Autobiography of ben jonson plays and masques

English playwright, poet, and actor (1572–1637)

For other people with similar names, see Ben Johnson.

Benjamin Jonson (c.

11 June 1572 – 18 August [O.S. 6 August] 1637) was an English playwright and poet.

Born in , Ben Jonson rejected his father's bricklaying trade and ran away from his apprenticeship to join the army.

Born in , Ben Jonson rejected his father's bricklaying trade and ran away from his apprenticeship to join the army.

This collection features three of Jonson's masterpieces: Volpone, Epicoene, and The Alchemist.

This collection features three of Jonson's masterpieces: Volpone, Epicoene, and The Alchemist.

Born in , Ben Jonson rejected his father's bricklaying trade and ran away from his apprenticeship to join the army.

Ben Jonson's plays and masques: texts of the plays and masques, Jonson on his work, contemporary readers on Jonson, criticism ix, p.

Jonson's artistry exerted a lasting influence on English poetry and stage comedy. He popularised the comedy of humours; he is best known for the satirical plays Every Man in His Humour (1598), Volpone, or The Fox (c. 1606), The Alchemist (1610) and Bartholomew Fair (1614) and for his lyric and epigrammatic poetry.

He is regarded as "the second most important English dramatist, after William Shakespeare, during the reign of James I."^[2]

Jonson was a classically educated, well-read and cultured man of the English Renaissance with an appetite for controversy (personal and political, artistic and intellectual) whose cultural influence was of unparalleled breadth upon the playwrights and the poets of the Jacobean era (1603–162