The laureateship obliged him annually to provide, besides other entertainments of the court, the Christmas Masque: of these we have a series in his works, from 1615 to 1625. In 1625, his comedy called The Staple of News was exhibited. In 1627, The New Inn was performed at the Blackfriars theatre, and deservedly hissed off the stage. Three of Jonson’s plays underwent that fate. He was so much incensed against the town, that in 1631 he published it with the following title: “The New Inn, or the Light Heart, a comedy; as it was never acted, but most negligently played, by some, the king’s servants, and more squeamishly beheld and censured by others, the king’s subjects, 1629; and now at last set at liberty to the readers.” To this he annexed an ode to himself, threatening to leave the stage, which was sarcastically parodied by Owen Feltham, a writer of note, and author of a book called “Resolves.” Jonson’s mingled foibles and excellencies are pleasantly touched by Sir John Suckling, in his “Session of the Poets.” An improbable story is told by Cibber, and repeated by Smollet, that in 1629, Ben, being reduced to distress, and living in an obscure alley, petitioned his Majesty to assist him in his poverty and sickness; but that, on receiving ten pounds, he said to the messenger who brought the donation, “His Majesty has sent me ten pounds, because I am poor and live in an alley: go and tell him that his soul lives in an alley.” His annual pension had been increased from a hundred marks to a hundred pounds, with the welcome addition of a yearly tierce of Canary wine. He received from the king a further present of one hundred pounds in that very year, which he acknowledged in an epigram published in his works. Could he, as he does in his “Epistle Mendicant,” have further solicited the Lord Treasurer for relief in 1631, had he been guilty of such an insult to royalty in 1629? There is reason to believe that he had pensions from the city, and from several of the nobility and gentry; particularly from Mr. Sutton, the founder of the Charter-house. Yet, with all these helps, his finances were unredeemed from disorder.
In his distress, he came upon the stage again, in spite of his last defeat. Two comedies without a date, “The Magnetic Lady,” and “The Tale of a Tub,” belong to these latter compositions, which Dryden has called his dotages; at all events, they are the dotages of Jonson. Alexander Gill, a poetaster of the times, attacked him with brutal fury, on account of his “Magnetic Lady.” Gill was a bad man as well as a bad poet; and Jonson availed himself of his adversary’s weak points in a short but cutting reply. His last masque was performed July 30, 1634, and the only piece extant of later date is his “New Year’s Ode for 1635.” He died of palsy, August 6, 1637, in his sixty-third year, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. His grave-stone only bears the quaint inscription,—“O RARE BEN JONSON!”