Transcribed and edited by Hester Lees-Jeffries; introduction by Ian Donaldson.
Thomas Plume (baptised 7 August 1630, died 1704), was a native of Maldon in Essex, a graduate of Christ’s College, Cambridge (BA, MA, 1649; DD 1673), and, from 1669, archdeacon and prebendary of Rochester in Kent. A man of wide intellectual interests, charitable inclinations, and some personal wealth, he began during his lifetime to collect books, pamphlets, and manuscripts which he assembled in the upper rooms of his endowed school in Maldon, leaving provision in his will for maintenance and further development of the library, which at the time of his death numbered approximately 7,400 volumes. The library, which also contains Plume’s personal papers (including his notes on Ben Jonson: MS Plume 25, f. 161), flourishes to this day. Along with other bequests, Plume endowed the Chair of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge which bears his name, and an observatory, now demolished, which was erected over the main gateway of Trinity College.
Plume had had no personal acquaintance with Jonson, having been no more than seven years of age at the time of the poet’s death in August 1637. His anecdotes about Jonson – like his observation, recorded around 1657, about Shakespeare’s father being a glover and ‘a merry-cheeked old man’ (Schoenbaum, 1970, 106-7; Tromley, 2010) – were therefore entirely dependent on hearsay or reading. Plume’s most likely source of gossip and information about Jonson was his friend and mentor John Hacket, Bishop of Lichfield, with whom Plume had been acquainted since the late 1650s. Hacket may have helped Plume to secure his first living in Greenwich in 1658, and have helped him also to admission as a Bachelor of Divinity in Cambridge in 1661. From that year Hacket employed Plume as his agent in London, charging him in particular to buy books on his behalf. At his death, he was to leave Plume a sum of money and two volumes of sermons which Plume subsequently published, along with a memoir of his patron (French, 2004; Fell Smith, 1901). Hacket was a brilliant Latinist and author of a comedy, Loyola, that had captured the attention of King James, who appointed Hacket to a royal chaplaincy in 1624; like Jonson, he had been a friend and admirer of the deposed Lord Keeper Bishop John Williams, whose life he later wrote. As argued more fully elsewhere in this edition (Donaldson, Sermones Fideles, Dubia, CWBJ Online), Hacket had worked with Jonson in the mid-1620s on a Latin translation of Francis Bacon’s Essays, and is likely to have retained vivid memories of his formidable collaborator.
Anecdotes from the mid-seventeenth century of the kind that Plume records here, however, supposedly reporting impromptu exchanges between Jonson and Shakespeare, need to be read with a certain caution. Similar tales have been shown to have had enjoyed an earlier currency in the Jest Books, the names of ‘Jonson’ and ‘Shakespeare’ being subsequently added to give them colour and substance (Graves, 1923). Yet the existence of numerous variants of Plume’s stories about the two writers – the jokes about Jonson’s sparse beard and slowness in composition and preference for wit over land (‘One called him – Wise Acre’); the humorous epitaphs (‘Here lies Ben Jonson . . .’); the tale of Shakespeare’s challenge to Jonson translate a ‘Latin’ (or ‘latten’ = brass) christening spoon, – testify, if not to the authenticity of the stories, then at least to their strong hold on the popular imagination (Bentley, 1945, 1. 36, 37; Jordan, Jewels of Ingenuity, 1660; Le Strange, Merry Passages, ed. Lippincott, 1974, 19; Drummond, Democritie, CWBJ Online Edition; Dekker, Satiromastix, ed. Penniman (1913), 5.2.280, 217-19). Though Plume attributes at least one of the epitaphs to ‘Shakespr.’, a perhaps more reliable version of these lines, recorded by William Drummond in 1619 during Jonson’s visit to Hawthornden, is said to have been written more simply by ‘a companion’:
Here lies Benjamin Jonson dead,
And hath no more wit than a goose in his
head;
That as he was wont, so doth he still
Live by his wit, and
evermore will . . .
Here lies honest Ben
That had not a beard on his chin.
