The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson
Cambridge University Press, $1,475 hb (7 vols), 5224 pp
Literary Studies
Our century's edition of Ben Jonson
by Lisa Gorton •
Shakespeare’s great contemporary Ben Jonson dressed an actor in armour to open his play Poetaster. The Prologue explained:
If any muse why I salute the stage,
An armèd Prologue, know, ’tis a
dangerous age,
Wherein who writes had need present
his scenes
Forty-fold proof against the conjuring
means
Of base detractors and illiterate apes,
That fill up rooms in fair and formal
shapes.
A dangerous age, and Ben Jonson was not a circumspect man. This new edition of all Ben Jonson’s work brings out the valiant nature of his achievement.
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