Yamada, Yumiko
“Ben Jonson: A Neoclassical Response to Cervantes”. In: Cervantes in the English Speaking World. (Estudios de literatura 96) Kassel 2005, pp. 3-24.

This essay argues that Ben Jonson (1572?-1637) was influenced by Cervantes through Thomas Shelton’s English translation of Don Quixote. Focusing on Jonson’s quotation from the Curate’s defence of the Aristotelian-Horatian dramatic canon in Part 1, it explores a parallel rivalry in playwriting – Jonson vs. Shakespeare as analogous to Cervantes vs. Lope de Vega. Like Jonson, Cervantes was a frustrated classical playwright, losing to Lope de Vega, the Spanish counterpart of Shakespeare, who preferred commercialism to classicism. It then relates chivalric romances, the main target of satire in Don Quixote, with the commercial theatre of Lope, by examining how the former was adapted on stage, as well as how the Spanish chivalric romance drifted onto the English stage. It concludes that Jonson’s first folio (1616) was an active response to the author of Don Quixote, who appears to struggle under similarly adverse conditions.