ABSTRACT
Throughout the seventeenth century Ben Jonson was considered by some to be England’s leading dramatist and by many to share an equality with Shakespeare. Jonson was educated at Westminster School and worked briefly in his stepfather’s trade of bricklaying, then served as a soldier in the Netherlands, but was soon back in England, acting and writing plays. Many less celebrated dramatists fed the hungry theatres throughout the Elizabethan and Jacobean period. Though plays were sometimes the fruit of collaborative effort, the writers are too individual for us to dismiss them in groups. The Witch of Edmonton, in which Dekker collaborated with Ford and Rowley, is a homely play that gives a taste of Jacobean domesticity. It involves a sympathetic study of a young man whose generosity first, then his weakness, leads him into the situation in which he commits murder.
