What, according to Dryden, are Ben Jonson’s
virtues as a playwright?
Answer: According to Dryden in An
Essay on Dramatic Poesy, Ben Jonson is among the best known writers and
theorists of English renaissance literature, second in reputation only to
Shakespeare. A prolific dramatist and a man of letters highly learned in
the classics, he profoundly influenced Augustan age through his emphasis on the
precepts of Horace, Aristotle and other classical Greek and Latin thinkers.
He was master of mankind love in any of his scenes. His
genius was too serious to do it gracefully; he was deeply conversant in the
ancient, Greek and Latin. Some time he translated word to word from ancient.
Dryden remarks on Ben Jonson who is compared with Shakespeare and in this way
the respective merits of the two are brought out.
“As
for Jonson, to whose character I am now arrived if we look upon him while he
was himself (For his last plays were but his dotages) I think him the most
learned and judicious writer which any theater ever had. He was a most severe
judge of himself as well as others. In his work you find little to retrench or
alter.wit and language and humor also in some measure we had before him I but
sometime, something drama was waiting till he came .