Responding to issues raised by other essays in the collection, the Afterword considers Jonson’s place on the contemporary global stage and imagines him working in the world of social media. Speculating about how he might have conducted himself on Facebook and Twitter, Sanders suggests that Jonson the self-publicist would have seized on these modes of modern celebrity with creative relish. The Afterword goes on to consider Jonson in the modern theatre and questions of canon. Finally, it addresses some of the challenges and opportunities for Jonson's future afterlives.

At Bothal we saw the battle-axe with which Robert Ogle, the first baron, slew Sir Davy Dunbar in a single combat. Who wore the tod tail, that is, the fox tail, in his hat in token none durst encounter him.

Henry the third matching with Scotland, both of the kings met at the Bishop’s Palace in York, where the bishop bestowed three score beeves5 on them for a breakfast, all other charges being suitable thereto.

George Nevell, archbishop and brother to the earl of Warwick that carried a king on his sleeve, at his establishment in the see strewed a thousand yards of cloth, which reached from St James, from whence he passed to theminster, which was presently cut and divided by 10 the people. He spent three hundred quarters of wheat, as many tuns of ale and 104 tuns of wine, the fowl and all other provision coming to an equal rate.

The earl of Warwick was his steward and another earl his marshal, and he had four marshals more, all knights. The earls with all ceremony 15 served him.

He sat in estate by himself, and on his right hand sat beneath him three bishops, and on his left a duke and two earls.

A discovery

Ben Jonson’s walk from London to Edinburgh has caught the imagination and provoked the curiosity of many since it was first mooted in June 1617, a year before he set off. The journey itself was not the adventure it might have been before the Union of the Crowns, but that a celebrated and, frankly, weighty poet should choose to attempt it on foot was certainly remarkable. Most importantly, the expedition produced the encounter between Jonson and William Drummond recalled in the latter’s notes of his guest’s conversation and opinions, or ‘informations’. The views, jests and anecdotes set down there illuminate Jonson’s poetic principles, his views of his contemporaries, and the account he chose to give of himself. They are particularly beguiling for allowing us to imagine that we are hearing Jonson speak off the record, as it were, and that we can catch his conversational tone even through Drummond’s editorial compressions and sometimes pursed lips. The Informations also provide us with glimpses of the journey itself, including Jonson’s irritation at being followed – mocked, he thought – by Taylor, and his purchase of a pair of shoes at Darlington, which he ‘minded to take back that far again’ (ll.514–15). Such snippets have been combined with a sparse patchwork of other sources to build up an outline picture of Jonson’s walk and his possible motives for undertaking it. We also know from Edinburgh records that Jonson was made a burgess of the city, and that a dinner was held there in his honour in September 1618. In his Pennyles Pilgrimage Taylor records meeting his fellow poet at the house of John Stewart in Leith, while Jonson’s correspondence with Drummond and a dedication inscribed in a book presented to a Scots courtier reveal the names of some of his other hosts. From such diverse and, in some cases, fragmentary sources, scholars such as David Masson, Ian Donaldson and James Knowles have crafted an intriguing picture of the king’s poet, at the height of his fame, comfortably berthed in the capital of James’s first realm in the autumn and winter of 1618–19.

1. Canesco, or the Sleu-dog’s Language

2. Lurg if a Dog, Mellin if a Bitch

He cries first, ‘horse, Lurg,’ then the dog leaps up before him, and there will sit upon the neck of the horse like an ape. Then he bids him ‘ga down sir, and make ye for’d,’ then he goeth piss and shit. Then he bids him cast for a fore gate of a night drift; then he leads him in a line of cord, and as soon as he sees him put down his head, he cries, ‘is that it? Chalice5 that.’ Then he barks. Then he cries, ‘chalice that, the caple, and the cawd arne’ (that is, the horse shoes) that drives the cow with it. ‘Turn tha woo’d. Go where she goes; put her tull a stall, and thous ha’ blood on her. Keep thee with thine awne cow and change her not. Is that she that tha first fand? Keep tha with that and change her not, but go where she10 goes. Shame, thief, he’ll shame’s both. Shame him that would shame thee and me.’

Then when he comes among other beasts he cries, ‘is tat hit, that tha first fand?’ It’s a night drift, and he waps it in the day fewte, that is, when other beasts crosseth the trod. Then when he is troubled with another15 trod, he cries, ‘hast it? Keep thee woo’t then. That’s thine awne bugle, i’faith tha gar’st thy bugle blaw now. Gather’t, gather’t, and go thy way wooth’t, and change not that.’

We set out of London on Wednesday the eight of July and reached that night to Tottenham High Cross, where we lodged at the Bear etc. By the way thither we met with the shake-rag errant and his two doxies etc.

From thence to Waltham, where my Lady Wroth came to my gossip etc. with Mr Ed Kerry, Mr Harbert and5 Mr Powell, etc. There also came to us two Cambridge men, one fellow of Q College called Holmes, and Blitheman Master of Art who etc.

Thence to Hogsdon, where a lunatic woman met us by the way and went dancing before us, and a humorous tinker of whom we could not be rid etc. There also three minstrels thrust themselves upon us, asking whether we would hear a merry song, which proved to be the life and death of my Lord of Essex. This forenoon it thundered and rained, which stopped us from setting forwards till towards the evening. Then we came to Ware, to Mr Cross’s, where Sir Robert Mansell, Sir Arnold Harbert, and Mr Rice came to us and Sir Thomas [sic] subscribed 10 pieces etc. Here my fat hostess commended me with a token. Thence to Puckeridge the Falcon, where we dined, where mine host Holland gave my gossip a forest bill etc. That night we came to Dick of Buntingford’s to bed.

