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H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson. Professor Harry Levin’s excellent one-volume
Ben Jonson: Selected Works
was, alas, unannotated, but, throughout, I have been guided, enlightened, and occasionally inhibited, by the scholarship of previous editors and by the insight of critics and commentators. Any editor is greatly indebted to others. For example, a casual glance at the editions of
Bartholomew Fair
by Eugene M. Waith (1963) and Edward B. Partridge (1964) will reveal how deep is their debt to E. A. Horsman’s edition for the Revels Plays (1960); I had the good fortune to be able to consult and make use of the work of all three gentlemen. I am grateful to Professor David Daiches and Mr R. P. C. Mutter for advice and encouragement.
FURTHER READING
    The bibliography on p. 33 and the prefatory matter to the three separate comedies show that there is no lack of critical and scholarly books on Ben Jonson. There has indeed been something of a Jonson revival in the United States with Professor Levin, dedicatee of at least two striking books on the dramatist, as the
doyen
of American Jonsonians. The general reader must be warned, however, that Jonson’s notorious learning has called forth an answering pedantry in some of his more recent American commentators and scholarly exegetes which is manifested either in a fancy line in chapter headings, ‘Comoedy of Affliction’ and ‘(Although no Paralel)’, or in mandarin prose:
    With Zeal-of-the-Land Busy… we are back on the highroad of linguistic caricature, where every cobblestone, every pebble, shrieksaffectation, and the whole gives off a lurid phosphorescence more like that of a Martian than an earthly landscape…
    Unlike Busy… Overdo is auto-intoxicate.
    Scholars who have immolated themselves in some part of ‘The Background’ (Renaissance philosophy, rhetoric, satire, psychology, alchemy, the Great Chain of Being itself) are sometimes slow to get back to Jonson’s marvellous liveliness on the printed page and to the theatrical potentialities of his comedies.
    Had I put an epigraph on the title-page, I should have adapted some words of Jonson’s from the epilogue to
Cynthia’s Revels, or The Fountain of Self-Love
:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â By God ’tis good, and if you lik’t, you may.
    Falmer House
,                                                                                         M. S. J.
    The University of Sussex
,
    Brighton
    St Bartholomew’s Day, 1965

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. BIBLIOGRAPHIES
    W. W. G REG .
A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration
, 4 vols., 1940–59.
    S. A. T ANNENBAUM.
Ben Jonson (A Concise Bibliography)
, 1938.
    S. A. and D OROTHY R. T ANNENBAUM .
Supplement to Ben Jonson, A Concise Bibliography
, 1947
2. SCHOLARLY WORKS OF REFERENCE
    G. E. B ENTLEY .
The Jacobean and Caroline Stage
, 7 vols., 1941–68.
    E. K. C HAMBERS .
The Elizabethan Stage
, 4 vols., 1923.
3. COLLECTED EDITIONS
    The Workes of Benjamin Jonson
, 1616.
    The Workes of Benjamin Jonson
, 2 vols., 1640.
    C. H. H ERFORD and P ERCY and E VELYN S IMPSON , editors.
Ben Jonson,
11 vols., 1925–52.
    A. B. K ERNAN and R. B. Y OUNG, general editors.
The Yale Ben Jonson,
in progress, 1962–.
4. BIOGRAPHICAL, CRITICAL, AND OTHER STUDIES
    J. B. B AMBOROUGH .
Ben Jonson
, 1959.
    J. A. B ARISH .
Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy
, 1960.
    J. A. B ARISH , editor.
Ben Jonson: A Collection of Critical Essays
, 1963.
    G. E. B ENTLEY .
Shakespeare and Jonson, Their Reputations in the Seventeenth Century Compared, 2 vols., 1945; The Swan of Avon and the Bricklayer of Westminster,