Ben Jonson is overshadowed as a dramatist by Shakespeare, his great contemporary. As a poet, however, he stands high. His polished urbanity, direct expression and classicism have been especially valued in modern times. T.S. Eliot says Jonson incorporated his erudition into his sensibility, creatively assimilating Horace, Martial and Juvenal into his poetry and hence into English literature. Richard Dutton's introduction illuminates the structure and context of Jonson's Epigrams and The Forest. Dutton shows them to be carefully structured poem sequences that display Jonson's command of poetic...

Set in Ancient Rome, "Poetaster" offers one of the first and most subtle statements in English of the Augustan cultural ideal. Jonson contrasts Augustus' wise rule with an English polity dominated (like the stage) by malice, intrigue and envy. This text examines these different strands so skilfully interwoven by Jonson, and argues for a reassessment of "Poetaster" as one of the most ideologically interesting of all early modern plays. The accompanying explanatory notes guide the reader through the personal and political illusions which gave the play its immediate satirical impact.

This edition breaks with usual practice by presenting the 1601 quarto version of Jonson's play, set in Florence, instead of the revised 1616 version, set in London. Robert Miola presents a meticulously edited and modernised version of the play as originally acted by the Lord Chamberlain's Men (with Shakespeare in the cast) in 1598. He has collated all fifteen known copies of the quarto and consulted the revised folio version as well. Instead of simply endorsing the folio as the superior play, the Introduction seeks to understand the earlier version on its own terms.
Miola explores the...

Epicene is now one of the most widely-studied of Johnson's plays. Brilliantly exploiting the Jacobean convention whereby boys played female roles, it satirises the newly fashionable and sexually ambiguous world of the West End of London, where courtly wit rubs shoulders with commercial values.
This authoritative new edition, now in paperback, is based on a thorough re-examination of the earliest texts. The introduction analyses the play as originally written for the newly formed Children of the Queen's Revels, and performed at the little-known Whitefriars Theatre. Dutton discusses the...

Despite its popularity when it first appeared in print in 1600, Every Man out of His Humour has never appeared as a single modern critical edition until now. The volume's introduction and annotations convey early modern obsessions with wealth and self-display by providing historical contexts and pointing out the continuity of those obsessions into modern life. The play is of interest because of its influence on the course of city comedy and its wealth of information about social relationships and colloquial language at the end of Elizabeth's reign.
Jonson's experiments in generating...

This is the paperback edition of the first fully annotated volume of Ben Jonson's 'The Magnetic Lady' written in 1632. It contains textual and explanatory notes and the text is modernised for student use. The introduction places the play in the context of Jonson's later dramatic and poetic works and discusses the political context of the Caroline court. A performance history of the play and fresh material relating to its seventeenth-century reception are also provided. This edition by Peter Happe critically reappraises Jonson's much-neglected play and argues for its recognition as a work of...

This edition of "The Devil is an Ass" (1616) aims to provide an insight into Jonson's life and work, the theatrical qualities of the play, its political background and its textual history. In his introduction, Peter Happe looks at the special place of the play in Jonson's own life, his interest in London, the theatrical setting of the play and its sources and analogues. There are critical and explanatory commentaries and a glossarial index. The play is seen in its historical and political context, by linking it with late medieval and Elizabethan plays, as well as with the Jacobean stage. The...

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This volume consists of 14 masques, one of the most extravagant and spectacular forms of entertainment ever produced.

Since its birth as a concept, civilization has been defined by an encounter with the 'other'. Barbarism, the ever-ready counter concept, has provided civilization with its raison d'etre-that of exerting violence upon other societies to 'civilize' them. Enlightenment thinkers defined civilization as an opponent of nature, while science and technology, tools with which nature was to be conquered, became one of the basic indicators of development. Thus was formed the unbroken tie between civilization and science.
In the Muslim world, civilization became a synonym for modernization, a...