Ben Jonson

Ben Jonson

Author: Richard Dutton

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-07-21

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 1317893751

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Interest in Ben Jonson is higher today than at any time since his death. This new collection offers detailed readings of all the major plays - Volpone, Epicene, The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair - and the poems. It also provides significant insights into the court masques and the later plays which have only recently been rediscovered as genuinely engaging stage pieces.


Ben Jonson: Authority: Criticism

Ben Jonson: Authority: Criticism

Author: R. Dutton

Publisher: Springer

Published: 1996-03-27

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 023037249X

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Ben Jonson: Authority: Criticism is the first book-length study of Jonson's literary criticism, and examines the ways that criticism defines his unprecedented role as a professional author. Each chapter explores a different facet: 'The Lone Wolf' looks at Jonson's role in creating a critical discourse to respond to a new literary market-place; 'Poet and Critic' explores the relationship between his 'creative' and 'critical' writing; 'Poet and State' traces his accommodations as an author with censorship and other forms of authority; 'The Laws of Poetry' relates his appeals to classical precedent to his insecurity in a world where literary conditions were very different from those of ancient Greece and Rome; 'Jonson and Shakespeare' examines the old supposed rivalry as evidence of competing definitions of authorship. Throughout Richard Dutton suggests how Jonson's criticism set the terms for the profession of letters in England for more than a century. Finally an appendix provides a representative selection of Jonson's critical work.


Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets

Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets

Author: Hugh Maclean

Publisher: W W Norton & Company Incorporated

Published: 1974

Total Pages: 591

ISBN-13: 9780393093087

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This volume offers an abundant and representative selection of the verse of Ben Jonson and the Cavalier poets.


The Cambridge Companion to Ben Jonson

The Cambridge Companion to Ben Jonson

Author: Richard Harp

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2000-11-30

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 9780521646789

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An accessible, up-to-date introduction to the life and works of poet and dramatist Ben Jonson.


Inventing the Critic in Renaissance England

Inventing the Critic in Renaissance England

Author: William M. Russell

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2020-09-21

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 1644531925

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The turn of the seventeenth century was an important moment in the history of English criticism. In a series of pioneering works of rhetoric and poetics, writers such as Philip Sidney, George Puttenham, and Ben Jonson laid the foundations of critical discourse in English, and the English word "critic" began, for the first time, to suggest expertise in literary judgment. Yet the conspicuously ambivalent attitude of these critics toward criticism—and the persistent fear that they would be misunderstood, marginalized, scapegoated, or otherwise "branded with the dignity of a critic"—suggests that the position of the critic in this period was uncertain. In Inventing the Critic in Renaissance England, William Russell reveals that the critics of the English Renaissance did not passively absorb their practice from Continental and classical sources but actively invented it in response to a confluence of social and intellectual factors. Distributed for UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE PRESS


Ben Jonson

Ben Jonson

Author: David Riggs

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1989-01-01

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 0674255879

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Ben Jonson's contemporaries admired him above all other playwrights and poets of the English Renaissance. He was the “great refiner” who alchemized the bleakest aspects of everyday life into brilliant images of folly and deceit. He was also a celebrated reprobate and an ambitious entrepreneur. David Riggs illuminates every facet of this extraordinary career, giving us the first major biography of Jonson in over sixty years. The story of Jonson's life provides a broad view of the literary procession in early modern England and the milieu in which Elizabethan drama was produced. Beginning as a journeyman actor, Jonson was soon a novice playwright; his first important play was staged in 1598, with Shakespeare in the cast. He was by turns the self-styled leader of a literary elite, a writer of court masques, the first dramatist to publish his own Works, a royal pensioner, and a genteel poet. As Jonson transformed himself from an artisan into a gentleman, his need to transcend his class origins led him to murder, to his notorious quarrels with Thomas Dekker, John Marston, and Inigo Jones, and to his lifelong rivalry with Shakespeare. Riggs traces the roots of Jonson's aggressiveness back to the turmoil of his childhood and adolescence. He offers new and convincing accounts of Jonson's latent hostility toward his bricklayer stepfather, his reckless marriage to Anne Lewis, and his conflicted relationships with his children. This vivid portrait synthesizes six decades of scholarship and new historical evidence. Sixty halftones beautifully illustrate the story and capture the spirit of the age. With Riggs' original interpretations of Jonson's masterpieces and lesser known works, Ben Jonson: A Life will prove the standard account of this complex man's life and works for many years to come.