The Poems of Ben Jonson

Tom Cain is Emeritus Professor of Early Modern Literature at Newcastle University. He has worked on Ben Jonson for many years but has also written a study of Tolstoy (1977) and edited Nicholas Hilliard’s Art of Limning (1981), an anthology of Jacobean and Caroline Poetry (1981), and several collections of essays on the early modern period. In 2001, he published an edition of the large collection of poems left in manuscript by Robert Herrick’s patron, Mildmay Fane, Earl of Westmorland, and in 2013, with Ruth Connolly, he edited The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick. He has written essays on Donne and Jonson and edited Jonson’s Poetaster for the Revels Plays (1995) and Sejanus for the Cambridge Works of Ben Jonson. He is currently completing an edition of Ford’s The Lovers Melancholy for the Oxford Complete Works of John Ford, editing a volume of Waugh’s short stories for the Oxford Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, and writing a biography of John Donne.

Ruth Connolly is Senior Lecturer in Seventeenth-Century Literature at Newcastle University. She has written essays on the circulation of Stuart lyric poetry in manuscript, on early modern women’s writing and intellectual cultures, and on the poetry of Hester Pulter, Richard Lovelace, and Jonson. In 2011 she edited (with Tom Cain) a collection of essays, ‘Lords of Wine and Oile’: Community and Conviviality in the Poetry of Robert Herrick, and with Christopher Burlinson a special issue of Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 (Winter, 2012) on editing Stuart poetry. This was followed in 2013 by an edition with Tom Cain of The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, special issues of The Seventeenth Century on Cavalier writing (2018), and (with Naomi McAreavey) of Literature Compass on the literatures of early modern Ireland (2019). She is currently completing a monograph on the poetics of the body in early modern lyric and researching bookselling in early modern Newcastle.