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Ben Jonson truly is a writer for our time, even if no one much reads or stages these plays anymore. Why would we?—we’re busy acting them out unwittingly.

No Shakespearean romance here. Many of the trusted ingredients, sure: word-drunk whimsy; pranks, pratfalls, and punning; whole hosts of schemers, fools, lovers and marks. But Shakespeare loved his heroes (and his antiheroes). Shakespeare’s plays have so much heart—however dark, however silly, however thorny, to read Shakespeare is to feel a great love—a great love for human beings.

The inimitable 20th century musician Brian Wilson described his goal as an artist, once, as: “To bring some love to people, spiritual love, you know? We wanted people to be covered with love, because there’s no guarantee that somebody will wake up in the morning with any love. It goes away, like a bad dream, it disappears.� To bring love to people—this is something great art can do.

Or not. Ben Jonson has no interest in love, spiritual or otherwise. His plays are vinegar in a wine bottle. Frankly, they’re mean.

And we live in mean times. A time of quack alchemists and vainglorious conmen—of “rogues, cozeners, imposters, bawds.� Forget Julius Caesar, this is the play that should have been put on in Central Park with a Donald Trump lookalike in the lead. This story of a “chemical cozener� and his “captain pander,� and all the fools they took in—“ladies and gentlewoman, citizens� wives, and knights in coaches ... oyster women, sailors wives, tobacco men,� not to mention pastors and deacons—and all of them willing, nay, eager, to trade all their earthly possessions for “some twelve thousand acres of fairy land.�

The play must be read as quickly as possible! Avoid annotations. No footnote is worth the loss of momentum—half the play is nonsense anyway, that’s the whole point! But Jonson, too, was a wizard in his way.