by Bob Evans In 2023, the Ben Jonson Journal celebrated its thirtieth anniversary with a special issue devoted to detailed explications of all 108 sonnets in the important Astrophil and Stella sonnet sequence composed by Sir Philip Sidney. Edinburgh University…
Compared with video material dealing with Shakespeare, there are relatively few really helpful videos dealing with Ben Jonson, either on the internet in general or on YouTube in particular. This, of course, is also true of most “Renaissance” authors aside from “the Bard.” However, one particularly valuable video documentary dealing to some degree with Jonson (and in fact titled “Ben Jonson”) was released as part of the “ShaLT [Shakespearean London Theatres] Project”:
By Brett Andrew Jones It wasn’t every day that accusations of cannibalism flew around the early Jacobean court. That’s (one reason) why I found the revised version of Mucedorus so interesting. It hardly compares well to what we consider the…
John Pollock’s new article on the true provenance of ‘Mr Shuckspr’se Box’ begins with an auction, although true to our ‘advanced age’, it is a live webcast auction. Our author bids on ‘A 17TH CENTURY IRON STRONG BOX’ and wins…
2018 marks the 25th anniversary of the Ben Jonson Journal. Read on and learn more about the history and impact of the journal from the editor, Richard Harp. History of the Ben Jonson Journal Richard Harp and Stanley Stewart met…
By Kelly Stage In 1605, Ben Jonson and George Chapman found themselves in prison because parts of their play Eastward Ho (written also with James Marston) had offended King James’s Scottish favourite, Sir James Murray. Jonson and Chapman took to…
By Amanda Henrichs I’ve always imagined Ben Jonson as the quintessential cranky old man, constantly complaining about the current state of things and longing for a return to the good old days, when everyone was virtuous and poetry was good…
By Roger D. Sell Literary activity can be studied as one among other kinds of human communication. Such an approach strongly endorses the insistence of present-day historicist scholars on the precise contexts, not least the precise political contexts, within which…
By Lisa Hopkins Having an associative mind is often a source of shame, but it does occasionally have benefits. Two separate moments of mental abstraction came together to help me think about the fourth acts of Shakespearean tragedies. Watching King…