Poems of Ben Jonson

Ben Jonson, who was with Shakespeare and Marlowe one of three principal playwrights of his age, was also one of its most original and influential poets. Known best for the country house poem ‘To Penshurst’ and his moving elegy ‘On my First Son’, his work inspired the whole generation of seventeenth-century poets who declared themselves the ‘Sons of Ben’. This edition brings his three major verse publications, Epigrams (1616), The Forest (1616), and Underwood (1641) together with his large body of uncollected poems to create the largest collection of Jonson’s verse that has been published. It thus gives readers a comprehensive view of the wide range of his achievement, from satirical epigrams through graceful lyrics to tender epitaphs. Though he is often seen as the preeminent English poet of the plain style, Jonson employed a wealth of topical and classical allusion and a compressed syntax which mean his poetry can require as much annotation for the modern reader as that of his friend John Donne. This edition not only provides comprehensive explanation and contextualization aimed at student and non-specialist readers alike, but presents the poems in a modern spelling and punctuation that brings Jonson’s poetry to life.

Tom Cain is Emeritus Professor of Early Modern Literature at Newcastle University. He has worked on Ben Jonson for many years but has also written a study of Tolstoy (1977) and edited Nicholas Hilliard’s Art of Limning (1981), an anthology of Jacobean and Caroline Poetry (1981), and several collections of essays on the early modern period. In 2001, he published an edition of the large collection of poems left in manuscript by Robert Herrick’s patron, Mildmay Fane, Earl of Westmorland, and in 2013, with Ruth Connolly, he edited The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick. He has written essays on Donne and Jonson and edited Jonson’s Poetaster for the Revels Plays (1995) and Sejanus for the Cambridge Works of Ben Jonson. He is currently completing an edition of Ford’s The Lovers Melancholy for the Oxford Complete Works of John Ford, editing a volume of Waugh’s short stories for the Oxford Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, and writing a biography of John Donne.

Ruth Connolly is Senior Lecturer in Seventeenth-Century Literature at Newcastle University. She has written essays on the circulation of Stuart lyric poetry in manuscript, on early modern women’s writing and intellectual cultures, and on the poetry of Hester Pulter, Richard Lovelace, and Jonson. In 2011 she edited (with Tom Cain) a collection of essays, ‘Lords of Wine and Oile’: Community and Conviviality in the Poetry of Robert Herrick, and with Christopher Burlinson a special issue of Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 (Winter, 2012) on editing Stuart poetry. This was followed in 2013 by an edition with Tom Cain of The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, special issues of The Seventeenth Century on Cavalier writing (2018), and (with Naomi McAreavey) of Literature Compass on the literatures of early modern Ireland (2019). She is currently completing a monograph on the poetics of the body in early modern lyric and researching bookselling in early modern Newcastle.