The Story of Charis

Abstract ‘A Celebration of Charis in Ten Lyric Pieces’ (The Under wood, 2) is one of the most attractive and seemingly most accessible of all Ben Jonson’s poetic works. Subtle, humorous, enchanting, these often admired lyrics appear at a casual reading to present few problems of exegesis or interpretation. Yet the sequence has pro voked sharply divergent readings over recent years. There is continu ing disagreement amongst critics about its tone and seriousness, about the contexts-intellectual, historical, and literary-within which it may need to be understood, and even about the main out lines of the narrative which these seemingly simple lyrics unfold.