Love & Passion Quote by Ben Jonson

A phrase like "the very womb and bed of enormity" doesn’t just accuse; it anatomizes corruption as something domesticated, reproductive, and almost cozy. Ben Jonson reaches for the most intimate furniture of life - the place where bodies begin and where they collapse at night - and turns it into an indictment. Enormity here isn’t mere bigness; it’s moral monstrosity, wrongdoing swollen past the point of private sin into a public condition. By calling it a womb, Jonson suggests that vice isn’t accidental or episodic but generative: it produces more of itself, like an institution breeding its next generation. By calling it a bed, he adds the insinuation of complicity and comfort: people aren’t only born into this ugliness, they lie down with it willingly.

That double image is classic Jonson: crisp, bodily, slightly repellent, built to land onstage with a thud. In the Jacobean world Jonson inhabited - a culture of court patronage, performative piety, and thriving urban scams - "enormity" was often less a shocking aberration than a system with routines. The line’s specific intent is to locate a source, not just a symptom: the room where excess becomes normal. Subtext: if wickedness has a nursery and a mattress, then society has already made space for it. The metaphor quietly denies the audience the comfort of treating evil as a stranger; it’s living in the house.