This study considers how Jonson threaded his political views into the various literary genres in which he wrote. Renowned scholars offer perspectives on many of Jonson's major works, and together they reassess his political life in Jacobean and Caroline Britain.

While Ben Jonson's political visions have been well documented, this is the first study to consider how he threaded his views into the various literary genres in which he wrote. For Jonson, these genres were interactive and mutually affirming, necessary f.

Explores the construction of Jonson's multifaceted reputation and shifting legacy from his own time to the present.

This collection highlights exciting new areas of research related to Ben Jonson, including book history, social history and cultural geography.

This collection of multi-authored essays not only refashions and revises critical understandings of the early modern dramatist Ben Jonson and his canon of work, but is also self-reflexive about the process. It includes original essays by both established and emergent Jonson scholars, and employs materialist, feminist and queer theory in the production of its readings of Jonsonian playtexts and masques, familiar and otherwise. It is intended to encourage new approaches by students to this central figure from the Renaissance.

In the first edition of this now-classic text, Richard Peterson offered an important revaluation of the poetry of Ben Jonson and a new appreciation of the way in which the classical doctrine of imitation-the creative use of the thoughts and words of predecessors-permeates and shapes Jonson's critical ideas and his work as a whole. The publication of the original book in 1981 led to a reinterpretation of the poems and a coherent view of Jonson's philosophy; the resulting portrait of Jonson served as a corrective to earlier views based primarily on the satiric poems and plays. This second edition of Imitation and Praise in the Poems of Ben Jonson makes Peterson's important scholarship available to a new generation of scholars and students.

King James VI and I's extensive publications and the responses they met played a key role in the literary culture of Jacobean England. This book is the first sustained study of how James's subjects commented upon, appropriated and reworked these royal writings. Jane Rickard highlights the vitality of such responses across genres - including poetry, court masque, sermon, polemic and drama - and in the different media of performance, manuscript and print. The book focuses in particular on Jonson, Donne and Shakespeare, arguing that these major authors responded in illuminatingly contrasting ways to James's claims as an author-king, made especially creative uses of the opportunities that his publications afforded and helped to inspire some of what the King in turn wrote. Their literary responses reveal that royal writing enabled a significant reimagining of the relationship between ruler and ruled. This volume will interest researchers and advanced students of Renaissance literature and history.