ABSTRACT
Or is it? Jonson’s plays themselves are a continuing testament to the essential interaction between theatre and education. Although his plays resist simplistic didacticism, all social satire has an educative, or an instructional function; and, just as theatrical form in Jonson’s theatre is never static, so, too, there is a continuing exploration of educational method in his satire. There has always been a reciprocal relationship between theatre and education, in the broadest sense of that word. Jonson, Shakespeare and their contemporaries may each have used their classical sources rather differently, but all the English Renaissance playwrights were steeped in ‘learning’ (many of them writing for companies of boys drawn from grammar and choir schools). It seems disingenuous that certain of Jonson’s critics (who themselves work in the academy) have focused on the contention that he occasionally appears to wear his scholarship rather ostentatiously.
