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Jacobean age. Ben Jonson (born June 11?, 1572, London, England—died August 6, 1637, London) was an English Stuart dramatist, lyric poet, and literary critic. He is generally regarded as the second most important English dramatist, after William Shakespeare, during the reign of James I. Among his major plays are the comedies Every Man in His ...
- Clifford Leech
The majority of poems which he adds to the canon had appeared in print before: ‘Somerset Verses’, for instance, had first been noticed in Notes and Queries 1 st Series 5 (1852), 193-4 and had been printed by Bell in 1856 , while Collier’s discovery of Jonson’s autograph of ‘Happier Life’ (first printed in Collier, 1841 Bib. # 4542], 54) enabled Cunningham to offer that poem for the ...
A consensus formed: Jonson was the first English poet to understand classical precepts with any accuracy, and he was the first to apply those precepts successfully to contemporary life. But there were also more negative spins on Jonson's learned art; for instance, in the 1750s, Edward Young casually remarked on the way in which Jonson's learning worked, like Samson's strength, to his own ...
Most 19th-century critics agreed with the assessment of John Addington Symonds that the “higher gifts of poetry, with which Shakespeare—‘nature’s child’—was so richly endowed, are almost absolutely wanting in Ben Jonson.” T.S. Eliot, writing in 1919, focused attention on Jonson’s reputation as “the most deadly kind that can be ...
In the wake of Montaigne, these short prose pieces took off: Francis Bacon became the first person to publish essays in English (1597), while Shakespeare’s contemporary, Ben Jonson, gave us the first recorded use of the word ‘essayist’ (1609).
Benjamin Jonson was born on 11 June 1572, probably in or near London. He was of Scottish descent, and retained a keen interest in the country of his forebears. ‘His grandfather came from Carlisle, and he thought from Annandale to it; he served King Henry VIII, and was a gentleman’, noted the Scottish poet William Drummond of Hawthornden ...
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Ben Jonson - Plays, Poetry, Achievement: Ben Jonson occupies by common consent the second place among English dramatists of the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. He was a man of contraries. For “twelve years a papist,” he was also—in fact though not in title—Protestant England’s first poet laureate. His major comedies express a strong distaste for the world in which he lived and a ...
