Of the republic of uzbekistan andizhan state university named after z. M. Bobur the faculty of foreign languages

3. COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF COMEDY PLAYS BY SHAKESPEARE AND BEN JOHNSON
A 19th-century engraving illustrating Thomas Fuller's story of Shakespeare and Jonson debating at the "Mermaid Tavern".
There are many legends about Jonson's rivalry with Shakespeare, some of which may be true. Drummond reports that during their conversation, Jonson scoffed at two apparent absurdities in Shakespeare's plays: a nonsensical line in Julius Caesar and the setting of The Winter's Tale on the non-existent seacoast of Bohemia. Drummond also reported Jonson as saying that Shakespeare "wanted art" (i.e., lacked skill). Whether Drummond is viewed as accurate or not, the comments fit well with Jonson's well-known theories about literature. [3, 15]
In "De Shakespeare Nostrat" in Timber, which was published posthumously and reflects his lifetime of practical experience, Jonson offers a fuller and more conciliatory comment. He recalls being told by certain actors that Shakespeare never blotted (i.e., crossed out) a line when he wrote. His own claimed response was "Would he had blotted a thousand!"^[a] However, Jonson explains, "He was, indeed, honest and of an open and free nature, had an excellent phantasy, brave notions and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped". Jonson concludes that "there was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned." Also when Shakespeare died, he said, "He was not of an age, but for all time."
Thomas Fuller relates stories of Jonson and Shakespeare engaging in debates in the Mermaid Tavern; Fuller imagines conversations in which Shakespeare would run rings around the more learned but more ponderous Jonson. That the two men knew each other personally is beyond doubt, not only because of the tone of Jonson's references to him but because Shakespeare's company produced a number of Jonson's plays, at least two of which (Every Man in His Humour and Sejanus His Fall) Shakespeare certainly acted in. However, it is now impossible to tell how much personal communication they had, and tales of their friendship cannot be substantiated.
Jonson's most influential and revealing commentary on Shakespeare is the second of the two poems that he contributed to the prefatory verse that opens Shakespeare's First Folio. This poem, "To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare and What He Hath Left Us", did a good deal to create the traditional view of Shakespeare as a poet who, despite "small Latine, and lesse Greeke", had a natural genius. [3, 16]
The poem has traditionally been thought to exemplify the contrast which Jonson perceived between himself, the disciplined and erudite classicist, scornful of ignorance and sceptical of the masses, and Shakespeare, represented in the poem as a kind of natural wonder whose genius was not subject to any rules except those of the audiences for which he wrote. But the poem itself qualifies this view:
Yet must I not give Nature all: Thy Art,
My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part.
Some view this elegy as a conventional exercise, but others see it as a heartfelt tribute to the "Sweet Swan of Avon", the "Soul of the Age!" It has been argued that Jonson helped to edit the First Folio, and he may have been inspired to write this poem by reading his fellow playwright's works, a number of which had been previously either unpublished or available in less satisfactory versions, in a relatively complete form.
When the fresh-faced youth, William Shakespeare, arrived in the great city of London from the market town of Stratford-upon-Avon to pursue his ambition to be an actor, he fell in with two young men who were working in the theatre. One was Christopher Marlowe, the same age as Shakespeare, who was already writing plays, and the other was the older Ben Jonson.
Jonson was an experienced man of the world – a poet and soldier, who had fought in several campaigns in Europe. First and foremost a writer of poems, Jonson was now turning his talent to the lucrative business of writing plays for the theatre.
Taken under the wing of these two writers the young William Shakespeare was invited to collaborate with Marlowe in writing plays, thus enjoying a valuable apprenticeship as a playwright. He may have performed in one of Marlowe’s plays but there is evidence that he did in at least one of Jonson’s plays. He took a role in Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour, a play full of comic characters. Unfortunately, we do not know which of them he played. Marlow was murdered soon after Shakespeare’s arrival in London but the friendship between Shakespeare and Jonson developed and remained solid for the duration of Shakespeare’s life. In fact, Jonson visited Shakespeare in Stratford a week before his Shakespeare’s death. [7, 255]
It is possible that if Shakespeare had never existed Ben Jonson’s plays would be regarded as the great examples of Elizabethan drama. He was a very different kind of writer, though. Whereas Shakespeare’s texts are baroque in their elaborations Jonson’s have a more sparse, cut-down, quality, with far more prose than Shakespeare’s, making them seem more modern to the twenty-first century ear.
The plays are lively and mainly comic: they reflect the author’s interest in current affairs and the new sciences like geography. In one of his comedies, Bartholomew Fair, two characters are discussing the tobacco that’s being sold at one of the stalls at the fair. Tobacco, used by the indigenous tribes of America had recently been introduced into England by Sir Walter Raleigh and was a great talking point. Justice Overdo advises his companion against smoking it. He doesn’t like its colour and texture. Moreover, he says, ‘who can tell if, before the gathering and making up thereof, the alligator hath not pissed thereon?’
While continuing to write poems, Jonson produced several plays, twenty of which have survived. He was more prolific, though, in the masque form that was taking the Jacobean theatre by storm with its multi-media presentations – poetry, drama, comedy, music, dance and colourful sets.
Thirty-six of those have survived.
The masques are not much performed today but the regular performance of the most famous of his plays makes him a giant of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, second only to Shakespeare.
Here is a list of Ben Jonson’s plays: