ABSTRACT
The concerns of Humanism were the same all over Western Europe, but the urgent topics of the day had little to do with Italian theories of the theatre and with epic poetry; they encompassed problems of language, rhetoric, the art of persuasion and the nature of poetry. The young Jonson had felt the pull of the classic; older, he had accepted the challenge and reached what was for him a satisfactory compromise solution. Ben Jonson strikes as a level-headed, self-disciplined intellectual whose work reveals little of the man, as an artist for whom reason and order are the tools needed for pleasing, for imposing a simple moral truth and as fighting rebellion against a balanced view of life. Clarity of thought and of conception, vast erudition, innumerable allusions to a remote past and the renewed claim that a poem demands active participation by the reader: none of these suffices to categorize the larger-than-life creations of a prophetic mind.
