Work on Ben Jonson has long been dominated by the 11-volume Oxford text of his Works , edited by C.H. Herford, Percy Simpson and Evelyn Simpson (1925-52). In this monumental edition, Jonson seems a remote and forbidding figure, an author of formidable learning and literariness. This collection of essays by twelve leading scholars, editors, historians and bibliographers explores ways in which modern understanding of Jonson's texts has undermined the emphasis of the Oxford edition, and generated a Jonson whose Works and career look quite different. Addressing the competing needs of future readers, teachers and performers, it asks how this reconceptualized Jonson might best be transmitted into the next century. The volume also includes a new Jonson text, The Entertainment at Britain's Burse , written in 1609 to celebrate the royal opening of the Earl of Salisbury's commercial development in the Strand. Discovered in 1996, it is the most significant addition to Jonson's canon this century, and is here printed for the first time.

DAVID BEVINGTON Phyllis Fay Horton Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago MICHAEL CORDNER Reader in the Department of English and Related Literature, University of York HUGH CRAIG Department of English, University of Newcastle, N.S.W., Australia KEVIN DONOVAN Professor of English, Middle Tennessee State University ROBERT C. EVANS University Alumni Professor, Auburn University, Montgomery DAVID L. GANTS Lecturer in Literature, University of Georgia JAMES KNOWLES Lecturer in English, University of Newcastle upon Tyne JOSEPH LOEWENSTEIN Associate Professor of English, Washington University, St. Louis HELEN OSTOVICH Associate Professor of English, McMaster University, Canada LOIS POTTER Ned B. Allen Professor of English, University of Delaware BLAIR WORDEN Professor of Early Modern History, University of Sussex