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Benjamin Jonson and English Renaissance Literature

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Benjamin Jonson, also named Ben Jonson, is considered as the second most renowned writer of English Renaissance literature. Only the great William Shakespeare himself is found more famous through history. Jonson started out as a bricklayer and later became a mercenary in the Netherlands, before he started his writing and acting career. Over the years Jonson became an enormously successful writer of masques (a form of festive courtly entertainment) and he acquired many patrons at court and King James I valued his learning highly. In the early periods Jonson was mostly writing plays for the theatre and the courts, but over time he drifted in to more and more of poem writing. Many of Jonson ´s fellow playwrights wrote for small coterie (aristocrats and intellectuals) audiences or for theatre companies that preferred not to let go of the scripts (Norton p. 707). The way of distributing literary works was normally to circulate them in private manuscripts, but for Jonson this was not the case with his edition of the folio Works, At this time publishing a work was basically unheard of, but Ben Jonson did publish his folio (i.e. collected form) Works as early as 1616. The thousand-plus, large-size pages work gather together all Jonson's significant publications to date, placing them in chronological order within their appropriate genres and introducing the whole with a lavishly engraved title page that spells out the thoroughly artistic concerns of the contents (stiba-malang.ac.id). The folio contains a massive nine plays, thirteen masques, six entertainments and two works of non-dramatic poetry. To My Book is a part of one of the poetic works; Epigrams. By doing this he became the first English writer to dignify his dramas by terming them "works  (enotes.com). It is almost satiric that the year of 1616 is the same year that Jonson ´s good friend William Shakespeare dies. Mr. William Shakespeare ´s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies, the fir

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