‘Shifting place and air’

In A Jovial Crew, perhaps his last play, Richard Brome presents an extraordinary picture of a gentleman given, in the strongest possible sense, to travel. Springlove is steward to the ‘ancient esquire’ Oldrents, charged with the responsibility of managing the latter’s substantial estate; when we first meet him he is encumbered with books and papers, ready to present to his master ‘a survey of all your rents / Receiv’d, and all such other payments as / Came to my hands since my last audit’ (1.1.123–5). Yet the efficiency with which he has calculated Oldrents’ income and expenditure is not a function of the pleasure he takes in his work; instead he is keen to complete his duties ten days early, around 25 April, so he can pursue his calling – figured in the play as the stirring song of nightingales and cuckoos, to which Springlove responds with a surge of emotion. He wants to travel, as he has been restrained from doing for the last year and a half – in fact, as he says, he needs to travel, and cannot be reasoned out of this drive:

1. ’Tis the season of the year that calls me.

2. What moves her notes provokes my disposition

3. By a more absolute power of nature than

4. Philosophy can render an accompt for.

5. (1.1.166–9)

To Oldrents, rooted as he apparently is in his family lands, this is nothing more than a ‘disease of nature’, a ‘running sore’ or ‘gadding humour’, a worryingly pathogenic element in Springlove’s constitution (1.1.156, 175). But for his steward, this disposition is nothing less than the ‘predominant sway of nature…in me’ (1.1.242–3). It cannot be suppressed or denied, however suspect and unnatural it appears to those, like Oldrents, who wish only to cleave to their home country.

‘As if they came to entertain us…’

One of the most prominent features of the ‘Foot Voyage’ is the writer’s extraordinary effort to note the names and titles of the many people who hosted, escorted or encountered Jonson on the journey. While much of the other detail of the walk is abbreviated or omitted, this comprehensive enumerative effort reaches across the social spectrum, from earls, countesses, lords, ladies, baronets and knights to members of their households, minor gentry, clerics, aldermen, innkeepers and captains – encompassing, in all, more than 300 people. At times, however inclined to thoroughness, he gives up in the face of a crowd: despite mentioning by name many of the people Jonson met at Welbeck, for example, he can note only that ‘diverse gentlemen’ (l.140) dined with them on the Sunday; similarly, in Sir William Anstruther’s house at Doncaster, he records simply that they ‘found a long table full of gentlemen and ladies’ (ll.239–40), while he mentions by name just a few of the ‘diverse’ who came to greet them on their arrival in York (l.298). On occasion, the names recorded are familiar or diminutive, most strikingly in the case of ‘Randy’ – for Randall – Fenwick in Northumberland, suggesting an easy informality in the relationship between Jonson and his companions here. At times, too, the writer is led into error: a would-be host at Buntingford is given the name Sir John Skinner, although investigation indicates that this is more likely to have been Sir John Caesar; at Ware, Sir Robert Mansell is correctly named on his first appearance but rechristened ‘Sir Thomas’ ten words later, probably because this was the name and title of Mansell’s elder brother, a baronet and courtier. While the first slip suggests that Caesar was entirely unknown to the companion, the second might be thought to betray a degree of familiarity on the writer’s part with the circles in which the Mansells moved. Perhaps, though, he was taking his cue from Jonson himself, who certainly knew Sir Robert and was no doubt familiar with his elder brother, too.

The landscape and the way

‘A route’, Catherine Delano-Smith acutely notes, ‘is not a road, nor in itself a physical feature, but a direction, an imaginary line linking a point of departure with a destination. Only its description gives it tangible form in speech or gesture, writing or image.’ Jonson’s walk was a dynamic and active form of engagement with the landscape, giving it a narrative and linear form that is itself not necessarily identical with the shape of the ‘Foot Voyage’ account kept by his companion. To read the landscapes of the walk, and the route it traces through them, requires us to attend to what cultural geography describes as the ‘geographies of mobility’ and ‘choreographies of place’. Making sense of the walk might therefore require us to think not just of the wager journey and the royal progress but also of other narrative genres or motifs and performance practices through which its significance might be – might have been – determined. Prominent among these is the pilgrimage, a term adopted for themselves and their expeditions by Taylor and Lithgow, used of Coryate by some of those who penned commendatory verses for his 1611 Crudities, and which provided the umbrella under which Samuel Purchas gathered his expanding collections of travel narratives in the second and third decades of the seventeenth century. It is a term applied to Jonson’s own adventure both retrospectively by William Drummond (who is perhaps quoting his guest) and, during the journey, by the earl of Rutland. One might also evoke the troubadour tradition of household visitations and a life of performance on the road, the quest structure and adventuring motifs of romance, or pastoral traditions of arboreal sanctuary and escape to the provincial and the regional countryside. All of these ways of understanding the physical and imaginary landscapes through which Jonson and his companion travelled are capable of illuminating aspects of the story of the walk; also relevant, though, is the evocation of more prosaic, material and indeed constructed environments, not least the bricks and mortar of country estates or of inns and hostelries in market towns, and the deer parks, pales and working ‘taskscapes’ that defined much of the countryside.