Ben Jonson, China, and the cosmopolitan.

In this article author discusses definitions as starting points for exploring English playwright Ben Jonson's ideas about the interrelations of people, things and places. It further discusses various definitions of 'cosmopolitan' in the Oxford English Dictionary; emerging global interaction in the early modern period wrought by a global economic network centring on China; and the English cosmopolitan's fantasy of the baboons near China in "Volpone" play by Jonson.