The Selected Plays of Ben Jonson: Volume 2: The Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair, The New Inn, A Tale of a Tub

by Ben Jonson, Martin Butler (Editor)

Four of Ben Jonson's plays are examined in this volume: two are his major works and two from his later oeuvre. The Alchemist (1610) is a major satire on folly and greed, brilliantly plotted and dazzling in its use of language. Bartholomew Fair (1614), possibly Jonson's greatest achievement, reveals a panoramic depiction of London society. The New Inn (1629) and A Tale of a Tub (1633) suggest a different Jonson, exploring new forms and writing from a profoundly modified perspective. In The New Inn, a romantic comedy overlaid with an atmospheric melancholy and ethical urgency, Jonson engages seriously for the first time with the conventions of non-satiric comedy. A Tale of a Tub, a riotous farce set in the early years of Queen Elizabeth, is now widely regarded as a nostalgic Jonsonian pastiche of Elizabethan popular drama. In recent criticism, Jonson's later career has been undergoing considerable reassessment, and this edition is the first that attempts to take this new view of Jonson into account.

560 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Benjamin Jonson was an English Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor. A contemporary of William Shakespeare, he is best known for his satirical plays, particularly Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, which are considered his best, and his lyric poems. A man of vast reading and a seemingly insatiable appetite for controversy, Jonson had an unparalleled breadth of influence on Jacobean and Caroline playwrights and poets. A house in Dulwich College is named after him.

See more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Jonson

Reviews

[Yngvild · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Tale of a Tub (i.e. a silly story) is one of those court plays where the antics of rural folk are the source of the comedy. By rural I mean what we would now call the suburbs of London, which gives the play a sparkle that Ben Jonson could never have expected.

No State affaires, nor any politique Club,
Pretend wee in our Tale, here, of a Tub.
But acts of Clownes and Constables to day
Stuffe out the Scenes of our ridiculous Play.

The plot involves a young man and woman whose names have been selected at random to marry each other as part of the coming Valentine Day celebrations. Young Awdrey is happy with simple-minded John, but his rivals have other ideas. During the course of the play, they perpetrate a series of dirty tricks designed to keep the other suitors away from the ceremony. One succeeds.

Most of the characters speak in a dialect I should consider vaguely southern or south-western English; ‘f’s’ are spoken like ‘v’s’, and ‘s’s’ like ‘z’s’. They mangle English in a way that was probably hilarious to their betters, and is still funny if you don’t mind dreadful puns.

Iohn Clay. Let ‘un bring a dog, but to my vace, that can
Zay I ha’ beat ‘hun, and without a vault;
Or but a cat, will sweare upon a booke,
I have as much as zet a vier her taile.

--A Tale of a Tub, Ben Jonson (circa 1633)