Poet and Critic

Abstract

One of the most striking features of Jonson’s career, which has a direct bearing on the criticism he wrote, is the sheer variety of forms of writing to which he turned his hand, and the differing audiences and publishing contexts which these entailed. He was a writer of plays (among which he would distinguish the forms of comedy, comical satire, tragedy and pastoral), of masques and other entertainments commissioned by royal, aristocratic and civic patrons; he wrote poetry which, despite a marked statistical preference for iambic pentameter rhyming couplets (‘he detesteth all other rhymes’, Drummond, 3), is in a far wider range of forms than a casual reader might suppose — love lyrics and epigrams, verse epistles and odes, eulogies and mock-heroics — and some of these (notably the Pindaric ode) were only recent importations into English; he wrote a history of Henry V, lost in the 1623 fire, translated Horace’s Ars Poetica, and planned ‘an epic poem, entitled Heroologia, of the worthies of his country roused by fame’ and ‘A Discovery’ of his ‘foot pilgrimage’, which would have been a topographical poem about Scotland (Drummond, 1–3, 347–9), though neither of these seems to have come to fruition; he kept a commonplace book, Timber, or Discoveries, which there are signs that he was reworking for publication in the later part of his life, and compiled An English Grammar.