ABSTRACT
Mick Jardine observes that many critics have seen Jonson as a conservative with an obsessive desire to assert his authority over the authorship of his work. Theatre practitioners tend to take a very different line. Griff Rhys Jones’s assertion that ‘In Shakespeare there’s nothing to live for if anarchy reigns, whereas for Jonson that’s where life really has its foundations’1 exemplifies the understanding of most of the practitioners we spoke to, who saw Jonson as a subversive radical. ‘Jonson never writes about Kings and Queens, that whole moth-eaten hierarchy of privilege and incompetence, but about people like us, working people who work to live…’ (Peter Barnes).2
