“Language most shows a man. Speak that I may see thee.” — Ben Jonson

“Language most shows a man. Speak that I may see thee.” — Ben Jonson

“O rare Benn Johnson.” — Jonson’s incorrectly-spelled epitaph in Westminster Abbey It’s his birthday today. Ben Jonson did everything. Plays, poems, satires, elegies, epigrams. His talent was wide and flexible. Everything he wrote feels inevitable. However, as Michael Schmidt writes in his wonderful Lives of the Poets: “Jonson suffers one irremediable disability: Shakespeare.” When people have discussed him, throughout history, more often than n…