Critical Essays on Ben Jonson

Critical Essays on Ben Jonson
Author: Robert N. Watson
Publisher: Macmillan Reference USA
Total Pages: 298
Release: 1997
Genre:
ISBN:

Pairs early critical commentaries with modern interpretive responses in an attempt to resurrect Jonson (1573-1637) from his entombment in classical Renaissance comedy. Some of the 40 perspectives consider his poetry and masques, but most focus on the problematics of his person and his responses to antagonists in the literary and social wars. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Ben Jonson

Ben Jonson
Author: Richard Dutton
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2014-07-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317893751

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

Ben Jonson
Author: Ian Donaldson
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 554
Release: 2012-02-20
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0191636797

Ben Jonson was the greatest of Shakespeare's contemporaries. In the century following his death he was seen by many as the finest of all English writers, living or dead. His fame rested not only on the numerous plays he had written for the theatre, but on his achievements over three decades as principal masque-writer to the early Stuart court, where he had worked in creative, and often stormy, collaboration with Inigo Jones. One of the most accomplished poets of the age, he had become - in fact if not in title - the first Poet Laureate in England. Jonson's life was full of drama. Serving in the Low Countries as a young man, he overcame a Spanish adversary in single combat in full view of both the armies. His early satirical play, The Isle of Dogs, landed him in prison, and brought all theatrical activity in London to a temporary — and very nearly to a permanent — standstill. He was 'almost at the gallows' for killing a fellow actor after a quarrel, and converted to Catholicism while awaiting execution. He supped with the Gunpowder conspirators on the eve of their planned coup at Westminster. After satirizing the Scots in Eastward Ho! he was imprisoned again; and throughout his career was repeatedly interrogated about plays and poems thought to contain seditious or slanderous material. In his middle years, twenty stone in weight, he walked to Scotland and back, seemingly partly to fulfil a wager, and partly to see the land of his forebears. He travelled in Europe as tutor to the mischievous son of Sir Walter Ralegh, who 'caused him to be drunken and dead drunk' and wheeled provocatively through the streets of Paris. During his later years he presided over a sociable club in the Apollo Room in Fleet Street, mixed with the most learned scholars of his day, and viewed with keen interest the political, religious, and scientific controversies of the day. Ian Donaldson's new biography draws on freshly discovered writings by and about Ben Jonson, and locates his work within the social and intellectual contexts of his time. Jonson emerges from this study as a more complex and volatile character than his own self-declarations (and much modern scholarship) would allow, and as a writer whose work strikingly foresees - and at times pre-emptively satirizes - the modern age.

Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets

Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets
Author: Hugh Maclean
Publisher: W W Norton & Company Incorporated
Total Pages: 591
Release: 1974
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780393093087

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

Ben Jonson in Context

Ben Jonson in Context
Author: Julie Sanders
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2010-06-03
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0521895715

This collection highlights exciting new areas of research related to Ben Jonson, including book history, social history and cultural geography.

The Sacred Wood

The Sacred Wood
Author: Thomas Stearns Eliot
Publisher:
Total Pages: 184
Release: 1921
Genre: Criticism
ISBN:

Ben Jonson's Plays and Masques

Ben Jonson's Plays and Masques
Author: Ben Jonson
Publisher: New York : Norton
Total Pages: 502
Release: 1979
Genre: Masques
ISBN: 9780393090352

This collection features three of Jonson's masterpieces: Volpone, Epicoene, and The Alchemist.

The Complete Critical Guide to Ben Jonson

The Complete Critical Guide to Ben Jonson
Author: James Loxley
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2002
Genre: Jonson
ISBN: 0415222273

This volume offers the broadest range of information on Jonson and his works, from background on contexts to details of recent interpretations of his plays.

Inventing the Critic in Renaissance England

Inventing the Critic in Renaissance England
Author: William M. Russell
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2020-09-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1644531925

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