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Ian Donaldson: Ben Jonson. A Life

A study of Ben Jonson published in 1919 asserted that ‘the biographer is not driven, with the Shakespearians, to conjectural reconstruction from the shards of record and anecdote’, because ‘we know more of Jonson than of any of the greater writers of his age’. In an influential review of this book, T.S. Eliot argued that what was required for an adequate understanding of Jonson was ‘intelligent saturation in his work as a whole’. Ian Donaldson eminently meets that requirement from his lifelong immersion in Jonson’s poetry and prose, and, concurrently with the composition of this new biography, as one of the general editors of the Cambridge Works. He challenges the view that Jonson’s personality and progress as a writer present the biographer with no mysteries or inconsistencies, however, and identifies aspects of Jonson’s self-fashioning that stand in the way of a straightforward reading from work to life. The unsettling of a once firmly established chronology ‘gives an altogether more irregular, various, and interesting view of the canon, and of the imaginative development of the author’ (p. 8); and Jonson’s statements about himself and his artistic intentions in poems, epistles, prologues, epilogues, and inductions, together with his adoption of an ideal Horatian

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37307/j.1866-5381.2012.02.48
Lizenz: ESV-Lizenz
ISSN: 1866-5381
Ausgabe / Jahr: 2 / 2012
Veröffentlicht: 2012-12-14
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Dokument Ian Donaldson: Ben Jonson. A Life