“Good morrow to the day; and next, my gold!”

I can still see Peter, my graduate school roommate—who to this day cultivates a sharp ironic wit not unlike Jonson’s own—shuffling groggily into our kitchen to find the fixings for breakfast and declaiming that glorious line as he approaches.

Peter must have been taking a course in Elizabethan literature because that is the opening line of the play Volpone, the Fox, a satire on greed and its companion, lust, by poet and playwright Ben Jonson: rival, colleague, friend, and champion of fellow-poet William Shakespeare.

Ben Jonson: now there’s someone I haven’t thought about for years, but suddenly revived for me by the happy memory of Peter’s grand entrance.

And no wonder. It’s a great opening line, doing exactly what Ben Jonson does best: encapsulate a person’s character in an iambic pentameter epigram, or even in just one iambic pentameter line. Almost all you need to know about the main character, Volpone, is there: Volpone’s vigor, his sociability, his clear if topsy-turvy grasp of priorities—first, polite if cursory acknowledgement of the sun’s rising, followed by deep obeisance to the lord of all shining objects, gold. The only other salient attribute of the man is given in the play’s subtitle: “the Fox,” though that is just a translation of the Italian form of his name. The word volpone tells us exactly how the character acquired all that shiny stuff: by shrewdness—the power of which we get an immediate demonstration in the scenes that follow.

That one line has now installed itself in my repertoire of the first things I say to myself as I try cheerfully to greet another day. But it has also made me open my copy of Jonson’s poetry—just so I could listen once again to his inimitable voice.

My collection begins with the first volume Jonson published, in 1616, called “Epigrammes.” The first poem is a classic rhymed iambic pentameter couplet. (Martial, the satirical Roman writer of epigrams, is Jonson’s model here.) The couplet captures the spirit of all that follows:

To the Reader

Pray thee, take care, that tak’st my booke in hand
To read it well: that is, to understand.

The tone is both deferential—“Pray thee…”—and cautionary—“take care….” Why? Well, presumably the reader has grabbed Jonson’s book from the book stall without much forethought—figuring, perhaps, it’ll be a volume stuffed with juicy libels against Jonson’s many enemies, a kind of rhyming gossip-sheet. (Jonson was a brawler, several times imprisoned for alleged insults against powerful men, once even on suspicion of being associated with the Gunpowder Plot). So, is Jonson warning prospective readers away from buying a book he hoped to make a little money with?

Of course not. But he is warning them “To read it well: that is, to understand.”

Ah.  So there’s danger here after all, not in the book’s words themselves but in how they’re being put together. That is—and here the real danger is implied, not stated—in whether the reader has the wit not simply to “read” these words but to “understand” them. As if the epigram were really saying: “There’ll be trouble here if you can’t get beyond the literal meanings here and so fail to catch the fun I’m having.” For whatever else you might say of Ben Jonson, you’d have to say that he was above all else playful—both literally (as the author of many plays) and personally, in his love of irony and indirection.

Take as confirmation of that latter kind of playfulness the epigram following the first one, for it expands the dimensions of the fun Jonson is proposing for the reader. The address this time is not to the reader, but to the book itself:

To my Booke

It will be look’d for, booke, when some but see
Thy title, Epigrammes, and nam’d of me,
Thou should’st be bold, licentious, full of gall,
Wormwoode, and sulphure, sharpe, and tooth’d withal; 
Become a petulant thing, hurle ink, and wit
As mad men stones: not caring whom they hit.
Deceive their malice, who could wish it so.
And by thy wiser temper, let men know  
Thou art not covetous of least selfe fame,
Made from the hazard of another’s shame:
Much less with lewd, prophane, and beastly phrase
To catch the worlds loose laughter, or vain gaze.
He that departs with his own honesty
For vulgar praise, doth it too dearly buy.

One point to notice right away is that we’re dealing with something that looks like a sonnet, but isn’t. It has fourteen lines, all right, and they’re in iambic pentameter, with a tidy moral at the end. But all the lines are couplets. Also, the speaker isn’t following the convention of speaking to his lover, but to his book. And the tone isn’t ardent but cautionary (as it was in the epigram, “To the Reader”).

The speaker’s worry is that the author’s name will entice the dull-witted reader, who has somehow not absorbed the caution given him in the opening epigram, to expect anything with Ben Jonson’s name on it to be a riot of bad taste:

…bold, licentious, full of gall
 Wormwoode, and sulphure, sharpe, and tooth’d withal…. 

No, don’t let them think you’ll feed such cravings, the speaker instructs his book. But instead take charge of such readers at once, without delay:

Deceive their malice, who could wish it so… 

Notice that the reader isn’t instructing his book to accuse those readers of malice (that might discourage all sales or even get the author himself cast back into the brig). He instructs it to deceive their malice. Make them think they’re getting something more high-minded than they expect. And to make their judgment a judgment of the book, not of its author. Assure them emphatically that you, book, are far above what all will declare to be a base motive:

Thou art not covetous of least selfe fame,
Made from the hazard of another’s shame…

And that you are certainly, indubitably even farther above chasing fame with an even baser motive:

Much less with lewd, prophane, and beastly phrase
To catch the worlds loose laughter, or vain gaze.

The rhetorical battle won, the reader’s malice deceived, the book can primly sum things up in the final couplet, and the buyer, having obeyed the dictum caveat emptor, can now lay out his pennies for Jonson’s Epigrammes and enjoy its wit.

And right there is the ageless appeal of Ben Jonson: a wit that never rests, never ceases to “deceive their malice”—the “their” in this case being all of us who tend to react without thinking to the words we hear and say and so doom ourselves to a fate of lonely, narrow literalism. Jonson’s wit by contrast is an expansive one: showy, companionable, mischievous, but also at times tender, admiring, deeply philosophical.

Despite his many scrapes with the law, Jonson became England’s Poet Laureate, and is buried in Westminster Abbey. His tombstone reads: “O rare Ben Jonson.” It could also have read, “He Deceived All Malice.” He was that kind of man.

After getting his PhD in English literature, George Dardess taught close reading to his own students until his retirement. Since then he has been ordained a Deacon in the Roman Catholic Church and written several books on Muslim-Christian relations. He has also created the graphic novel Foreign Exchange.