Jonson and the Contexts of His Time.

In Robert Evans' third book since 1989 on Ben Jonson, he offers his readers a miscellany of historical contexts. Much of Jonson and the Contexts of His Time presents "new archival evidence" (xiii) bearing on various of Jonson's plays, masques, or poems, or builds on - and in certain instances recycles - scholarship now remote but still valuable to our understanding more fully Jonson's reception of and by his contemporaries. The conservative kind of historicism Evans practices here owes far more to the archival pursuits of a G.E. Bentley than to the new historicism with which his work has been bracketed in reviews of his companion study, Ben Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage. At its best, Evans' discoveries extend Bentley's and D.H. Craig's important work of historical retrieval and collection, including the documenting of previously unpublished allusions to Jonson. His latest book also augments our still-scanty knowledge of Jonson's relations to key patrons in his Caroline years, among them Newcastle, Weston, and Digby. If the organizational weaknesses of Jonson and the Contexts of His Time are glaring, individual chapters will be of durable interest to other scholars in the field.

In his preface Evans writes that he hopes his work "may have some value simply as presentations of new historical evidence, aside from any interpretations I have offered" (xi). In several chapters, Evans turns to rare manuscripts in the British Library to revive seventeenth-century debates over Jonson's targets in his plays and masques. For example, a speculation that lingered well into the Restoration linked Thomas Sutton, the wealthy founder of Charterhouse hospital, to Jonson's magnifico, Volpone. Evans publishes extensive excerpts from an anonymously-authored life of Sutton that set out to refute this supposition on the doubtful grounds that "'Ben understood well enough that his mushroome playes could never disparage or outlast mr Suttons . . . good workes where the oddes is as great as between paper and stone'" (54). In another source study, Evans compares in detail the "unique surviving manuscript" (99) of Robert White's masque Cupid's Banishment (1617), dedicated to Lucy, Countess of Bedford, and staged at Ladies Hall with Queen Anne in attendance, with Jonson's competing Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue. Evans mounts a plausible case for reading White's and Jonson's masques, staged in the same year, as invested in a triangulated rivalry and bid for Bedford's patronage. The most interesting of Evans's archival discoveries, however, is an unpublished epistolary pamphlet written by the educator and linguist Joseph Webbe in January, 1628, and addressed to Ben Jonson as the intellectual sponsor of his system of teaching the writing of Latin poetry. Webbe, a recusant who had been accused by John Gee of "'[inveigl[ing] disciples']" under the guise of promoting "[a new gayne way to learne Languages]" (134), seems a fascinating Caroline connection to pursue, given Jonson's apparent reconversion to Catholicism in his last decade, and the congruence between Webbe's humanist beliefs and Jonson's stances in his Discoveries.

Evans' Jonson and the Contexts of His Time thus performs a valuable service for other literary historians who will capitalize on his contextualizing of discrete works by Jonson and his contemporaries. It has little coherence as a book, given the heterogeneous choice of texts (and even contexts, as in Evans's diffuse chapter on The Devil is an Ass) and his at times bewildering crisscrossing of Jonson's career (most notably in his chapter comparing Dekker and Marston's Satiromastix [1601] with Jonson's epigrams to Newcastle [1625-1628]), but the final section, on Webbe's pamphlet, and Jonson's literary relations with his Caroline patrons, the Digbys and Richard Weston, are not only excellent pieces of scholarship and critical reading in their own right, but suggest what direction this study might have taken. Evans seems most at home with Jonson's non-dramatic canon. His sympathetic readings of key patronage poems in The Underwood (1640) do much to "illustrate 'the crucial importance of such intermediaries at a time when the poet's relations with the King and his status at court were less secure than they once had been" (148).

JENNIFER BRADY Rhodes College