The Social Relations of Jonson’s Theater

The author considers the Elizabethan playwright Ben Jonson a realist and an acute observer of the transformation from feudalism to capitalism with many of the forms and purposes of Jonson’s realism resulting from the social dynamics of the London theater audience. Haynes presents a detailed literary historical argument about the sources and consequences of Jonson’s realism and examines the entanglements of life and art in Jonson’s time both through a look at the life of that period and through insightful readings of Jonson’s plays. The book is informed by the new social history and polemicizes against the moral and formal preoccupations of the past two generations of Jonson criticism.