In his commonplace book, Timber, or Discoveries, which would appear to be an accumulation of reflections dating from across the Caroline period to his death in 1637, Jonson offered a revealing portrait of what was for him the precious commodity of memory. Here, he is seen to disclose in careful detail the painful recognition of his own ageing and decline, giving particular emphasis to the process of memory and its powers to frame and, indeed, to unframe the self.

In the main, Jonson eschewed the spiritual exercise of memory that Donne investigated in his sermons, seeming rather to share the opinions of his friend Sir Henry Wotton, who pondered in later life, ‘I read, that old Men live more by Memory than by Hope’. The poet-playwright favoured an interest in the ars memorativa as it had been advocated in pagan antiquity – an art that affirmed that an ‘artificial memory’ might be trained with a regime of rigorous mental discipline. Moreover, this interest could surface in any number of unexpected places in his writings, such as in his comedy The Case is Altered (published 1609), where Francisco Colonnia submits, ‘I will be silent, yet that I may serve | But as a decade in the art of memory, | To put you still in mind of your own virtues’ (ii.iii). More generally, Roman writers such as Cicero and Quintilian, who, as we have seen, conducted such influential expositions of the rhetorical practices of sequential imaging and the requirements of retrospection for public service, were among those held in particular esteem by Jonson. Indeed, a rather piqued Drummond of Hawthornden was informed by his voluble house guest in 1618 that he should turn back to Quintilian, ‘who ([Jonson] said) would tell me all the faults of my Verses [as] if he had Lived with me’ (i.132: 12–14).