Ben Jonson: A Life
"A deeply researched but happily readable new biography of Jonson" --The New York Times Book Review"A fascinating portrait... Brilliant biography." --Daily Telegraph"An authoritative and lucid biography." --Sunday Telegraph"Definitive biography of this quarrelsome playwright." --Sunday Times"The biographical material on Jonson is extraordinarily rich... Donaldson's fine book is stocked with new material." --The Guardian"A work of clarity and lucidity, exact in its historical detail, full of new material and ingeniously suggestive in its conjecture and interpretation." --Sam Leith,Spectator"An absorbing biography" --New Statesman"This is a measured, comprehensive book written with style, sympathy for his subject, and scholarly balance. Other good Jonson bios are out there...but for sheer reach, grasp, and panache, there may never be a better one than this." --The Philadelphia Inquirer"Donaldson's biography is well-paced, readable, and authoritative." --lThe New Criterion"His deep involvement with Jonson scholarship and criticism ... is apparent on every page of his authoritative, elegantly written, and illuminatingly illustrated biography." --Stanley Wells,The New York Review of Books"This volume embeds Jonson intimately in the social, political, and literary crosscurrents of Jacobean London. ...  An indispensable research aid.  Highly recommended." --Choice"Provides an incisive summary of contemporary research on Jonson's life and works." --Renaissance Quarterly"Wherever he may be in his after-life, Ben Jonson must be purring with delight at this latest, most magisterial biography of his. Than thisLife, nothing more detailed, more elaborate, more painstakingly researched can be conceived. Through all the recorded details, many of them left to posterity by the subject himself, the author has so well succeeded - as no author of Shakespeare's life has ever succeeded - in entering into the mind of his poet, in agreeing with him at almost every point, even (it might seem) in sharing with him what he calls 'his spiritual shuttling between the English and the Roman religions' (p. 57), as to form almost one entity." --The Heythrop Journal