Ben Jonson and the Art of Secrecy

Laila Abdalla is an associate professor of English at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington, and former professor at McGill University.

Ben Jonson was as intriguing a personality as he was a playwright. A
public persona of uncompromising opinions, he was also a private man who
defended the right to a personal life. This book examines how the author
of plays that turn on deception and disclosure deploys the notion of
secrecy.

Jonson’s era was politically unstable, and secrecy, ranging from
underground plotting to government-sanctioned spying, permeated society;
the dramatic arts of the period reflect the preoccupation with
concealment. Slights’s matrix for examining the plays views
interpretation as the basis of secrecy. That is, how things are
understood obscures or reveals secrets; interpretation itself creates
secrets in that it can hide an objective truth behind a subjective
reading. The discussion on the nature of truth allows Slights to
investigate six plays as well as the playwright.

This is an excellent, well-researched, and informative book on one of
the Renaissance’s most unfathomable playwrights. Critically a
sensitive work, the book sometimes lapses into mysteries of its own.
Slights claims (not always truthfully) to avoid analyzing the psyches of
the Jonsonian characters, reasoning that it is “a doubtful critical
activity.” Paradoxically, however, he does not draw the line at
analyzing Jonson himself. And his use of archaic spelling when citing
Jonson makes immediate interpretation difficult for the reader
uninitiated in Renaissance English. But these are small criticisms of
this otherwise important work.