Ben Jonson and Posterity: Reception, Reputation, Legacy

Description

Bringing together leading Jonson scholars, Ben Jonson and Posterity provides new insights into this remarkable writer's reception and legacy over four centuries. Jonson was recognised as the outstanding English writer of his day and has had a powerful influence on later generations, yet his reputation is one of the most multifaceted and conflicted for any writer of the early modern period. The volume brings together multiple critical perspectives, addressing book history, the practice of reading, theatrical influence and adaptation, the history of performance, cultural representation in portraiture, film, fiction, and anecdotes to interrogate Jonson's 'myth'. The collection will be of great interest to all Jonson scholars, as well as having a wider appeal among early modern literary scholars, theatre historians, and scholars interested in intertextuality and reception from the Renaissance to the present day.

Martin Butler is Professor of English Renaissance Drama at the University of Leeds. He is one of the general editors of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, 7 volume set (Cambridge, 2012). His publications include The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture (Cambridge, 2008). Jane Rickard is a Senior Lecturer in Seventeenth-Century English Literature at the University of Leeds. She is the author of Writing the Monarch in Jacobean England: Jonson, Donne, Shakespeare and the Works of King James (Cambridge, 2015) and Authorship and Authority: The Writings of James VI and I (2007), and co-edited Shakespeare's Book: Essays in Reading, Writing and Reception (with Richard Meek and Richard Wilson, 2008).