SOURCE: "Ben Jonson and the Centered Self," in Modern Critical View: Ben Jonson, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1987, pp. 89-110.

In the following essay, Greene claims that all of Jonson 's work is organized around two images: the circle, which implies harmony and equilibrium, and a center, which suggests the ruler or solitary independence. Greene traces how the use of these symbols differs in the masques, poems, and plays.

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"Deest quod duceret orbem" reads the motto of Ben Jonson's famous impresa with the broken compass. After the fashion of imprese, it contains a kind of transparent enigma, to be solved in this case by the reading of its author's canon. For the orbis—circle, sphere, symbol of harmony and perfection—becomes familiar to the student of Jonson as one of his great unifying images. In a sense, almost everything Jonson wrote attempts in one way...