SOURCE: "Jonson the Master: Stones Well Squared," in The Elizabethan Poets: The Making of English Poetry from Wyatt to Ben Jonson, Evans Brothers Ltd., 1969, pp. 127-56.

In the following essay, Inglis investigates Jonson's love, religious, and social poetry in relation to the facts of the poet's life.

Given the eminence I ascribe to Jonson, it seems right that this [essay] should open with a brief biography. But the decision is not only a critical one; Jonson occupies a position of unusual historical importance, and since we lack so much of the biographical evidence for Shakespeare whose career would be important in similar ways, Jonson's life is one of the few of which we can describe enough to know what life was like for a full-time professional in the world of letters. For Jonson, like Shakespeare, lacked Sidney's advantages of birth and ignored the particular aspirations of Ralegh or...