-
Ben Jonson, the Earl of Clarendon, and the Conspiracy of Catiline
- Huntington Library Quarterly
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Volume 83, Number 3, Autumn 2020
- pp. 615-641
- 10.1353/hlq.2020.0026
- Article
- Additional Information
abstract:
This essay illustrates the subterranean presence of classical writing in seventeenth-century English political thinking. It shows how Ben Jonson's Catiline his Conspiracy (1611), a dramatization of Sallust's Bellum Catilinae, penetrated the mind of one of Jonson's disciples, the eminent statesman and royalist historian Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. Over the decades after Jonson's death, the play helped Clarendon, as well as other followers of Charles I, to make sense of the nation's descent into civil war and revolution.