Jonson (1572–1637) lived so precariously it seems extraordinary that he managed to write anything, much less survive to the age of sixty-five, a ‘huge overgrown play-maker’ (The Staple of News). He killed two men in duels. The first he fought as a soldier in the Low Countries. In Jonson’s telling this was a fight out of The Iliad: he fought in view of both sides and claimed the spoils of victory. The second duel he fought in London in 1598 against the actor Gabriel Spencer. The year before, Jonson had co-written and acted with Spencer in a play, The Isle of Dogs. This play, now lost, landed him in prison along with Spencer, charged with ‘lewd and mutinous behaviour’. In prison they endured Richard Topcliffe’s interrogation: a man authorised to create a torture chamber in his own house. Imprisoned again for killing Spencer, branded on the hand with the mark of a felon, and lucky to have escaped the gallows, Jonson converted to Catholicism – a dangerous course in Elizabethan England.

Engraving of Walter Raleigh by Thomas Phillibrown, 1872

Jonson fought no more duels but found scant calm. For years he waged a public war of words with other playwrights. In 1603 he was called again to the Privy Council to answer charges ‘both of popery and treason’. In 1605, not long after the Scottish King James arrived in England, Jonson was imprisoned again for writing against the Scots. Shortly out of prison, he dined with the Gunpowder plotters. Employed at the Stuart court to write masques, he quarrelled bitterly with his collaborator Inigo Jones. Employed as a tutor and companion to Walter Raleigh’s dreadful son, Jonson ended up being wheeled around the streets of Paris in a barrow in a drunken stupor. For all his fame, he spent his last years ‘tended by a woman that governed him’: ‘neither he nor she took much care for next week; and would be sure not to want wine: of which he usually took too much before he went to bed, if not oftener and sooner’ (Izaak Walton).

The Scottish writer William Drummond of Hawthornden left a detailed if wry impression of Jonson’s character. Fat and poor, Jonson had walked from London to Edinburgh for a bet. Hosting him in Hawthornden Castle, Drummond noted:

He is a great lover and praiser of himself, a contemner and scorner of others, given rather to lose a friend than a jest, jealous of every word and action of those about him (especially after drink, which is one of the elements in which he liveth), a dissembler of ill parts which reign in him, a bragger of some good that he wanteth, thinketh nothing well but what either he himself or some of his friends and countrymen hath said or done. He is passionately kind and angry, careless either to gain or keep, vindicative, but, if he be well answered, at himself.

It must be said, Jonson had found fault with some of Drummond’s verse.

Clearly, Jonson was an impetuous and truculent man; yet in his writing he had a passionate admiration for classical proprieties. Famously erudite and fiercely opinionated, he often worked manifestos into his prefaces and plays. He told Drummond that Shakespeare ‘wanted art’ and that Donne ‘for not keeping of accent deserved hanging’; he knew both of them and was one of the first to recognise their gifts. Jonson was also among the first writers to seek to preserve a wide selection of his own work in print: ‘nine plays, two poetry collections, two pieces of pageantry, four entertainments and thirteen masques’ (from the essay here on the printing and publishing of Jonson’s works). He named his 1616 folio edition The Workes of Beniamin Jonson. This grand title, and the care that he took in revising his plays and arranging his work for the press, illustrate his ambition for posterity. All the same, his work shows a deep and often antagonistic absorption in the work of other writers and in the life of London and the court.

Instead of following the order that Jonson himself imposed on his work, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson for the most part orders his work chronologically. It also treats the quarto editions of his plays as equal to the folio versions. In that way, it emphasises the variousness of Jonson’s work. Its seven volumes include every extant thing that he wrote: plays, masques, entertainments, letters, poems, an English Grammar, a translation of Horace, marginalia, and the book of literary precepts that he called Discoveries. Its chronological order allows the reader to trace how Jonson’s work developed over time: no simple progression of interests or attitudes but a series of shifts, surprises, and contradictions. In 1605–06, for instance, Jonson first idealised the Stuart court in The Masque of Blackness, offended James I with his play Eastward Ho!, wrote a series of letters from prison, and then idealised the court again in Hymenaei, a masque celebrating the political marriage of Frances Howard, then about thirteen, and the earl of Essex, fifteen years old.

Jonson was among the first writers to see the power of the printing press, new technology of his age. This edition is one of the first to take full advantage of online storage. Alongside the print edition, Cambridge has published an electronic edition, partly open-access. This gathers an astonishing range of texts, essays, and archival matter: life records, performance histories, images, musical settings, and essays. More than an edition of his work, it is a gathering place for research on Ben Jonson. As such, it is a rich resource for anyone interested in that time, Jonson scholar or no.

Ben Jonson (portrait by Abraham van Blyenberch)

In their introduction, the editors point out that every century has its edition of Ben Jonson. This is our century’s edition. In recent decades, scholars have taken an interest in the relationship between literature and its time: its social and political and material setting. The popularity of literary biographies is one effect of this. The idea that art is contingent, reactive, and shaped by its time is one well suited to the work of Ben Jonson. Jonson wrote of Shakespeare: ‘he was not of an age but for all time’ – generous praise, because Jonson would probably have liked someone to say the same of him. But one of Jonson’s strengths is the extent to which he is ‘of an age’: London comes to life in his city comedies; the Stuart court’s ideals, extravagance, and self-delusions reveal themselves in his masques.

Ben Jonson is one of the most contradictory of writers. The contradiction is not only between a reckless life and deliberate art. The art itself is full of contradiction. Jonson insisted that the style of writing should fit the demands of a form; he was unusually versatile. When he wrote city comedies, he was bitterly satiric and comical. In his mock-epic poem ‘On the Famous Voyage’, he followed two men in a boat up Fleet Ditch, a London sewer. Imaginatively a journey into the underworld of the classics and the underworld of London, this poem is characterised by grotesque verve: ‘Here several ghosts did flit / About the shore, of farts but late departed …’; and, ‘When each privy’s seat / Is filled with buttock, and the walls do sweat / Urine …’ And yet when Jonson turned his hand to lyrics and masques, he wrote with fastidious musicality. ‘Drink to me only with thine eyes / And I will pledge with mine; / Or leave a kiss but in the cup, / And I’ll not look for wine …’ In his work he seemed not to build on his own past so much as discover the nature and potential of various literary forms.

Such versatility, such close involvement with his age, such scope of work – Jonson is a hard writer to see whole. The General Editors, David Bevington, Martin Butler, and Ian Donaldson, have given the greater part of their working lives to the study of Ben Jonson. They have achieved a remarkable feat of cooperative scholarship: this edition gathers contributions from a team of thirty scholars, including Electronic Editor David Gants and Associate Editors Karen Britland and Eugene Giddens. Jonson lived in an extraordinary age. His work, as much as his life, expressed its variousness, danger, energy, and ambition. Here it all is. He would have been delighted.