Jonson was a literary celebrity from early on, so there is a very extensive wider record of notice of his work. Readers interested in this more miscellaneous and scattered tradition should consult J. F. Bradley and J. Q. Adams’s The Jonson Allusion-Book (1922) and Volume 2 of G. E. Bentley’s Shakespeare and Jonson: Their Reputations in the Seventeenth Century Compared (1945) (noting the response by Frost, 1965). Andrew Lynn provides a detailed history of some aspects of Jonson’s posthumous reception in ‘The Impact of Ben Jonson, 1637–1700’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Cambridge University, 2000).

The Literary Record is organised by item, accessible via the list below on this page. A brief introductory note sets the item in context. The original spelling is followed. Translations of Greek and Latin are included. Where these are not already available in later editions they have been provided by Dr Thomas Roebuck, with some help from translations by Dr Bernie Curran that appeared in the present editor’s Ben Jonson: The Critical Heritage 1599-1798 (1990).

The comments share many themes and emphases, and can be read sequentially as a documentary history of the response to Jonson’s work, but each comment also reflects a particular context and speaks to the particular situation of the individual writer. The sequence of items probably presents more variety and contrast than neat progression. It certainly invites multiple viewpoints and attention to different layers and threads. There are detractors as well as supporters, and the themes and emphases in the comments change more or less continuously. One constant is the strength of the responses, whether favourable or not: Jonson was reviled as well as revered, but he was never neglected, in this period at least.

Reading through the items shows that Jonson first emerged from the inchoate, competitive world of late Elizabethan playwrights and poets as a writer of humours comedies. Thenceforth each phase of his work attracted comment. The responses reflect an inherent conflict. Jonson was a robust literary personality with little social capital attempting to achieve by main force a laureate status safe from criticism. This aspiration is already apparent in Poetaster (1601). He came closest to achieving this ambition as an officially anointed masque writer to the court in the later 1600s and 1610s, but even here there was controversy. In the later parts of his career some but not all of his contemporaries were prepared to grant him status as doyen, living treasure, and grand old man.

By the time of his death in 1638 he was a literary celebrity, with a reputation both for magisterial, seemingly already classic, work, and for more controversial personal and literary qualities. For some he was a genial focal point for a vibrant brotherhood of writers, the anchor for an English literary culture rivalling the ancients. For others he was an arrogant self-promoter whose powers dwindled sharply in his last works.

The most elaborate tribute is Jonsonus Virbius, a collection of elegies marking Jonson’s death, here included in full with translations of the items in Latin and Greek. This has a strong university and royalist flavour, wonderfully remote from the controversies of Jonson’s early career. In Jonsonus Virbius and elsewhere there are abundant examples of the hyperbolic literary eulogy, where Jonson figures as a capital-P Poet far removed from any recognisable individual works. This can still make for a stirring poem, as we can see in the contribution by Sidney Godolphin, taut and energetic though entirely lacking in detail.

Dryden’s Essay includes the most developed critical analysis of a Jonson work, a discussion of The Silent Woman as a model play and a match for anything French drama can offer. In other items Dryden keeps returning to Jonson, as if measuring up a rival from the past. He sharpens the comparison with Shakespeare to which Jonson was bound through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Other Restoration playwrights – Shadwell, Edward Howard and Congreve – also quote Jonson’s example in their discussions of the shape of the new English drama. Jonson is a prime point of reference in the debate as to whether its verse be rhymed or blank, its dialogue colloquial or courtly, or its humour satirical or inclusive.

The most persistent strain in the commentary is Jonson’s hard-won status as a classic poet of uncompromising high standards, reaching its apogee in Jonsonus Virbius and only gradually retreating after that. The retreat, when it comes, is partly a matter of doubts about whether Jonson in fact deserves his laureate crown, whether he fits the model as it has hardened into orthodoxy, and partly as the result of the pressure of a rival aesthetic of facility and naturalness associated with Shakespeare. One footnote to this discourse is that Jonson seems to anticipate Milton as a bogey for women writers. Both Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn describe him as a representative of the learned drama for which women are not equipped, with a hint that this may in fact relieve them of a burden. Yet there is also Jonson criticism of this time which sees his comedy as transgressive: malicious and factious (Mucedorus); or profane and abusive (Samuel Pepys, Jeremy Collier).

The documents in the Literary Record must take their place in a wider setting of different histories: histories of the multitudinous passing allusions to Jonson in the period, of the influence of his work on his contemporaries and successors, and of the reputations of his rivals, not to speak of literary history in the wider sense and political and cultural histories more generally. Yet the vigour of this discourse means that even in the artificially segmented format of the Record, with extracts set out item by item, the voices are unmistakably distinct and rich in implication. Whether as items or as a series, they are a provocation to interpretation.

The collection ends with the seventeenth century, as already mentioned. In the course of the following century Jonson was definitively eclipsed by Shakespeare as the pioneering English dramatist. A persistent, largely factitious narrative of Jonson’s personal hostility to Shakespeare lent momentum to this process. It was not until the twentieth century, and perhaps not until the Oxford edition, which began to appear in the 1920s, that he regained a balanced place in literary history. Parts of this absorbing story have been told in R. G. Noyes, Ben Jonson on the English Stage, 1660-1776 (1935); Stuart Tave, The Amiable Humorist (1960); the introduction to the Ben Jonson: The Critical Heritage volume already cited; and in Tom Lockwood, Ben Jonson in the Romantic Age (2005).

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