Ben Jonson, o Grande Escritor Inglês Eclipsado

A primeira obra literária que o SB leu em inglês foi Volpone, uma peça escrita por Ben Jonson [tudo bem, vocês vão dizer que não entendi porra nenhuma dela]. Naquela época eu queria achar que Jonson era tão importante quanto Shakespeare... ok, vamos deixar de lado meus arroubos críticos e vamos ao que interessa, a nova biografia de Jonson escrita por Ian Donaldson foi lançada pela OUP. Nesta resenha no The Spectator lemos: Jonson was a bruiser, intellectually and physically. He was poet, soldier and brickie. That was when poets were hard. He once walked to Edinburgh and back for a bet. He put his own shoulder to the wheel when scenery needed rotating for his masques. Towards the end of his life he weighed 20 stone. Ugly bugger, too; he was described by his sometime associate Thomas Dekker as ‘a staring Leviathan’ with ‘a terrible mouth’ and ‘a parboiled face ... punched full of oilet holes, like the cover of a warming pan’.