Introduction: Letters from Prison by Jonson and Chapman

Letters 2–8, (a)–(c)

This group of letters, written from prison by Ben Jonson and George Chapman, survives in an early seventeenth-century quarto manuscript first described by Bertram Dobell (Dobell 1901). The manuscript was purchased later in the same year by the New York collector William Augustus White, on whose transcription the Oxford editors depended when presenting Jonson’s letters in 1925 (H&S, 1.190–200). The manuscript subsequently disappeared from view, but was listed in 1941 by A. S. W. Rosenbach, who helped to secure its later acquisition by the Folger Shakespeare Library (Wolf, 1960, 504). The manuscript, now Folger MS.V.a.321, has been edited by A. R. Braunmuller (1983), who dates it to the last years of the sixteenth century and the first thirteen or fourteen years of the seventeenth century. Dobell believed the chief compiler of the manuscript to have been Chapman himself. The Folger Manuscript Catalogue tentatively identifies the compiler as Peter Ferryman (d. 1642), ‘a gentleman by birth and education’ who was acquainted with Jonson and Chapman, and associated with Charterhouse and the Inns of Court and Chancery. Braunmuller (1983, 15–35) favours this cautious ascription. The letters in this group are written in a very clear and probably professional secretary hand, which has not been identified. A revised version of Letter 3, addressed to Salisbury, survives at Hatfield in Jonson’s holograph; it was first printed by Gifford in 1816, and forms the copy-text for this edition. All of the other letters in this group were unknown before Dobell’s discovery of the manuscript in 1901.

Commentators have generally assumed, with varying degrees of confidence, that the troubles referred to in these letters were occasioned by the illicit performance or publication in 1605 of Eastward Ho! (for the circumstances of which, see Gossett and Kay’s Introduction to the play, this edition). This identification is not without its problems. The play which evidently offended the authorities is nowhere named in these letters, and the situation the letters describe is at odds with Jonson’s own subsequent account of the Eastward Ho! troubles, as recorded by William Drummond in 1618–19: ‘He was delated by Sir James Murray to the King for writing something against the Scots in a play, Eastward Ho!, and voluntarily imprisoned himself with Chapman and Marston, who had written it amongst them’, etc. (Informations, 207–15). Marston’s name is not mentioned anywhere in these letters; and while Chapman in Letter (a) speaks of two offending clauses for which he and Jonson insist they are not responsible, neither correspondent refers explicitly to a third author, whether free or currently under restraint. Nor do the letters give any hint that Jonson had ‘voluntarily imprisoned himself’ with either or both of his colleagues. On the contrary: Jonson protests vehemently throughout the correspondence that he has been forcibly committed to prison without fair hearing or examination, on the strength of mere ‘rumour’.

How are these discrepancies to be explained? A number of (partial) solutions might be suggested. It is possible, as Tricomi (1989), 44, conjectures, that Marston had either escaped or been detained in another prison, and that Jonson and Chapman, uncertain of his fate, maintained a strategic silence about his involvement with the play. Alternatively, the play to which the letters refer might not be Eastward Ho! at all, but another collaborative work by Jonson and Chapman which offended the authorities. It is not easy, however, to imagine which work this might be. The most obvious candidate is Sejanus, a play on which Chapman is often thought to have served as Jonson’s collaborator or ‘second pen’ (Sejanus, ‘To the Readers’, 32 and n.). But if Chapman indeed collaborated with Jonson on Sejanus – a plausible, but not entirely secure, assumption – he would have contributed only to the original (now-lost) acting version, not to the revised text as presented in the 1605 quarto edition. That text, as Jonson’s address ‘To the Readers’ makes clear, was entirely his own work; and if, as Dutton and Cain have argued, Jonson’s difficulties over Sejanus related to the play’s publication rather than to its performance, then Sejanus is unlikely to have been the play referred to here (Dutton, 1991, 164–5, 172, 269 n.19; Sejanus, Introduction). As Jonson and Chapman are not known to have collaborated on any other dramatic work apart from Eastward Ho!, this explanation remains highly conjectural.

A further possibility is that, thirteen years after the event, Jonson decided to improve the story of his troubles over Eastward Ho! by inventing, Bobadill- like, the episode of his voluntary imprisonment with Chapman and Marston. Such behaviour, though not inconceivable, would be uncharacteristic of Jonson, who – as Drummond himself had occasion to note – was certainly vain and often boastful, but also a stickler for honesty, not otherwise known for making up stories about his past. Another and perhaps more likely explanation is that Drummond was simply confused in his reporting of the story – the details of which may in any case not have emerged with perfect clarity from Jonson’s late-night, drink-fuelled narration. Each of these explanations rests uncomfortably on a measure of guesswork. In the absence of alternative evidence, however, the least unsatisfactory conclusion is that the correspondence indeed relates to the troubles arising from the performance or publication of Eastward Ho! in 1605.

On this assumption, the letters must have been written at some time between 4 May 1605, the date of Salisbury’s and Montgomery’s elevation to the titles by which they are addressed here, and 9 October, when Jonson is known to have been free and at supper in the Strand with Catesby and others (Life of Ben Jonson, Electronic Edition, Life Records, 29). These dates can be further narrowed. James was away on his summer progress between 16 July and 31 August 1605, and many of the recipients of these letters – Suffolk, Salisbury, Pembroke, Montgomery, Aubigny – were travelling with him (Nichols, 1828, 1.517–19). Chapman’s reference to the Lord Chamberlain’s being ‘so far removed from our required attendance’ when the offending act was committed (Letter (b)) suggests that the correspondence belongs to a period soon after the return of the royal party; most probably, to early September. (Though not all members of the royal entourage always stayed the full distance in these progresses, we know that those just mentioned were in Oxford on 30 August, where they received honorary degrees: Nichols, 1828, 1.519ff.) Eastward Ho! was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 4 September 1605. If, as Brettle (1928–9) and Adams (1931) have argued, the furore was caused by the play’s unauthorized performance earlier that summer, the Stationers’ Register entry might be thought to imply that the authors’ troubles had by then blown over, and that they themselves were now at liberty. On this reading of the evidence (and other interpretations are possible), the letters would have been written between 31 August and 4 September 1605. If, however, as Chambers (1923) and Greg (1926) suspected, it was the publication of the play, not its performance, which occasioned the authors’ arrest and detention, then the letters would presumably have been written between 4 September, the date of the Stationers’ Register entry, and about 9 October, when Jonson was supping with Catesby.

The danger in which the two authors found themselves was not trivial. ‘The report was that they should then had their ears cut and noses’, Drummond noted. Jonson’s mother had prepared a fatal dose for her son, to be taken by him and by herself should the sentence be delivered (Informations, 209–15). The urgency of the situation is evident in the very quantity of the letters, as the authors write simultaneously and in similar terms to some of the most powerful figures in the land.

The three letters by George Chapman precede those of Jonson in Folger MS.V.a.321, occupying fols. 88–9. Jonson and Chapman (1559/60–1634) were on close and affectionate terms throughout much of their working lives (see Informations, 126, Chapman’s verses prefixed to Sejanus and Volp., and Jonson’s verses on Chapman’s Hesiod), but later the relationship soured, as Chapman’s ‘Invective’ against his former friend and collaborator testifies.

IAN DONALDSON