Jonson was a key figure in rebuilding the repertoire of the revived playhouses of Restoration London, but as a model he was inhibiting as well as enabling. This essay first explores the circumstances in which his plays were revived and updated (exclusively by the King’s Company, who had their monopoly on Jonson’s plays confirmed in 1669). It goes on to look at the purposes to which the rival Duke’s Company put Jonson’s public image, as they sought to produce a Jonsonian comic output of their own. Both Thomas Shadwell and Edward Howard crafted works that drew on the plots and characters of Jonson’s comedies, particularly Epicene, concentrating the erotic themes suggested by the originals. The essay addresses Jonson’s predominance in the 1670–1 theatrical season, a crucial point at which aspects of his dramatic afterlife coalesced and the direction of comedy into the next decade was being formulated, and focuses on two Duke’s Company comedies: Shadwell’s The Humorists and Howard’s The Six Days Adventure; or, The New Utopia. It argues that these playwrights’ direct, practical efforts to enhance Jonson’s reputation (whilst strengthening their own) saw an awkward updating of humours comedy with moralistic depictions of erotic and homoerotic appetites.

In ‘Inviting a Friend to Supper’ Jonson celebrates an Horatian ideal of modest conviviality with intimates. The ironies of that poem, which hint at excesses waiting to erupt, point to another way in which he could be seen – as a man given to bodily excess and driven by his appetites.The anecdote of Jonson drawn drunk through Paris on a cart by his young tutee, Wat Raleigh, helped construct that image, along with the many references to his love of wine and to his physically imposing body.This essay explores the ways in which Jonson’s London plays – especially Epicene, Bartholomew Fair, and The Alchemist – contributed to his popular image as a recorder of and participant in the sensory excesses possible in the urban context where he spent much of his life. Jonson was acutely attuned to the sensory environment of London: to the sounds, sights, smells, and touches that invited its residents to indulge their senses even while threatening to shatter their self-control and social identities. This essay demonstrates the role of the urban plays in the construction of a Jonson whose contemporary image was in part defined by his corporeality and immersion in the life of the senses.