Court Hieroglyphics: the Idea of the Cipher in Ben Jonson’s Masques

Abstract

Spies, you are lights in state, but of base stuffe, Who, when you haue burnt your selues downe to the snuffe, Stinke, and are throwne away. End faire enough. Imprisoned for killing the actor Gabriel Spencer in a duel in 1598, Ben Jonson found himself plunged into a world inhabited by underground agents and intelligencers. His famous epigram ‘On Spies’ evokes this shadowy place in which moments of illumination are fleeting and extinguished as easily as a flickering candle. Whilst waiting to stand trial for his crime at the Old Bailey Jonson seems to have encountered the Jesuit priest Thomas Wright, who lived in semi-confinement in London’s jails where he worked as an informer to the Earl of Essex, the operator of extensive intelligence-gathering networks and a brief source of hope for recusants when he appeared to champion religious toleration around this time. Wright also undertook missionary work for the Jesuit cause amongst the prisoners and appears to have succeeded in converting Jonson to Catholicism, although uncertainty surrounds the extent to which this change of faith was motivated by political convenience. Jonson‘s supposed conversion may have provided him with a cover under which to infiltrate Catholic communities, enabling him to act as a counter-insurgent agent before his overt return to the Protestant Church around 1610. The suggestion that Jonson might have accepted a plea bargain in exchange for such services during a subsequent jail-term in 1605 has never entirely gone away, and Richard Dutton concludes that ‘The suspicion that his release from prison might have been bought at the expense of an agreement to spy for Cecil, or even act as a double agent, is difficult to discount.’ These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Cite this

Hannah Crawforth (2011). Court Hieroglyphics: the Idea of the Cipher in Ben Jonson’s Masques. Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230298125_9

@article{hannah2011court,
  title  = {Court Hieroglyphics: the Idea of the Cipher in Ben Jonson’s Masques},
  author = {Crawforth, Hannah},
  year   = {2011},
  journal = {Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks},
  doi    = {10.1057/9780230298125_9}
}

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