SOURCE: Donaldson, Ian. “Politic Picklocks: Reading Jonson Historically.” In Jonson's Magic Houses: Essays in Interpretation, pp. 125-42. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.

In the essay below, Donaldson offers an autobiographical reading of Every Man in His Humour.

A central problem in the methodology of both the new and ‘old’ historicism turns on the nature of the link that is assumed to exist between historical description and literary interpretation. The monolithic accounts of Elizabethan systems of belief assembled by so-called old historicists such as E. M. W. Tillyard (it is common these days to complain) often seem quite at variance with the diverse and at times rebellious energies of the literary texts which they are apparently devised to illuminate. Even in the work of a more sophisticated old historicist such as L. C. Knights the supposedly related activities of historical and literary investigation seem often to tug in contrary directions. The...