Ben Jonson: A Life by Ian Donaldson

JUDGES' COMMENTS

Ben Jonson: A Life stands as a model of contextual biography because Donaldson is always concerned with locating Jonson and his works within the wider social, political and cultural contexts of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Donaldson’s meticulous research reveals Jonson as a complex and contradictory figure: bricklayer, Catholic convert, convicted felon; a man who sought royal and aristocratic patronage, but risked it all by writing plays and satires that mocked the authorities he courted. Donaldson astutely connects Volpone, which is filled with tales of political intrigue, to the Gunpowder plot and shows how The Alchemist is a parody on social mobility, for in Jacobean England social mobility was driven by gold.

Donaldson also provides a fascinating account of how Jonson’s literary reputation far exceeded that of Shakespeare in the Jacobean era, largely because he was a more determined and successful self-promoter. He also hints that because his life and work were so closely intertwined with the political culture of the early seventeenth century Jacobean court, they both seemed less relevant as the Stuarts faded into history and oblivion. In the end this study provides important new insights into Jonson, his works and the society in which he lived. This book is likely to become the acknowledged standard biography of Ben Jonson.