War & Peace Quote by Ben Jonson

Art doesn’t need a censor when it can be starved by something duller: not hatred, but unknowing. Ben Jonson’s line has the brisk snap of a courtroom charge. “Hath” gives it biblical weight, and “enemy” frames the relationship as active conflict, not mere absence. Ignorance isn’t a neutral condition here; it’s an aggressor that corrodes art’s ability to be seen, funded, or even recognized as art.

Jonson is writing from a world where “art” still carried the older sense of craft and disciplined technique, not just personal expression. That matters. His target isn’t simply the uneducated public, but the entire ecology that pretends talent can flourish without literacy, training, and standards: patrons who can’t tell skill from novelty, audiences content with spectacle, rivals who benefit when evaluation collapses. The subtext is protective and a little prickly: art’s value depends on a shared competence, and that competence must be cultivated.

There’s also a political undertow. In Jacobean England, theatre and poetry lived close to power and its anxieties; misunderstanding could become moral panic, and moral panic could become regulation. Ignorance, then, isn’t just bad taste. It’s the precondition for scapegoating art as frivolous or dangerous.

The line works because it refuses romantic consolation. Jonson doesn’t claim art will “speak for itself.” He implies it needs defenders: readers, critics, teachers, patrons with discernment. Without that, the enemy wins quietly, by lowering the lights until nothing looks worth seeing.