Ben Jonson and the Art of Secrecy

In Ben Jonson andthe Art of Secrecy, William Slights argues that "the tension between concealment and revelation affords a model for the poise that sustained Ben Jonson in the intricately linked worlds of royal court and commercial theatre during the middle years of his career" (p. 1).He is led to his topic by the playwright and his times, the playwright whose plots regularly depend upon keeping and not keeping secrets, and times marked by the covert schemes both of state spies and of criminal and seditious conspirators.Secrecy also informed the reading and writing of texts, which protected from the ignorant the more removed mysteries of politics, science, and religion, but also stirred the suspicions of the censors, who investigated texts for hidden meanings that might prove dangerous to Jacobean authorities.Having considered (largely on the basis of Shakespeare's works) secret places

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