Paper Name: THE RENAISSANCE LITARATURE Assignment Topic :Ben jonson`s chief plays

Name: solanki pintu vSem : 1Roll No : 35Enrollment No: PG15101037Email: solankipintu1991@gmail.comSubmitted to : M.K. BHAVNAGAR UNIVERSITY Department Of English  

BEN JONSON • Name : Benjamin Jonson• Birth Date : June 11th, 1572• Place of Birth : London, England • Occupation : Playwright, Actor and Poet• Famous Works :  Every Man in His

Humor, Volpone, The Alchemist, The Coronation Triumph, To Celia

• Death Date : August 6th, 1637• Place of Death : London, England

His most famous plays

• Volpone

• The Alchemist

• Epicoene or The silent woman

• A tale of a tub

• The devil is an ass

INTRODUCTION• Volpone was first performed at the

Globe Theater in the spring of 1606.• Its audiences include some

aristocrats, prosperous citizens, lower-class groundlings and some learned people at Oxford and Cambridge, to whom Jonson dedicated the printed edition of Volpone.

• The play, set in Venice is about Volpone (which means fox in Italian), a rich man, who makes his money by pretending to be a dying man with no family with a large inheritance.

The Alchemist• The Alchemist a comedy by English

playwright Ben Jonson. First performed in 1610 by the King's Men, it is generally considered Jonson's best and most characteristic comedy;

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge claimed that it had one of the three most perfect plots in literature. The play's clever fulfillment of the classical unities and vivid depiction of human folly have made it one of the few Renaissance plays (except the works of Shakespeare) with a continuing life on stage (except for a period of neglect during the Victorian era).

Epicoene or The silent woman

• Epicœne, or The silent woman, also known as Epicene, is a comedy by Renaissance playwright Ben Jonson.

• It was originally performed by the Black friars Children or Children of the Queen's Revels, a group of boy players, in1609.

• It was, by Jonson's admission, a failure on its first presentation; however, John Dryden and other championed it, and after the Restoration it was frequently revived—indeed, a reference by Samuel Pepys to a performance on 6 July 1660 places it among the first plays legally performed after Charles II's ascension.

A tale of a tub

• A Tale of a Tub is a Caroline era stage play, a comedy written by Ben Jonson.

• The last of his plays to be staged during his lifetime, A Tale of a Tub was performed in 1633 and published in 1640 in the second folio of Jonson's works.

The devil is an ass• The Devil Is an Ass is a Jacobean

comedy by Ben Jonson, first performed in 1616 and first published in 1631.[1]The Devil Is an Ass followed Bartholomew Fair(1614),

• one of the author's greatest works, and marks the start of the final phase of his dramatic career.

• However just or unjust may be the characterization of Jonson's later plays as his "dotages," there would be no more great works after Bartholomew Fair, and a full decade would elapse between The Devil Is an Ass and Jonson's next play, The Staple of News.

Every man out of his Humour

• Every Man out of His Humour is a satirical comedy written by English playwright Ben Jonson, acted in 1599 by the Lord Chamberlain's Men.

• It is a conceptual sequel to his 1598 comedy Every Man in His Humour.

• It was much less successful on stage than its predecessor, though it was published in quarto three times in 1600 alone; it was also performed at Court on 8 January 1605.