Brief Chronicles Vol. 9: Ben Jonson’s Unorthodox Poetics: Rhetoric, Proportion & Authorship Paperback – May 12, 2025

Ben Jonson is a literary figure wrapped in an enigma. His fingerprints are evasively evident throughout the Shakespeare question. To the traditional Shakespeare biographer, Jonson is both a necessary and a notorious witness. As Robert Giroux claims, he is the “unanswerable argument against idiotic beliefs that Shakespeare’s plays were written by somebody else, like the Earl of Oxford.”Far from being “unanswerable,” Ben Jonson’s testimony on the Shakespeare question has been fruitful territory for “post-Stratfordian” scholars for over a century. In 1921 Sir George Greenwood, building on a formidable tradition of scholarship, including such names as: George Steevens, Felix Schelling, W.G. Clark, John Glover, Aldis Wright, and Sir Sidney Lee, showed Jonson was the author of at least one of the two 1623 Shakespeare Folio dedications attributed to Hemmings and Condell! To Gerald H. Rendall in 1939, Jonson was “the skilled and most effective agent in the preservation of anonymity.”Covered in the volume: Jonson’s parody of the Stratfordian author as Sogliardo in Every Man Out of His Humor; his exploration of the Shakespeare question in the masque, Neptune’s Triumph; his authorship of the verses on Shakespeare’s Holy Trinity monument in Stratford; his paratextual contributions to the 1623 Shakespeare Folio, with the concealed implication of his phrase “sweet swan of Avon”; his “17th century Tribe of Ben” and his New Cambridge Jonson reviewed; and the emotional complexities embodied in the word “envy.”Contributions by W. Lansdowne Goldsworthy, Ruth Loyd Miller, Nina Green, Ted Story, Alexander Waugh, Gabriel Ready, Shelly Maycock, and Roger Stritmatter, expand and elaborate on these early doubts and begin to reveal a very different Ben Jonson than the man of orthodox stereotypes. Both Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, through their mutual relationship, emerge as profoundly more interesting dramatists and poets.Rediscovering Ben Jonson through Shakespeare’s eyes reveals a craftsman of intricate literary design, Sancho Panza to Shakespeare’s Don Quixote, a man eager to honor his colleague by means of the most curiously intricate literary devices that his fertile mind could conceive. Read more