Ben Jonson

Playwright, Author

1572 – 1637

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Who was Ben Jonson?

Ben Jonson was a playwright, poet, and literary critic of the seventeenth century, whose artistry exerted a lasting impact upon English poetry and stage comedy. He popularised the comedy of humours. He is best known for the satirical plays Every Man in His Humour, Volpone, or The Foxe, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fayre: A Comedy, and for his lyric poetry; he is generally regarded as the second most important English dramatist, after William Shakespeare, during the reign of James I.

The literary artist Ben Jonson was a classically educated, well-read, and cultured man of the English Renaissance with an appetite for controversy whose cultural influence was of unparalleled breadth upon the playwrights and the poets of the Jacobean era and of the Caroline era.

Famous Quotes:

  • The covetous man never has money. The prodigal will have none shortly.
  • Talking is the disease of age.
  • There is no greater hell than to be a prisoner of fear.
  • A good poet's made as well as born.
  • No man is so foolish but he may sometimes give another good counsel, and no man so wise that he may not easily err if he takes no other counsel than his own. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master.
  • Art has an enemy called ignorance.
  • Language most shows a man, speak that I may see thee.
  • I'll give anything for a good copy now, be it true or false, so it be news.
  • Cares that have entered once in the breast, will have whole possession of the rest.
  • Woman, the more careful she is about her face, the more careless about her house.

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Born
Jun 11, 1572
Westminster
Spouses
Nationality
  • England
Profession
Education
  • Westminster School
Died
Aug 6, 1637
Westminster
Resting place
Westminster Abbey

Submitted
on July 23, 2013

Citation

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