Ben Jonson and the culture of his time

Ben Jonson (1572-1637) is arguably the most important English Renaissance writer after Shakespeare. He left a large and varied body of works (seventeen plays, three dozen court entertainments, the equivalent of four volumes of verse, prose works, personal letters, and extensive marginalia), and maintained friendships with many of the leading intellectuals and writers of his time. His career intersects with the key social, cultural and political changes of the period. As a playwright, he was involved in the theatrical marketplace and the world of urban commerce, yet he was a keen critic of both the contemporary stage and city. As a court poet and masque writer, he worked for the aristocracy and the crown, ending his life as de facto poet laureate, yet he was deeply ambivalent about the world of power. And as man of letters, he endeavoured to create his own intellectual space, surrounding himself with a tribe of 'sons' and using the new medium of print publication to develop a model of ownership of his own texts which was profoundly influential for those who succeeded or imitated him. This project will re-evaluate Jonson in relation to these complex and overlapping institutional changes, exploring his life and works as a response to the distinctive opportunities and tensions of early modern England. Additionally, it will pay special attention to the ways in which Jonson has been remembered and reconstructed as a literary figure in later times.

The project is organized around eight core issues, each of which has a chapter and takes up an established or emerging topic in early modern studies. The first two concern Jonson's self-fashioning: the book will study the image Jonson sought to project of himself as a writer (using analysis of his portraiture as well as his writing), and will look at the way that he sustained this image in his meticulous presentation of his printed texts (the author as his own editor) and in the circulation of his manuscripts (Jonson has never been adequately considered as a poet for manuscript). The next two themes are the interlinked zones of politics and religion. Drawing on the current and highly volatile historiography on the court and on Catholicism, the study will explore Jonson's role as aspiring but not always successful counsellor of princes, and the intellectual and artistic consequences of his religious dissent (he was a Catholic for twelve crucial years). A reading of the satirical comedies of London life will situate Jonson as a writer who charted the emergence of the early modern urban self-consciousness; and a study of his problematic late writings will reinterpret their peculiarities as a response to the social and cultural changes leading towards the civil war. Finally, two chapters address Jonson's influence and after-life: an account of Jonson's at times testy relationships with contemporary intellectuals and with the 'Sons of Ben', those poets who positioned themselves as his literary heirs; and an analysis of the stage traditions, adaptations, anecdotes and memories that proliferated after his death, including commentary on some rarely discussed operatic and film versions of his plays.

This study will range widely across the plays, poetry, masques, and prose, and will draw extensively on work arising from the forthcoming Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson (eds. M. Butler, D. Bevington and I. Donaldson). It aims to draw together neglected aspects of his works, and to accommodate timely perspectives newly emerging in historiography, bibliography, and book history. It will foreground Jonson's intellectual relationships with scholars such as Selden, Camden and Cotton, and the response of his works to the ideological pressure points of pre-civil war England. It will also explore the way that the modern reception (and sometimes neglect) of Jonson has been conditioned by the myths about him that grew up after his death.

The primary beneficiaries of this research will be the academic community, particularly academics interested in the literature, history and theatre of the English Renaissance, as the book engages with a series of key topics in current research. Jonson is one of the key figures in academic work on the period, and there will be a large professional audience for this material both from within English literary studies and from the disciplines of political and intellectual history, theatre studies, and bibliography, where he is also of major interest. Additionally, the monograph will develop an overview of a major writer that will be relevant to undergraduate and graduate students working on late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth century literature. The book will consolidate and develop new work on Jonson's texts, intellectual relationships, stage history and afterlife. It will feed into the pedagogical needs of the student community, for it will be the first book to assimilate the new work shortly to appear in the Cambridge Edition of Ben Jonson, and to focus on what have emerged in the course of this edition as the aspects of his work which are being most substantively redrawn.

Beyond the academic world, this monograph is part of a timely process of re-evaluation of one of the most important English dramatists and poets. Jonson is a writer with a significant presence within English literature and history, the author of several plays which have had an enduring life in the theatre, and a national and international profile as (arguably) Shakespeare's most famous literary associate. Jonson will have a high profile in 2012, when it is expected that the Cambridge edition will see print. The impact of the edition will be radical, as it completely revises the entire canon, and its appearance is eagerly awaited across the field. My book will be read alongside the new edition, and will benefit from the launch events, conferences and exhibitions which are being organized alongside it. Particularly, I am working on a Jonson exhibition to be mounted jointly by the Folger Shakespeare Library (Washington DC) and the Huntington Library (San Marino, California) which, drawing on rare books, original manuscripts and portraits, will present Jonson in a serious but accessible way to the wider public.

Undoubtedly the book will contribute in the long term to the contemporary retrieval of Jonson in the theatre. There has been an upsurge of Jonson revivals in recent years, especially by the Royal Shakespeare Company, which has staged almost half the canon. I have worked with the RSC on some of these, and expect that the book will provide a stimulus for the further exploration of Jonson as a writer for performance.