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Excerpt from Ben Jonson's Sad Shepherd: With Waldron's Continuation
The Sad Shepherd is not one of the great works upon which Jon son's Titanic reputation rests. It is, as a rule, little mentioned by critics, for it stands at a disadvantage in two important respects. In the first place, it is of little use for the purpose of illustrating those peculiar qualities, in virtue of which its author holds a position of his own in the motley company of Elizabethan playwrights. In the second, it has come down to us in a fragmentary state. As a consequence it probably finds few readers beyond professed students of Jonson, or such individual eccentrics as the present editor, who happen to take an interest in pastoral poetry as such. If, however, it bears little trace of the robust genius that portrayed the Alchemist and the F ox, it yet remains the most considerable achievement of that other Jonson, the delicacy of whose lyric utterance contrasts so strangely with the burly presence of the laureate. Mr Swinburne has very truly remarked that (c No work of Ben Jonson's is more amusing and agreeable to read, as none is more nobly graceful in expression or more excellent in simplicity of style n.
Editions. After Jonson's death on August 6, 1637, his works were collected and printed in two small folio volumes with the date 1640. The first of these was a reprint of the original folio of 1616, the second was composed of new matter. We find an entry in the Sta tioners' Register referring to this venture on March 20.
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