Ben Jonson's "Workes"

Paper Summary:

Ben Jonson's 1616 "Workes" embodies the central tension of Jonson's career, that between Jonson the dramatist and Jonson the "author." It is now, more or less, commonplace to think of Jonson's career in terms of a movement from the stage to the page. While this may be accurate, it is difficult to explain why Jonson turned his attention increasingly towards the printing house and away from the playhouse. This essay examines this question by looking at how the stage and the page differed for Jonson. Looking at the figurative and literal locations of the playhouses and printing houses, the paper argues that Jonson's primary motivation for becoming a poet of print was that print offered him a safer and more authoritative mode of communication from which to exhort. Jonson, after all, was a moralist at heart, and the early seventeenth-century theater was still a marginalized and contained space, whereas the printing houses were positioned more centrally while, ironically, maintaining a greater freedom from royal control. Thus, print offered Jonson a more powerful tool to effect change.

From the Paper:

"A number of reasons have been suggested to explain why Jonson embraced print publication over performance. The most basic explanation is simply that Jonson sought immortality and realized that print provided a far more lasting medium than the ephemeral experience of the stage. Jonson's dedicatory poem in Shakespeare's First Folio supports this, especially when, addressing Shakespeare directly, Jonson writes: "Thou art a monument without a tomb, / And art alive still while thy book doth live, / And we have wits to read and praise to give" (22-4). Another popular reason given for Jonson's turn to printing involves his anxiety over the interpretation of his works."

More papers on Ben Jonson's "Workes":

• Analytical Essay # 128777 : "Ben Jonson and the English Renaissance"
• Essay # 43131 : "Ben Jonson, A Study in Excellence"
• Book Review # 107961 : "Ben Johnson's "Volpone"

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