ABSTRACT

This section focuses on the critical responses that Jonson’s work has provoked over the years, and indeed continues to provoke in everincreasing volume. The sheer variety and range of Jonson’s work means that these critical responses cover a disparate array of both formal and thematic issues, addressing not just the substance of Jonson’s writing (assuming for the moment that that is easily separable) but also its generic affiliations. Analysis of his work, that is to say, plays an important part in the history of critical thinking about drama, the masque, and poetry. Furthermore, the four centuries over which Jonson has been read in a manner recognisable as ‘literary-critical’ ensures that there is already a huge body of work devoted to the analysis of Jonson’s own, substantial oeuvre. What follows is therefore necessarily selective, dealing at length with significant landmarks in the critical writing of the later twentieth century while only giving an outline of influential elements in its prehistory. The subsections which follow have been arranged to reflect both attention paid repeatedly to certain topics and the particular lines along which the critical assessment of Jonson’s drama, masques and poetry have – at times separately – developed. Within this framework, the reader will find that particular topics have been revealed or transformed by the attentions of critics writing from various theoretically informed positions. Thus, for example, the development of feminist criticism made possible an engagement not only with the ways in which Jonson writes women, but also with the broader functioning of the language of gender and sexuality in his work. Similarly, comprehension of Jonson’s configurations of authorship and of carnival were developed distinctively by critics working from a Marxist inheritance, and then reworked again in the light of New Historicist concerns.