Informations, 469-5
Plume’s elliptical notes on Jonson’s remarks about The Winter’s Tale and on his own travels in France with the young Wat Ralegh are more fully explained by passages in Jonson’s Informations to William Drummond (156-7, 226-33), but interestingly this text was not at this time available to Plume in either print or manuscript. Other observations by Plume are more directly verifiable from other sources. Jonson’s critique of Shakespeare’s supposed errors and solecisms, which Plume records here, is a memory of Jonson’s own account of the matter in Discoveries, 467-83, which Plume could have read in the 1640-1 Folio. Plume’s report of Jonson’s beating with ‘a Trunchion Cane’ ‘an old Comrague’ he had met in the streets, a man who had similarly disciplined Jonson himself when young, is not recorded elsewhere, but gains plausibility from Jonson’s known tendency to resort on occasions to physical violence (‘he beat Marston, and took his pistol from him’, Informations, 117, 216-18; cf. Epigrams, 68), and his strong condemnation of teachers who flogged their young pupils: a practice he deplored as ‘deformed and servile’ (Discoveries, 1204; cf. Informations, 167-19).
The episode in Jonson’s The Gypsies Metamorphosed to which Plume here refers, in which the band of gypsies light-heartedly steal from some of the masque’s spectators, pilfering a young woman’s copy of The Practice of Piety (a popular devotional work by Lewis Bayley), is at lines 585-6 of the Burley version of the masque (and 637-9 of the Windsor text). Alternative versions of Jonson’s lines on the lawyer and politician William Noy (later to become Charles’s Attorney-General) which Plume records here may be found in Bodleian Rawlinson MS Poet. 147 and 210, f. 68. Plume’s comment ‘So Tom Goff brings in Etiocles and Polynices discng of K. Rich. 2d.’ seemingly refers to a criticism made by Jonson of an anachronistic conversation in a now-lost play, based on Seneca’s Phoenissae, by his friend the Christ Church dramatist Thomas Goffe, that was in some way comparable to the solecism he had detected in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (O’Donnell, 1954b; Discoveries, 479-81).
Plume’s notes on Ben Jonson cannot be dated precisely, but may well have been written in the late 1650s, as conjectured by Bentley, 1965, 1.99.
[MS 25 A, p. 77]
Here lies Ben Johnson—who was once
one—
this he made of
himself--shakspear. took. the
pen from him & made this
Here lies
Benjamin—with short hair upon his Chin—
Who while he lived was a slow thing--& now
he’s dead is no thing.
[[p. 95]]
Ben Johnson
borrowed £50 and paid it again
after would have
borrowed 100 the gentleman told him—He
had deceived him once and never
should again—
[[p.
123]]
Thou Thing like a Thing, like a
Man—said Ben Johnson to Sir Inigo Jones—who
dairs not call him Jackanapes.
[[p. 161]]
Ben Johnson
at the Christning of Shakespeare his child to
which he was jnvited
good Friend said to him—now
thou expect a great matter—But
I will giue it a Latin spoon & thou
shalt translate it.
[MS. 25 B, p. 51.]
Here lies Ben Johnson Who once was
one—his own Epitaph.
Here lies
Benjamin—with little hair upon his chin
Who while he liued was a slow
thing--& now he is dead is Nothing }
Shakespear.
If thou fall a galloping once
said one—to Another that
was thrown in a gallop
B Johson
said he should
rather have an Acr of witt than
of land—whereupon One called
him—Wise Acre—
[[p. 71]]
One told Ben
Johnson—shakesp never studied for any
thing he wrott. B. J. said—the
more to blame He—said—Cesar never punishes any
but for a just Cause & another time
make athyns in Bohemia—So Tom Goff brings in
Etiocles & Polynices discussing of King
Richard 2nd.
[[p.
78]]
B. Johnson used to walk
with a Trunchion Cane & met an old
Comrague in the streets a long time absent fell a Bastinading
him—& chiding him—that he would putt him to
it, now he was grown old to
discipline him—when not so abl
as when he was yong—
[[p.
82]]
B. Johnson was with yong Wat Rawleigh in France &
would there be drunk—See you my
governor said hee—
[[MS. 30,
fol. 6 verso]]
Searjant Noy was presented
with these verses from Ben. Johnson while he
was himself at his Commencement
dinner for his degree of Searjant at Law, that so he might take
notice Ben stood without expecting but a call to come to
dinner,
When the world was drowned, No venizon was found,
because there was no park.
Here Wee sit & get never
a bitt, because Noy has all in his Arke.
[[fol. 21 verso]]
Ben Johnson brings in his Gypsies dancing, who robd the
spectators—amongst the rest there was one Christian, & he had
lost (he said) his practise of piety. The gypsies cleer
themselves--Your book (or ballad)
whatever you call it Is not here—our
Society—dos not practise piety The Author that first undertook it
Long agoe himself forsook it.