Re-Presenting Ben Jonson

Text, History, Performance

Martin Butler

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 1999
• Print ISBN: 9780333720417
• eBook ISBN: 9780230376724
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Work on Ben Jonson has long been dominated by the 11-volume Oxford text of his Works , edited by C.H. Herford, Percy Simpson and Evelyn Simpson (1925-52). In this monumental edition, Jonson seems a remote and forbidding figure, an author of formidable learning and literariness. This collection of essays by twelve leading scholars, editors, historians and bibliographers explores ways in which modern understanding of Jonson's texts has undermined the emphasis of the Oxford edition, and generated a Jonson whose Works and career look quite different. Addressing the competing needs of future readers, teachers and performers, it asks how this reconceptualized Jonson might best be transmitted into the next century. The volume also includes a new Jonson text, The Entertainment at Britain's Burse , written in 1609 to celebrate the royal opening of the Earl of Salisbury's commercial development in the Strand. Discovered in 1996, it is the most significant addition to Jonson's canon this century, and is here printed for the first time.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Plates
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Prefatory Note
• 1 Introduction: from from Workes to Texts
• 2 Why Re-edit Herford and Simpson?
• 3 The Printing, Proofing and Press-Correction of Ben Jonson's Folio Workes
• 4 Forms of Authority in the Early Texts of Every Man Out of His Humour
• 5 'To Behold the Scene Full': Seeing and Judging in Every Man Out of His Humour
• 6 Personal Material: Jonson and Book-burning
• 7 Jonson's Jonson’s Entertainment at Britain’s Burse
• 8 Politics in Catiline: Jonson and his Sources
• 9 Zeal-of- the-Land Busy Restored
• 10 The Swan Song of the Stage Historian
• 11 Jonsonian Chronology and the Styles of Tale of a Tub
• 12 Jonsonian Allusions
• Index