Jonson: the Epistle to Volpone

Abstract

The Epistle to Volpone (1607) was the earliest free-standing critical treatise by Jonson to see print. There are, to be sure, a number of critical pronouncements in earlier works by Jonson, such as Lorenzo Jr’s encomium on poetry in Every Man In His Humour (printed 1601), the various Grexes in Every Man Out of His Humour (1600), and incidental commentary on those parts of The Magnificent Entertainment (1604) for which Jonson had been responsible. There are also relatively brief prefaces to the printed texts of Sejanus (1605) and the masque Hymenaei (1606). But all of these relate very specifically to the works in which they appear, even if the neoclassical and humanist vocabularies they deploy connect them readily enough with wider socio-aesthetic agendas.

‘Ben Johnson, I think, had all the critical learning to himself; and till of late years England was as free from critics, as it is from wolves.’

(Thomas Rymer, 1674)