ABSTRACT
If Shakespeare was 'not of an age, but for all time', Jonson himself has always been firmly located in the age which created him. He gave to that age - more than any other writer - a voice and a literary definition. And that remains, I shall argue, crucial to his current critical reputation. There is a paradox in this, because no one did more than Jonson himself, in the monumental 1616 folio of his Works, to promote himself as a literary classic, a writer whose work transcends its own era.1 Yet the definitions of 'the classic' he espoused were themselves the product of an early modern English culture he was helping to construct, and not timeless. They remained valid for a century or so after his death, but could not guarantee him readers, or a regular place on the stage, beyond that.
