Introduction by Ian Donaldson and Martin Butler.

Biographia Britannica: Or, the Lives of the Most Eminent Persons Who Have Flourished in Great Britain and Ireland, From the Earliest Ages, Down to Present Times, was published in six volumes between 1747 and 1766 under the editorship of the herald and antiquary, William Oldys. The work was later continued by the dissenting minister and biographer Andrew Kippis, who with the assistance of Joseph Towers produced five volumes between 1778 and 1793, and part 1 of a sixth volume in 1795.

The life of Jonson that appears in the Biographia Britannica was the work of Philip Nicholls (or Nichols or Nicholes), as Andrew Kippis’s key to authorship of the entries – published in the preface to volume 1 of the second (1778) edition and expanded in the preface to volume 2 – reveals. Nicholls matriculated from Brasenose College, Oxford, on 4 April 1715, aged 16 (BA 1718, MA 1722); was admitted as a clerical fellow at Trinity Hall, Cambridge on 29 April 1723, and ordained priest in London on 28 June 1724. He received the degree of LLD in 1729. On 4 August 1731, however, Nicholls was expelled from Trinity Hall and degraded for ‘serious crimes’ involving the theft of books from St John’s College, Trinity College, and the University Library (J. Foster, 1891-2; J. and J. A. Venn, 1922-7; Warren’s Book, ed. A. W. W. Dale, 1911, 217).

Nicholls’ entry for the Biographia Britannica is the most ambitious account of Jonson’s life to have appeared since the poet’s death in 1637. It draws not merely on the earlier notes and memoirs of Fuller, Wood, Aubrey, and Hyde, but on Nicholas Rowe’s ‘Some Account of the Life, &c., of Mr William Shakespeare’ prefixed to his edition of Shakespeare’s Works (1709); on the ‘Heads of a Conversation betwixt the Famous Poet Ben Jonson and William Drummond of Hawthornden, January 1619’, from the folio edition of Drummond’s Works, edited by Bishop John Sage and Thomas Ruddiman in 1711; and on Peter Whalley’s recently published seven-volume edition of Jonson’s own writings (1756). Nicholls may well have had access also to Oldys’s personal copy of Gerard Langbaine’s An Account of the English Dramatic Poets, 1691 (now in the British Library), with Oldys’ annotations concerning the life of Jonson and other dramatists.

Bibliography
Foster 1891-2
Langbaine 1691
Rowe 1709
Sage and Ruddiman 1711
Venn 1922-7
Warren 1911
Whalley 1756