ABSTRACT
In the Introduction (pp. 13-14) I pointed to the marked recent interest in Jonson's late plays. This can hardly even be described as a 'revival' of interest, since there is no evidence that they made much impact in their own day (The New Inn was even hissed off the stage) and in the Restoration Dryden famously - and effectively - damned them as 'dotages'. Anne Barton led the way in putting a much more positive valuation on them, and this has since generated serious debates about their aesthetic value and their politics. Butler, in a political-Marxist approach, resists the suggestion of Barton herself, and of David Norbrook in Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), that the Caroline Jonson was so alienated from the court as to be antagonistic to its values. On the contrary, Butler argues that 'Despite the apparent technical disjunction between Jonson's early and late plays, the ideological assumptions on which they rest - their social priorities and political commitments - remain the same'. But this in turn has been challenged by, for example, Julie Sanders in Ben Jonson's Theatrical Republics (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1998). The relationship between the familar Jonson of the first folio (1616) and the much less familiar of the sec ond (1640) is emerging as another new critical battleground.
