The first collection of literary commentary memorializing Ben Jonson was published just a year after his death.  Its title -- Jonson Virbius -- sets an example this new volume seeks to follow, despite New Critical and Post-Structuralist doubts about the centrality of the author to the functions of literature.  I want to bring the figure of Jonson back from death.

So my unofficial subtitle is Jonson Virbius II.  Virbius was a minor mythological figure commonly identified by Renaissance mythographers as Hippolytus returned to life after being torn apart.  In the 1638 volume, the 33 elegists and their editor, Bryan Duppa, evidently sought to repair the damage Jonson suffered from attacks during his long decline, when he could no longer defend himself as ferociously as in his ambitious youth.  My primary task is to rescue Jonson from an opposite danger: not ridicule, but what T. S. Eliot rightly identified as "the praise that quenches all desire to read the book . . . the most perfect conspiracy of approval."