C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
Prologue from Every Man in His Humour
By Ben Jonson (15721637)
T
As art and nature have not bettered much;
Yet ours, for want, hath not so loved the stage
As he dare serve the ill customs of the age,
Or purchase your delight at such a rate
As, for it, he himself must justly hate.
To make a child, now swaddled, to proceed
Man, and then shoot up in one beard and weed
Past threescore years; or with three rusty swords,
And help of some few foot-and-half-foot words,
Fight over York and Lancaster’s long jars,
And in the tyring-house bring wounds to scars.
He rather prays, you will be pleased to see
One such to-day, as other plays should be:
Where neither chorus wafts you o’er the seas;
Nor creaking throne comes down, the boys to please;
Nor nimble squib is seen, to make afeard
The gentlewomen; nor rolled bullet heard
To say, it thunders; nor tempestuous drum
Rumbles, to tell you when the storm doth come:
But deeds and language such as men do use;
And persons such as comedy would choose,
When she would show an image of the times,
And sport with human follies, not with crimes.