Ian Donaldson, Ben Jonson: A Life
Oxford University Press, 2011.
Oxford University Press, 2011.
Melbourne-bred Ian Donaldson has been a major academic in
English literature sequentially at Oxford, Canberra, Edinburgh and Cambridge
and he has long been acknowledged as a dominant forces in the world of Jonson
studies. Jonson has been overshadowed by the more immediately appealing,
user-friendly, tear-jerking Shakespeare, but it was Ben who was buried in
Westminster Abbey while Shakespeare mouldered away in Stratford.
Scholarship has been fairly slow to pickup on the richness of
Jonson's plays and other work: the major edition is long out of date, though a
new multi-volume version masterminded by Donaldson himself, will very shortly
be available. But the crucial work is this biography, which both gathers
together the substantial amount of information and interpretation that is
available on Jonson and also shapes a strong, intelligent and long overdue
cases for this strong-minded, deeply learned, theatrically vigorous – and often
very funny – great writer. Shortlisted for the very prestigious British James
Tait Black prize, this is a major book to own and read and re-read to
understand the lateral riches and remarkable variety of the greatest period of
Enlgish drama.
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