IN 1932, T. S. Eliot's Selected Essays 1917–1932 arrived in print. The influence of these essays on subsequent critics and critical methods cannot be exaggerated, and even now, over eighty years since publication, their influence endures in the professional debates concerning aesthetics and literary methods of interpretation. Among Eliot's essays is “Ben Jonson,” a somewhat curious defense of Jonson's literary merit. For Eliot, Jonson's writings seek to appeal to the reader's mind; and so, in order for a contemporary reader to appreciate the “artistic value” of any individual work, one must labor through the corpus of Jonson's work as a whole. In addition to this, Eliot describes another necessary component to the method of understanding Jonson's work:

This recommended practice of lifting Jonson's works out of historical context dominated Jonsonian scholarship until the relatively recent past. Even L. C. Knights's ostensibly materialist examination of drama and society in the “age of Jonson” presents a cultural context available to Jonson as a source for his satire; however, Jonson himself remains precariously beyond the implicating reach of his own historical moment. In other words, for Knights, the age is of Jonson, Jonson is not of the age.

In the latter part of the twentieth century, however, scholarly work on Jonson attempted to read his texts through the multiple cultural ideologies and practices that constituted his work, and that in turn he participated in constituting. In his article, “Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson: Shifting Grounds of Authority and Judgment in Three Major Comedies,” Don E. Wayne provides a reappraisal of L. C. Knights's book and, at the same time, offers a more expansive perspective through which critics may (re-)locate Jonson's roles as playwright, poet, and social critic.