George Parfitt – författare

One of the greatest English playwrights of the seventeenth century, Ben Jonson was also a deeply influential lyric poet, whose poetry combined classical ideals with a vigorous interest in contemporary life and colloquial language. The Complete Poems contains all the volumes of poetry Jonson published in his lifetime - including Epigrams, The Forest and Underwoods - alongside a wide variety of his other poems collected after his death. Ranging from deeply moving pieces such as 'On My First Son' and the elegant love lyric 'Song to Celia' to brutally satirical poems such as 'On Poet-Ape' and the reflective 'An Ode to Himself', it offers a powerful celebration of both one man's life, and of an age.

This study does not set out to deal with all aspects of Donne's life and work. Rather, it aims to examine selected aspects of the life and work in the context of the times Donne lived in, seeking to emphasise those features which are most alive in our times. Particular emphasis is placed upon the period between Donne's marriage in 1601 and his ordination in 1615. The last period of his life and its main literary product, the sermons, are treated more briefly while the treatment of the early years is limited by the gaps in the surviving evidence. Both his poetry and his prose are seen less in purely aesthetic terms therefore, than as products of a difficult life lived at a difficult time.

The two plays which make up this volume are of different quality. While no one would claim that The Atheist's Tragedy is a masterpiece, it is an important play because in it the exhortation 'Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord' is acted upon with unusual consistency, and because stringent `puritan' moral attitudes are dramatised in the context of traditional revenge themes. The Revenger's Tragedy, on the other hand, is a masterpiece; a satirical tragedy with farce structure and poetic vision focused upon the vice and corruption of the imagined Italy of the Jacobean period. Its bleak view of humanity links the play with the strongly satirical theatre of the early seventeenth century, showing the dramatist's affinity with Jonson and Marston. Although The Atheist's Tragedy and The Revenger's Tragedy are commonly linked in readers' minds, there has 'been much disagreement since the end of the nineteenth century about the authorship of The Revenger's Tragedy. The issue is fully aired in the Introduction to the volume, the editor's view being that the play is best regarded as anonymous; however, the two plays, are printed together here to enable readers to compare them as discussions of the morality of revenge.

Concerned with English poetry of the 17th century, this text attempts to explain how this poetry relates to the century in which it was written. This second edition emphasizes the relationship of the verse with the century's socio-political history and includes a section on women poets.