Life & Wisdom Quote by Ben Jonson

He’s not just dunking on bad bands; he’s diagnosing a social nuisance. Jonson’s line lands like a stage whisper from someone trapped at a banquet while the hired consort keeps noodling. Calling it a "common disease" turns musicians into a kind of contagious ailment: once they start, they can’t stop, and the suffering spreads to everyone within earshot. The comic cruelty is the point. Jonson frames the problem as a failure of "mean" - measure, moderation, proportion - a word that matters in a culture obsessed with order, decorum, and the right length of a thing. Music, the art of timing, is accused of having none.

The subtext is about power disguised as entertainment. Musicians in Jonson’s world often occupy a liminal status: essential to courtly display, yet socially subordinate, paid to fill space. "To be entreated" suggests the audience has to beg for basic mercy, as if the performers mistake endurance for excellence and attention for consent. That’s a recognizable dynamic: the performer’s hunger for the moment overriding the room’s collective will.

Context sharpens the barb. Jonson wrote for and against the culture of court masques and public theater, where music was both prestige and padding. The jab isn’t anti-music so much as anti-self-indulgence. He’s defending restraint as a moral and aesthetic virtue: the hardest art isn’t playing; it’s knowing when to begin, and having the grace to end.