Odyssey Online

…I realise it’s Sunday just after lunch…where I have just finished Ian Donaldson’s new biography, Ben Jonson A Life, having spotted a positive review in the New York Times Book Review.  A contemporary of Shakespeare, and maybe, just maybe, the best playwright of that era after Shakespeare, Jonson is someone I studied as an undergrad and graduate student those many years ago.  Reading Donaldson’s fine new book was not only a reacquaintance with Jonson the man, but with memories of myself as a reader.  So if not exactly an exercise in rereading, an exercise in treading where a reader as trod.  For an overview of Jonson the writer try the Oxford Standard Authors, Ben Jonson edited, coincidentally enough, by Ian Donaldson (I’ll return the biography and it will be back in the Browsing Collection Monday…)