Editing Ben Jonson (section)

==His work==
{{more citations needed section|date=August 2017}}<!--only one citation in two sections-->

===Drama===
Apart from two tragedies, ''[[Sejanus (play)|Sejanus]]'' and ''[[Catiline: His Conspiracy|Catiline]]'', that largely failed to impress Renaissance audiences, Jonson's work for the public theatres was in comedy. These plays vary in some respects. The minor early plays, particularly those written for [[boy player]]s, present somewhat looser plots and less-developed characters than those written later, for adult companies. Already in the plays which were his salvos in the Poets' War, he displays the keen eye for absurdity and hypocrisy that marks his best-known plays; in these early efforts, however, the plot mostly takes second place to a variety of incident and comic set-pieces. They are, also, notably ill-tempered. [[Thomas Davies (bookseller)|Thomas Davies]] called ''Poetaster'' "a contemptible mixture of the serio-comic, where the names of [[Augustus Caesar]], [[Maecenas]], [[Virgil]], [[Horace]], [[Ovid]] and [[Tibullus]], are all sacrificed upon the altar of private resentment". Another early comedy in a different vein, ''[[The Case is Altered]]'', is markedly similar to Shakespeare's romantic comedies in its foreign setting, emphasis on genial wit and love-plot. Henslowe's diary indicates that Jonson had a hand in numerous other plays, including many in genres such as English history with which he is not otherwise associated.

The comedies of his middle career, from ''[[Eastward Hoe]]'' to ''[[The Devil Is an Ass]]'' are for the most part [[city comedy]], with a London setting, themes of trickery and money, and a distinct moral ambiguity, despite Jonson's professed aim in the Prologue to ''[[Volpone]]'' to "mix profit with your pleasure". His late plays or "[[wikt:dotage|dotages]]", particularly ''[[The Magnetic Lady]]'' and ''[[The Sad Shepherd]]'', exhibit signs of an accommodation with the romantic tendencies of [[English Renaissance theatre|Elizabethan comedy]].

Within this general progression, however, Jonson's comic style remained constant and easily recognisable. He announces his programme in the prologue to the [[folio (printing)|folio]] version of ''[[Every Man in His Humour]]'': he promises to represent "deeds, and language, such as men do use". He planned to write comedies that revived the classical premises of Elizabethan dramatic theory—or rather, since all but the loosest English comedies could claim some descent from [[Plautus]] and [[Terence]], he intended to apply those premises with rigour.<ref>Doran, 120ff.</ref> This commitment entailed negations: after ''The Case is Altered'', Jonson eschewed distant locations, noble characters, romantic plots and other staples of Elizabethan comedy, focusing instead on the satiric and realistic inheritance of [[new comedy]]. He set his plays in contemporary settings, peopled them with recognisable types, and set them to actions that, if not strictly realistic, involved everyday motives such as greed and [[jealousy]]. In accordance with the temper of his age, he was often so broad in his characterisation that many of his most famous scenes border on the [[farce|farcical]] (as [[William Congreve]], for example, judged ''Epicoene''). He was more diligent in adhering to the [[classical unities]] than many of his peers—although as [[Margaret Cavendish]] noted, the unity of action in the major comedies was rather compromised by Jonson's abundance of incident. To this classical model, Jonson applied the two features of his style which save his classical imitations from mere pedantry: the vividness with which he depicted the lives of his characters and the intricacy of his plots. Coleridge, for instance, claimed that ''[[The Alchemist (play)|The Alchemist]]'' had one of the three most perfect plots in literature.

===Poetry===
[[File:Houghton MS Lowell Autograph File 185, Jonson.jpg|thumb|"Epitaph for Cecilia Bulstrode" manuscript, 1609]]
Jonson's poetry, like his drama, is informed by his classical learning. Some of his better-known poems are close translations of Greek or Roman models; all display the careful attention to form and style that often came naturally to those trained in classics in the [[Renaissance humanism|humanist]] manner. Jonson largely avoided the debates about rhyme and meter that had consumed Elizabethan classicists such as [[Thomas Campion]] and [[Gabriel Harvey]]. Accepting both rhyme and stress, Jonson used them to mimic the classical qualities of simplicity, restraint and precision.

"Epigrams" (published in the 1616 folio) is an entry in a genre that was popular among late-Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences, although Jonson was perhaps the only poet of his time to work in its full classical range. The epigrams explore various attitudes, most from the satiric stock of the day: complaints against women, courtiers and spies abound. The condemnatory poems are short and anonymous; Jonson's epigrams of praise, including a famous poem to Camden and lines to Lucy Harington, are longer and are mostly addressed to specific individuals. Although it is included among the epigrams, "[[On My First Sonne]]" is neither satirical nor very short; the poem, intensely personal and deeply felt, typifies a genre that would come to be called "lyric poetry." It is possible that the spelling of 'son' as 'Sonne' is meant to allude to the [[sonnet]] form, with which it shares some features. A few other so-called epigrams share this quality. Jonson's poems of "The Forest" also appeared in the first folio. Most of the fifteen poems are addressed to Jonson's aristocratic supporters, but the most famous are his [[Country house poem|country-house poem]] "To Penshurst" and the poem "[[To Celia]]" ("Come, my Celia, let us prove") that appears also in ''[[Volpone]]''.

''Underwood'', published in the expanded folio of 1640, is a larger and more heterogeneous group of poems. It contains ''[[A Celebration of Charis]]'', Jonson's most extended effort at love poetry; various religious pieces; [[Encomium|encomiastic poems]] including the poem to Shakespeare and a sonnet on [[Mary Wroth]]; the ''Execration against Vulcan''<ref>Rickard, Jane. "Jonson's Imaginary Library: "An Execration upon Vulcan" and Its Intertexts." ''Huntington Library Quarterly'' 85, no. 3 (2022): 447-470.</ref> and others. The 1640 volume also contains three elegies which have often been ascribed to Donne (one of them appeared in Donne's posthumous collected poems).