the tension between concealment and revelation affords a model for the poise that sustained Ben Jonson in the intricately linked worlds of royal court and commercial theatre during the middle years of his career and that made him such a pivotal figure in the cultural history of early modern England. (3)

In reality, however, cultural history plays a smaller role in the narrative that unfolds than does a rather more familiar Jonsonian theme:

His plots variously deal with conspiracies to commit fraud, murder, and treason, but all his conspirators trade in a single commodity: misinterpretation, that is, failures of the critical faculty. (12)

But I do not mean to suggest that the readings which follow are themselves familiar. They may not play post-modernist games, but they subject Jonson's best-known plays to new and revealing scrutinies.

For Jonson the art of secrecy provided a resilient set of plot conventions for both intrigue comedies and political tragedies. Second, it opened the way to represent two prominent secret societies of his day - the court and the city of London - to themselves, sometimes with considerable danger to himself. Finally, it allowed him to offer a blistering critique of the art of reading, or rather misreading texts - that is, of penetrating good sense to arrive at bad. (177)

This is an acute and perceptive formulation, if at times perhaps a little too all-inclusive for its own good. It is appropriate that it generates some of Slights's most searching questions in respect of Epicoene, a play about which he wrote one of the finest of New Critical responses to Jonson ('Epicoene and the Prose Paradox', 1970):

Truewit's travesty of a communally sanctioned process of mediation, conciliation, and punishment raises some troubling questions. For example, should the author of a theatrical jest conceal his object so thoroughly from his comic butts and his audience? Is a dramaturgical art that itself turns on secrecy a suitable instrument for exposing the mystifications that are so boggling English society in its newly generated enthusiasm for private selves, personal relations, and private spaces? (90)

This seems to me another very useful way of asking what has become one of the most central of current questions about Jonson, that 'pivotal figure in the cultural history of early modern England': to what extent is his art itself a symptom of the very tensions in society it depicts? It is a particular strength of this book that it poses the question so accessibly and in ways that keep reminding us that, however important these plays are as social documents, they are also great drama.