life. "Eastward Hoe" achieved the extraordinary popularity represented in
a demand for three issues in one year. But this was not due entirely to
the merits of the play. In its earliest version a passage which an
irritable courtier conceived to be derogatory to his nation, the Scots,
sent both Chapman and Jonson to jail; but the matter was soon patched up,
for by this time Jonson had influence at court.

With the accession of King James, Jonson began his long and successful
career as a writer of masques. He wrote more masques than all his
competitors together, and they are of an extraordinary variety and poetic
excellence. Jonson did not invent the masque; for such premeditated
devices to set and frame, so to speak, a court ball had been known and
practised in varying degrees of elaboration long before his time. But
Jonson gave dramatic value to the masque, especially in his invention of
the antimasque, a comedy or farcical element of relief, entrusted to
professional players or dancers. He enhanced, as well, the beauty and
dignity of those portions of the masque in which noble lords and ladies
took their parts to create, by their gorgeous costumes and artistic
grouping and evolutions, a sumptuous show. On the mechanical and scenic
side Jonson had an inventive and ingenious partner in Inigo Jones, the
royal architect, who more than any one man raised the standard of stage
representation in the England of his day. Jonson continued active in the
service of the court in the writing of masques and other entertainments far
into the reign of King Charles; but, towards the end, a quarrel with Jones
embittered his life, and the two testy old men appear to have become not
only a constant irritation to each other, but intolerable bores at court.
In "Hymenaei," "The Masque of Queens," "Love Freed from Ignorance," "Lovers
made Men," "Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue," and many more will be found
Jonson's aptitude, his taste, his poetry and inventiveness in these
by-forms of the drama; while in "The Masque of Christmas," and "The Gipsies