Ben Jonson, Renaissance Dramatist Paperback - 2008

From the rear cover

Renaissance Dramatists Series Editor, Sean McEvoy An invaluable resource for all students of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, each volume in the series provides an authoritative and up-to-date survey of a major dramatist's work with a focus on the plays in performance on stage and screen. Each guide provides: * An informative account of the writer's entire dramatic output, with an emphasis on those plays most frequently studied at university, college and school. * Detailed and relevant contextual information on history, culture, politics and biography. * A lucid survey of important recent criticism. * Original critical readings of the major plays. The first four volumes in the series deal with the plays of Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Middleton and John Webster. Ben Jonson, Renaissance Dramatist Sean McEvoy This new guide to the English renaissance's most erudite and yet most street-wise dramatist strongly asserts the theatrical brilliance of his greatest plays in performance, then and now. It traces the sources of that phenomenon to Jonson's vision of himself as a poet in the Roman tradition, and to his commitment to the sane and progressive ideals of humanism in a city where a rampant free-market and political authoritarianism made life conflicted, dangerous, and yet darkly, hilariously absurd. In his best plays, all of these forces are crafted into formal structures glittering with wit and provocation. Ben Jonson, Renaissance Dramatist integrates all of Jonson's major plays into the milieu of the turbulent years which produced them, and analyses the way each work examines the issues and challenges of those years: money, power, sex, crime, identity, gender, the theatre itself. It offers a lucid guide to the competing critical views of a playwright who is far more than the obverse of his friend and rival William Shakespeare, and it explains in detail how the undoubted power and energy of these plays in modern performance s