Quiz 1 (COMPREHENSION)

Ben Jonson was a big man. In his hungry early years as a bricklayer, soldier and actor he was tall and lean – a "hollow-cheeked scrag", Thomas Dekker called him – but by middle age the celebrated playwright and poet had swelled to corpulence on the free dinners of patronage and gargantuan quantities of sweet Canary wine. A poem from 1619 punningly sums up his lifestyle and its consequences as "so much waste", and regrets that ladies "cannot embrace [his] mountain belly". In a verse epistle to Lady Covell he gives his weight as "twenty stone within two pound", and hopes she will round this up by adding some pounds to his purse. His agility in the art of cadging had clearly not deserted him.

In a career lasting 40 years, this "huge overgrown play-maker" – as he calls himself in The Staple of News– cast a correspondingly giant shadow over the Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline literary landscapes. More than any of his contemporaries – more than Marlowe, Shakespeare , Spenser or Donne, to name just the crème de la crème – this swaggering, learned, truculent and (let it never be forgotten) uproariously funny writer was a celebrity in his own time. And a generation after his death in 1637, when John Dryden looked back over the development of English theatre, it was Jonson rather than Shakespeare whom he singled out as "the greatest man of the last age" – though he added a telling rider to this, saying: "I admire him, but I love Shakespeare."

This turbulent comic genius strides splendidly through the pages of Ian Donaldson's exemplary new biography. Donaldson has been a leading Jonson scholar for decades and is an editor of the seven-volume Cambridge edition of the Works, published this year (with an expanded electronic edition planned for 2013). The book is rich in detail and insights, combines meticulous research with readability, and is full of quoted examples of Jonson's inimitably muscular, pungent yet precise style. It is not, as the publishers claim, the first major biography for 30 years – an excellent Life by David Riggs was published in 1989 – but it is now certainly the definitive one.

Jonson was a Londoner through and through, and wrote brilliantly about the city – "our scene is London", he announces in the prologue to The Alchemist (1610), for "no clime breeds better matter" – but his family's origins were Scottish. His grandfather was of the Johnstons of Annandale, a tough border clan. His father, who died a month before Ben's birth, was a Protestant minister who lost his estate during the reign of Bloody Mary. His widowed mother, whose name was probably Rebecca, married a bricklayer called Robert Brett, in whose house on lowly Hartshorn Lane, near Charing Cross, he grew up. Much of the above detail is autobiographical, coming from the "Informations" recorded at first hand by the Scottish poet William Drummond, with whom Jonson stayed at Hawthornden Castle in 1618.

The biographical material on Jonson is extraordinarily rich. As well as the prolific abundance of his published work – plays, masques, poems, epigrams, civic entertainments, translations, a book of English grammar – there is a fascinating deposit of more private material. There are books from his library, inscribed with his Senecan motto, Tanquam explorator("As an explorer") And there is his splendid "commonplace book", posthumously published in 1640 under the title Timber: or, Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter, full of sound writerly advice and classical quotations, intermixed with veins of self-reflection. All this provides an atmospheric hinterland of personal detail that might make the shadowy Shakespeare's biographer green at the gills.

There were many adjectives expended on Jonson in his lifetime, both laudatory and hostile, but the one posterity likes best is inscribed on his gravestone in Westminster Abbey – "O rare Ben Jonson". An old tradition had it that Jonson did not lie in his grave, but stood – in other words, his coffin was interred vertically – which seems appropriately defiant (one recalls his saying that "he would not flatter though he saw death"). Rather unexpectedly, the tradition turned out to be true when the grave was uncovered in the 19th century. But death had the last laugh after all, for the skeleton was found to be upside-down – an indignity even the great Ben was by that stage unable to redress.

Q1) The word 'cadging' as used in the passage means:

a) attacking

b) praising

c) criticizing

d) begging

Q2) According to the passage,which of the following is true?

a) Ben Jonson died while standing

b) Ben Jonson was a contemporary of John Dryden

c) Ben Jonson was of Scottish Origin

d) Ben Jonson was thin and tall

Q3) Which of the following can be inferred from the passage?

a) Lady Covell was a critic of Jonson

b) Jonson's father was Robert Brett

c) Jonson was Ian Donaldson's father

d) None of these

Q4) This passage primarily deals with

a) Ian Donaldson's book

b) Ben Jonson's girth

c) The competition between Jonson and Shakespeare

d) Jonson and his heritage.

Q5) As per the passage, which of the following is true?

a) Ben Jonson was afraid of death and poverty

b) Jacob and Jonson were competitors

c) Lady Covell was a contemporary of Jonson.

d) Jacob inspired Jonson's writing

Q6) Which of the following can be inferred from the passage?

a) Ben Jonson was loved in his day and age itself

b) Shakespeare was the most loved writer of his time

c) Everyone believed that Jonson had cheated death

d) Jonson was a famous bricklayer

Q7) As per the passage,which of the following is true?

a) Jonson mostly wrote tragedies

b) Jonson's writing was very witty and funny

c) Jonson was famous and successful novelist

d) Jonson was patronised by the royal family

Q8) Which of the following can be inferred from the passage?

a) Jonson's father was  biggest fan

b) William Drummond was Jonson's friend and biographer

c) David Riggs was Jonson's publisher

d) Ian Donaldson has written a biography of Jonson

Q9) The author mentions the phrase "green at the gills" to imply

a)suffocation

b)rickets

c)jealousy

d)epilepsy

Q10) Choose the correct option from the following?

a) Ben Jonson knew bricklaying

b) David Riggs likes Jonson

c) The author of this passage is possibly a journalist

d) Ben Jonson was born in 1610

Answers:

1)d
2)c
3)d
4)d
5)c
6)a
7)b
8)d
9)c
10)a