Professor James Loxley

Details of Professor James Loxley's inaugural lecture.

Event details

Lecture title: "Ben Jonson’s Road North"

Date: 25 February 2014

Time: 5.15pm

Venue: Lecture Theatre 183, Old College, South Bridge, Edinburgh, EH8 9YL

Lecture abstract

In July 1618, the poet and playwright Ben Jonson embarked on an enterprise that had been at least a year in the planning - an epic walk all the way from London to Edinburgh. This was to be one of the most memorable incidents in a noteworthy life, and Jonson himself later wrote a verse account of what he called his ‘adventures’ that summer. But his poem was lost in a fire before it could be circulated or printed, and since then the rationale for, and significance of, Jonson’s unusual poetical progress has been a focus only for guesswork.

However, in 2009 a surprise find at Cheshire Archives and Local Studies changed the picture. I was fortunate enough to discover a manuscript containing an account of the journey written by Jonson’s hitherto unsuspected travelling companion, which provides some striking new information about Jonson, his writing, his patrons and the social landscape through which he walked. In this lecture, I will look at what his companion’s account can tell us about the motivations and meanings of Jonson’s long walk to the north, and offer some reflections on what this new information on the journey can tell us about the culture and politics of the Stuart kingdoms in the decades after the union of the crowns.

Lecture video