name is. We know he was married to a woman he described as, quote, “a shrew, though honest” (ugh), but nowhere in the eight million words written by or about him did he ever think to specify her name. I just hate him so much, your honor.
Dies Irae Dies I Guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It wasn’t just that Jonson was bad company, though. He also spent more time in prison for dirtbaggy crimes than you usually expect from a poet laureate. Jonson was famously arrested by Queen Elizabeth’s personal torturer in 1597 for “lewd and mutinous behavior” after a performance of his play The Isle of Dogs. Far from learning his lesson, Jonson kept getting into legal trouble for suspicious and possibly seditious behavior, including having dinner with Guy Fawkes and company shortly before the whole “Blow Up Parliament” debacle in 1606.
In 1598, Jonson was arrested again, this time for the non-poetic offense of stabbing one of his actors to death in a duel. Which, like, not to belabor the point, but I cannot imagine Current US Poet Laureate Ada Limón stabbing an actor to death. Jonson was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to hang, but he got out of this punishment in a fucking stupid way, as follows.
In 16th-century English law, priests and other members of the clergy could essentially opt out of civil law and be tried in an ecclesiastical court instead. Put aside that, as we have discussed, clergypeople are not statistically less likely to commit wacky crimes, civil law’s only qualification for being a priest was that you could speak Latin. So Ben Jonson got up on the gallows, rattled off a couple sentences of Latin, and bingo bongo Pope Clement VIII’s your uncle, no more death sentence for you.
I mean, this isn’t really materially different from how we handle crimes these days, but you’ve got to admit, it does feel stupider.
I’m Great and Here’s Why: A New Play by Ben Jonson
Jonson probably could have carried on writing cringey masques at court forever, except for one small wrinkle, which was the death of King James I in 1625. James was succeeded by Charles I, who was significantly less interested than his predecessor in a six-foot-tall self-important murderous poet who couldn’t stop badmouthing his peers.
Jonson took this dip in his reputation with about as much grace and humility as you would expect. Specifically, he wrote a poem titled “An Ode to Himself” in which he whined that nobody appreciated his genius anymore. This is in fact the second whiny ode a man has written about his own genius in this publication. It is a genre to which I hope the world does not return.
Jonson gradually receded from court life, writing a few additional plays and poems I also did not enjoy before dying in 1637 at age 65. London basically shut down for his funeral, and he was buried standing up in Westminster Abbey because he was both too tall and too broke for your standard laying-down grave. If you happen to be based in London and want to take a quick trip to shit-talk Epicœne for me over his moldering bones, I’d be much obliged.
Anyway, that’s all for this time. Happy February, be well, and brush up on a few Latin phrases in your spare time because you never know when they might be useful,
-Allison