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A copy

biography of a comic genius

Ben Jonson was a great man. In his years of famine from a mason, soldier, actor, was tall and thin - a "neck hollow cheeks," Thomas Dekker called - but the median age, the celebrated playwright and poet had increased to much meals without sponsorship and huge amounts of islands wine. A poem of 1619 summarizes punningly lifestyle and its consequences as "lost so much," and regrets that the ladies "can not kiss [his] belly of the mountain." In a letter to Lady Covell verse gives his weight as "twenty two stones in the book" and expects its this, add a few pounds out of pocket. Agility in the art of cadging is clearly not abandoned. In a career for 40 years, this "huge indoor play-maker" - as he calls in

the staple News - Cast a Giant Shadow for the Elizabethan and Jacobean literature Carolina landscapes. More than any other of his contemporaries - more than Marlowe, Shakespeare, Spenser and Donne, among the cream of the crop - the arrogant writer spectacularly fun to learn, truculent and (never forget) was a celebrity in his own time. And a generation after his death in 1637, when John Dryden looked back on the development of the English stage, rather than Jonson was Shakespeare who said " the greatest man of modern times "- but added a clause to this, saying:". I admire, but I love Shakespeare "

This beautifully designed engineering turbulent progress through the pages of the biography of new copies of Ian Donaldson. Donaldson was an eminent specialist in Jonson for decades and is an editor of the publication of seven volumes of the Cambridge Works

, published this year (with an expanded edition in 2013 electronic). The book is rich in detail and points of view, combining meticulous research with reading and is full of examples in the inimitable Johnson muscle, but the style of accurate fire. It is, as the editors say, the first major biography in 30 years - an excellent Life by David Riggs was published in 1989 - but now it's definitely the ultimate .

First Jonson as a playwright best known is the work

The Isle of Dogs

, co-written with Thomas Nashe pamphleteer in 1597, when he was in the mid-20. It was an explosive start. Considered by authorities as "indecent, seditious and sklandrous", which was dragged off the stage, and even suppressed so effectively that no trace remains of this text. Johnson was arrested - the first of three periods of recording imprisonment. When questioned, he later boasted, "judges" (which includes the famous Richard Topcliffe offset) "could get all this to all their demands, but yes and no." He was released after a few months and the following year had his first success with every man in his humor

(1610), for "the race for better weather does not matter" - but the origins of his family were Scots. His grandfather was of the Johnstons of Annandale, a clan of the border difficult. His father, who died one month before the birth of Ben, was a Protestant pastor who lost their property during the reign of Bloody Mary. His widowed mother, whose name was probably Rebecca, married to a builder named Robert Brett, whose modest home in Hartshorn Lane, near Charing Cross, he grew up. Johnson said of his mother when he was in prison in 1605 - another game, another scandal - he wrote a "Lust poison strong" for him to take in case of conviction, and to demonstrate "that it was not Churl ... first treated herself drunk. "Many of the details above is autobiographical, the" information ", recorded by hand for the first time by the Scottish poet William Drummond, who stayed at the castle Hawthornden Johnson in 1618.

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