Volphone's reverential prayer to his heaps of gold launches the sharpest, funniest play about money and morals in the 17th century - a play still wickedly relevant on the same topics four centuries later. Ben Jonson's comedy depicts selfishness thinly veiled by sanctimonious speeches, lust and possessiveness poorly disguised as love and marriage, ...
One of the greatest English playwrights of the seventeenth century, Ben Jonson was also a deeply influential lyric poet, whose poetry combined classical ideals with a vigorous interest in contemporary life and colloquial language. The "Complete Poems" contains all the volumes of poetry Jonson published in his lifetime - including "Epigrams", "The ...
This edition brings together Jonson's four great comedies in one volume. Volpone , which was first performed in 1606, dramatizes the corrupting nature of greed in an exuberant satire set in contemporary Venice. The first production of Epicene marked the end of a year long closure of the theatres because of an epidemic of the plague in 1609; its ...
Widely performed and studied, "The Alchemist" is one of the world's great comedies. It was first performed in 1610, and its success kept it in the repertory until the closing of the theatres. After the Restoration, it was one of the first plays to be revived and it has been produced with increasing frequency ever since. This edition is based on a ...
The three plays collected in this volume depict the faults, errors and foibles of ordinary people with exuberant humour, savage satire and acute observations. "Volpone" portrays a rich Venetian who pretends to be dying so that his despised acquaintances will flock to his bedside with extravagant gifts in hope of an inheritance. "The Alchemist" ...
The five plays in this collection are Everyman in his Humour, the tragedy Sejanus, Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair. They represent the full range and complexity of Jonson's art as a playwright. The text is the modernized version of Herford and Simpson's edition (OUP 1925-52), with full annotation.
'A silent and loving woman is a gift of the lord' This 'excellent comedy of affliction' enjoyed enormous prestige for more than a century after its first performance: for John Dryden it had 'the greatest and most noble construction of any pure unmixed comedy in any language'. Its title signals Jonson's satiric and complex concern with gender: the ...
Poetaster Sejanus The Devil is an Ass New Inn Oxford English Drama offers plays from the sixteenth to early twentieth centuries in selections that make available both rarely printed and canonical works. The texts are freshly edited using modern spelling. Critical introductions, wide-ranging annotation, and informative bibliographies illuminate the ...
Early modern London - too foggy and Protestant to have a carnival - offered its inhabitants commercial events during which to indulge their need for bodily delights and festival exuberance. The fair of St Bartholmew, held anually in Smithfield on 24 August, served Jonson as an opportunity to dissect a wide cross-section of Londoners and their ...
Benjamin Jonson (1572-1637) was an English Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor. A good friend of William Shakespeare, he is best known for his satirical plays, particularly Volpone and The Alchemist which are considered his best, and his lyric poems. A man of vast reading and a seemingly insatiable appetite for controversy, Jonson had an ...
Contains three plays and three masques, all with expanded annotations. The book also contains a selection of Jonson's own comments on his writings, a section called "Contemporary Readers on Jonson", a section called "backgrounds and sources", and a collection of 12 critical essays.
This volume contains three of Ben Jonson's greatest plays - Sejanus (1603), Volpone (1606) and Epicoene, or The Silent Woman (1609). Sejanus, an experimental tragedy written in the classical manner, was labelled a seditious work at the time of its first production and embroiled Jonson with the Privy Council. Volpone is the first of his mature ...
Complete text of play first performed in 1603. Modernized English text, explanatory and critical notes, and Introduction. From the Yale Ben Jonson Edition.
Renaissance court masques involved music, dance, pageantry, and spectacular scenic effects. The form was transformed by Jonson into a serious mode of literary expression. Includes Jonson's own notes and glosses, explanatory notes, and critical commentary. From the Yale Ben Jonson edition.
This collaborative masterpiece of hilarious city comedy was performed by the Children of the Revels at the Blackfriars playhouse in 1605. The story is of an allegorical simplicity that lends itself to satire of civic mores and traditions as well as to parody of the sentimental, idealising London comedy presented at the amphitheatres in the ...
Ben Jonson's "Volpone" (1605) is one of the most famous comedies of early modern Europe, translated into many languages and frequently revived on stage. This student edition has a carefully modernized text, aimed at undergraduates, theatrical producers and actors of the play. The introduction presents new material about Volpone's debt to the ...
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 ...
This volume presents a new and fresh selection of Ben Jonson's dramatic works. It includes the three greatest and most accessible comedies - 'Volpone' (1606), 'Epicoene' (1609), and 'The Alchemist' (1610) - along with the seldom - reprinted unfinished pastoral comedy 'The Sad Shephard' (1640); in the editor's words, this play 'complements the ...
The Renaissance court masque, traditionally an entertainment of music, dancing, pageantry, and spectacular scenic effects, was transformed by Ben Jonson into a serious mode of literary expression. By using its peculiar viability as a forum for his dramatic imagination, Jonson resolved and transcended the satiric vision that was in many ways the ...
This edition presents the full texts of Jonson's two most popular comedies, Volpone and The Alchemist and of his commonplace book Discoveries, his Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden, and all his non-dramatic poetry.
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