Ben Jonson

Ben Jonson
Portrait by Abraham Blyenberch, c. 1617; oil on canvas painting at the National Portrait Gallery, London
Portrait by Abraham Blyenberch, c. 1617; oil on canvas painting at the National Portrait Gallery, London
BornBenjamin Jonson
c. 11 June 1572
Diedc. 6 August 1637 (aged 65)
London,[1] England
Resting placeWestminster Abbey
Occupation
  • Playwright
  • poet
LanguageEarly Modern English
Alma materWestminster School
PeriodBefore 1597 – 1637
Literary movementEnglish Renaissance
Spouse
Ann Therese Lewis
(m. 1594)
Children2
Signature

Benjamin Jonson (c. 11 June 1572 – c. 6 August 1637)[2] was an English playwright and poet. Jonson's artistry exerted a lasting influence on English poetry and stage comedy. He popularised the comedy of humours; he is best known for the satirical plays Every Man in His Humour (1598), Volpone, or The Fox (c. 1606), The Alchemist (1610) and Bartholomew Fair (1614) and for his lyric and epigrammatic poetry.[3] He is regarded as "the second most important English dramatist, after William Shakespeare, during the reign of James I."[4]

Jonson was a classically educated, well-read and cultured man of the English Renaissance with an appetite for controversy (personal and political, artistic and intellectual) whose cultural influence was of unparalleled breadth upon the playwrights and the poets of the Jacobean era (1603–1625) and of the Caroline era (1625–1642).[5][6]

  1. ^ "Ben Jonson - Bibliotheca Alexandrina" (PDF).
  2. ^ Bland, Mark (2004). "Ben Jonson and the Legacies of the Past". Huntington Library Quarterly. 67 (3): 371–400. JSTOR 10.1525/hlq.2004.67.3.371.
  3. ^ Ward, Adolphus William (1911). "Jonson, Ben" . In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 15 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 502–507.
  4. ^ Ben Jonson at the Encyclopædia Britannica
  5. ^ "Ben Jonson", Grolier Encyclopedia of Knowledge, volume 10, p. 388.
  6. ^ Evans, Robert C (2000). "Jonson's critical heritage". In Harp, Richard; Stewart, Stanley (eds.). The Cambridge companion to Ben Jonson. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. pp. 189–202. ISBN 0-521-64678-2.

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