Since he is quite appropriately frank about himself, let me add that one of my warmest memories of Joe Gold goes back to a learned conference at which, instead of purveying official Lit Crit, he held a roomful spellbound and breathless by reading Dickens to us aloud. Much the same kind of pleasure and illumination is to be had from this book, as many readers (and astonished browsers, one hopes) have no doubt discovered for themselves. Spread the word. M i c h a e l H O E N Y A N S K Y / Brock University Jennifer Brady and W.H. Herendeen, Ben Jonson’s 1616 Folio (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1991). 221. $35.00 (U.S.) This collection of essays claims to offer a radical redefinition of Jonson’s art as fluid, his range and ordering of texts in the 1616 Folio contingent, marginal, and interdependent. In the attempt to counter “the more static, abstracted view of individual works that critics have generally held” (Intro duction, 14), the editors of this new critical volume have selected essays that reexamine the Folio as historical text, physical monument, literary/generic experiment, social signifier, and mid-career milestone. The common concern of the volume is its reassessment of Jonson’s classicism as a vital and inde pendent neoclassicism that comments more on the fluctuating early-modern values of Renaissance England than on idealizations of ancient Rome. The first pair of essays deal with aspects of the physical text. Kevin J. Donovan questions the authority of the Folio texts of individual works, and argues vigorously and convincingly for a reevaluation of quarto texts as authoritative for certain plays and masques. In disputing the preeminence of the Folio texts in Herford and Simpson’s 11-volume Ben Jonson, and in effect calling for a new and definitive edition of Jonson that takes recent bibliographic opinion into account (to which I can only add “Hear, hear!” ), Donovan clarifies the real and unique importance of the 1616 Folio: not as a monument to Jonson’s proofreading skills, but as a deliberate selection of works that invite reinterpretation of the meaning and reputation of liter ary/dramatic texts and their writers. W.H. Herendeen sets the pace in the second essay for such a reinterpretation by recognizing that the dedications of individual works in the Folio pay off past debts, rather than scrounge for new or continued patronage. He represents Jonsonian dedications as pro gressive declarations of the authority and independence of the poet himself, pointing to the fact that no dedication appears with the masques in the final 238 segment of the volume, nor at the head of the entire Folio itself, a clear sign that Jonson considered all debts paid in full, and all credit for the works his volume contains accruing to the artist alone. The next two essays focus on the drama from quasi-political perspectives. Katherine Maus describes the “satiric and ideal economies” Jonson creates in the Folio, arguing that the insatiable competitiveness among Jonson’s have and have-not materialists in the reductive world of his plays should not obscure the alternative transcendent economy of shared abundance Jonson celebrates in the poetry and masques. Maus is dazzling in her survey of supply and demand in the comedies, but in finally identifying Jonson with a Roman stoicism that finds merit only in hard-won results, she loses her economic balance to fall in with Edmund Wilson’s morose “anal-retentive” Jonson whose “costive” labour alone stamps his artistic production as gen uine. William Blissett’s discussion of the “Romanity” of three of the nine plays in the Folio (Poetaster, Sejanus, Catiline) takes a different tack in considering how far a classical education in Roman history, language, and literature permeates the Renaissance and modern consciousness. Blissett perhaps over-Romanizes by declaring that Jonson showed no similar interest in British history. What of the lost Robert II, those unidentified tragedies for which Francis Meres praised him, or indeed the increasingly explicit Englishness of the other six plays in the Folio? Of the two essays on the poetry, only Stella Revard continues the de bate on...