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

Ben Jonson, who was with Shakespeare and Marlowe one of three principal playwrights of his age, was also one of its most original and influential poets. Known best for the country house poem ‘To Penshurst’ and his moving elegy ‘On my First Son’, his work inspired the whole generation of seventeenth-century poets who declared themselves the ‘Sons of Ben’. This edition brings his three major verse publications, Epigrams (1616), The Forest (1616), and Underwood (1641) together with his large body of uncollected poems to create the largest collection of Jonson’s verse that has been published. It thus gives readers a comprehensive view of the wide range of his achievement, from satirical epigrams through graceful lyrics to tender epitaphs. Though he is often seen as the preeminent English poet of the plain style, Jonson employed a wealth of topical and classical allusion and a compressed syntax which mean his poetry can require as much annotation for the modern reader as that of his friend John Donne. This edition not only provides comprehensive explanation and contextualization aimed at student and non-specialist readers alike, but presents the poems in a modern spelling and punctuation that brings Jonson’s poetry to life.

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.

project that self into the posterity he imagines, he must refine and adapt his strategies.

This edition offers a modernized text based on a fresh collation of the 1631-1640 folio, together with an account of the play's printing history, a full commentary which sets Jonson's art in its intellectual and social context, and an introduction which seeks to do justice to the play's braod scope and to suggest something of its theatrical potential.