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4 unusual facts about Ben Jonson


Comedy of humours

This comic technique may be found in Aristophanes, but the English playwrights Ben Jonson and George Chapman popularized the genre in the closing years of the sixteenth century.

Il volpone

Il volpone is an Italian movie directed in 1988 by Maurizio Ponzi, inspired by Ben Jonson's comedy with the same name.

Lucius Arruntius the Younger

Arruntius appears in a 17th Century play written by English dramatist Ben Jonson called Sejanus His Fall.

Volponi

:not to be confused with the Ben Jonson play Volpone.


Abraham van Blijenberch

He worked in London from 1617 to 1622, where he painted portraits of members of the court of James I, including Prince Charles (later Charles II), the Lord Chamberlain William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, William Drummond of Hawthornden and Ben Jonson.

Alexander Gough

Most notably, Gough wrote an introduction to Humphrey Moseley's 1652 first edition of The Widow; his preface "To the Reader" re-iterated the title-page attribution of that play to John Fletcher, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Middleton.

An Humorous Day's Mirth

The sub-genre would gain its greatest prominence in the works of Ben Jonson — most notably in Every Man in His Humour (1598) and Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), but through his later works too.

Aulularia

In 1597 Ben Jonson adapted elements of the plot for his early comedy The Case is Altered.

Blackfriars Theatre

Together with its competitor, Paul's Children, the Blackfriars company produced plays by a number of the most talented young dramatists of Jacobean literature, among them Thomas Middleton, Ben Jonson, George Chapman, and John Marston.

Country house poem

The model for the country house poem is Ben Jonson's To Penshurst, published in 1616, which compliments Robert Sydney, 1st Earl of Leicester, younger brother of Sir Philip Sidney on his Penshurst Place.

David Norbrook

In Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, Norbrook explains the political context and events that influenced writers such as Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, and John Milton.

Edmund Bolton

This is valuable for its notices of contemporary authors such as Ben Jonson, whom he praises as the greatest English poet; this manuscript was reprinted in Joseph Haslewood's Ancient Critical Essays (vol. ii., 1815); Nero Caesar, or Monarchie Depraved (1624), with special note of British affairs.

Edward Blount

Though best remembered for the First Folio, Blount also published works by Miguel de Cervantes, Ben Jonson, Samuel Daniel, William Camden, José de Acosta and other important authors.

His genitive

The heyday of this construction, employed by John Lyly, Euphues His England (1580), in the travel accounts under the title Purchas His Pilgrimes (1602), Ben Jonson's Sejanus His Fall (1603) or John Donne's Ignatius His Conclave (1611), was the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century.

Hymenaei

Hymenaei, or The Masgue of Hymen, was a masque written by Ben Jonson for the marriage of Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex, and Lady Frances Howard, daughter of the Earl of Suffolk, and performed on their wedding day, 5 January 1606.

John Faber Senior

To his visit to Oxford were due also the engraved portraits of Samuel Butler, Charles I, Geoffrey Chaucer, Duns Scotus, John Hevelius, Ben Jonson, and others.

John Skelton

In Anthony Munday's Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon, Skelton acts the part of Friar Tuck, and Ben Jonson in his masque, The Fortunate Isles, introduced Skogan and Skelton in like habits as they lived.

Peter Hausted

As a playwright, Hausted has been classed among the Sons of Ben, the followers of the comedic style of Ben Jonson.

The Wild Gallant

Like the earliest works of many authors, and also like many other Restoration plays, The Wild Gallant is a derivative work: Dryden borrowed from several previous authors and plays, as far back as Ben Jonson's Every Man Out of His Humour (1599).

Thomas Farnaby

Other letters appear in John Borough's ‘Impetus Juveniles’ (1643), and in Barten Holyday's ‘Juvenal.’ Farnaby prefixed verses in Greek with an English translation to Thomas Coryat's ‘Crudities,’ and he wrote commendatory lines for William Camden's ‘Annales.’ Ben Jonson was a friend of Farnaby, and contributed commendatory Latin elegiacs to his edition of Juvenal and Persius.

Thomas Middleton

Middleton stands with John Fletcher and Ben Jonson as among the most successful and prolific of playwrights who wrote their best plays during the Jacobean period.

Verse drama and dramatic verse

Greek tragedy and Racine's plays are written in verse, as is almost all of Shakespeare's drama, Ben Jonson, Fletcher and others like Goethe's Faust.

War of the Theatres

The resulting controversy, which unfolded between 1599 and 1602, involved the playwright Ben Jonson on one side and his rivals John Marston and Thomas Dekker (with Thomas Middleton as an ancillary combatant) on the other.

William Sly

Sly is included in the troupe's surviving cast lists for the next few years, for Every Man in His Humour (1598), Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), and Sejanus (1603) — all three by Ben Jonson.


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