Tom Lockwood. Ben Jonson in the Romantic Age.(Book review)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-MAR-07

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Tom Lockwood. Ben Jonson in the Romantic Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. xii+257. $85.00.

The conventional wisdom is that Ben Jonson had little cultural or poetic visibility during the Romantic period. The key date often cited is 1776, the retirement of David Garrick, which is usually taken as a watershed in the long slow decline of Jonson's reputation, after which his place in the canon--once so towering--became ever more marginal. Certainly in comparison with Shakespeare, Milton, and Spenser, all of whom had rich afterlives in Romantic literature, Jonson's presence is harder to detect. His humours comedy offered comparatively little to Romantic poets, and his scrupulous classicism and self-conscious art were not congenial. But Tom Lockwood's authoritative new study drastically revises this picture by demonstrating the variety of ways in which Jonson was remembered in the period, and remained a subject of discussion, allusion, and imitation. Lockwood also identifies 1776-1820 as a crucial phase in Jonson's critical fortunes, during which groundwork was laid that would become the basis for his modern critical reception. A reassessment took place which partially liberated him from the shadow of Shakespeare, dislodging the ingrained idea of...

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