Reading progress update: I've read 129 out of 285 pages.
Ben Jonson was the most aggressively self-opinionated, conceited, quarrelsome, vociferous and self-advertising literary and theatrical figure of his time. He was also one of its most powerful satirists, a lyric poet of genius, a playwright of great though uneven achievement, the finest of all creators of court masques, an autodidact who turned himself from a bricklayer’s apprentice into a considerable classical scholar, and perhaps the most powerful advocate in his time of the value to society of the artist as critic.
Ha! What an introduction!