Ben Jonson and the Lucianic Tradition

The challenge to the audience in Jonson’s major comedies is usually seen as an extension of the provocative techniques of English Morality drama. In this lucid and penetrating study, Professor Duncan aims to supplement that view by suggesting a more sophisticated precedent for Jonson’s methods in the practice of ‘oblique teaching’, which Erasmus and More developed out of their admiration for the Greek author Lucian. Jonson shows that stage-comedy is not as incompatible with the techniques of ‘Menippean’ non-dramatic satire as has often been thought. More generally, what is called here his ‘art of teasing’ places him in the centre of a long line of Christian humanist writers - stretching from Erasmus and More to Milton and Swift - who used fiction to educate their public through devious processes of moral and intellectual testing.