Jonson was a man of strong convictions and equally strong prejudices. He was convinced of the necessity for rational control of the passions, especially for a poet; yet he often failed to manage his own notoriously unruly passions and appetites. In a censorious and aggressive age he was notably censorious and aggressive. However, he was also loyal and generous, and he had a special talent for making firm friendships.
Of Jonson's early life and family background relatively little is known. He told the Scottish poet William Drummond of Hawthornden, whose account of his conversations with Jonson is a valuable source of information about Jonson's life, that his grandfather was a gentleman who came from Carlisle and before that from Annandale. His father, a minister who lost his estate under Queen Mary, died in 1572, not long before the birth of his son Benjamin, near London, between 5 May 1572 and 19 January 1573 (probably on 11 June 1572). The character of his mother can be glimpsed in an anecdote about Jonson that is related in the Conversations with Drummond. In 1604 Jonson was arrested along with the playwrights John Marston and George Chapman for some satirical passages in their collaborative play Eastward Ho, and, after their release, Jonson feasted his friends in celebration: "at the midst of the Feast his old Mother Dranke to him & shew him a paper which she had (if the Sentence had taken execution) to have mixed jnye Prisson among his drinke, which was full of Lustie strong poison & that she was no churle she told she minded first to have Drunk of it herself." Such a mother does much to explain the temperament of her famous son.
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