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About the Online Edition

This digital edition of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson offers a fully searchable modern spelling text, arrayed in conjunction with old-spelling transcriptions of the textual witnesses and digital images of the early printed books and the most important manuscripts from which the text is derived.

These key primary materials are delivered via a best-in-class text viewing and comparison tool. Alongside this body of material, the edition offers a collection of large-scale documentary and contextual archival materials, together with essays analysing the text and interpreting its history and reception. In all, the complete Online Edition contains around 100 old-spelling texts and 500 contextual documents, plus over 80 essays, several hundred high quality images, a database digesting 500 documented performances of the plays, about 220 music scores (with midi capable audio), a dynamic timeline of Jonson’s Chronology, and a fully cross-linked bibliography comprising just under 7,000 items.

The website offers a number of extremely powerful and innovative searching tools which allow the entire corpus, or any subset of it, to be interrogated. A facetted browse paradigm underpins the entire website, allowing end users to explore the texts by character, location, person, date, or thematic element. Additionally an innovative ‘KWIC’ search combines the usability of real-time ‘autosuggest’ searching with a keyword-in-context display. The online edition is complementary to the print edition both in terms of its function and its substantially enlarged capacity. It may be used both independently and in conjunction with the print texts.

Read more about the Technical aspects of the Online Edition