New Directions in Jonson Scholarship

Abstract

Ben Jonson has seen a surge of popularity among early modern critics in the last forty years, and the zeal shows no sign of abating. Between the 2012 publication of The Cambridge Works of Ben Jonson and a number of excellent monographs on Jonson’s work on such diverse topics as the dramatist’s classism, his city comedies, and his poetry and poetics, Jonson scholarship is as vital as ever. Among the recent critical work on Jonson are Ian Donaldson’s lively Ben Jonson: A Life, Victoria Moul’s masterful Jonson, Horace, and the Classical Tradition, A.D. Cousins and Alison V. Scott’s Ben Jonson and the Politics of Genre, and Matthew Steggle’s Volpone: A Critical Guide. These works reveal Jonson criticism’s current preoccupation with the author’s investment in politics, in literary fame, and in the role art plays in both. While exploring Jonson’s concern with fame and politics, Moul, Cousins, and Scott also return to a possibility that has long troubled Jonson scholarship — the suspicion that Jonson, a court poet dependent on the patronage of figures like William Camden, the Sidneys, Sir Robert Cecil, and James I, at times played the role of sycophant, flattering men (like Cecil) whose political actions and religious intolerance he elsewhere condemned.1 Both books reveal Jonson’s wariness of being charged with flattery in his court poetry, masques, and plays, and work through Jonson’s process of negotiating his economic dependency and political ideals. Although their methods and focus differ, they reach a similar conclusion: Jonson’s political and artistic