The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson by Ian Donaldson et al.
Cambridge University Press, $1,475 hb (7 vols), 5224 pp
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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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