After Shakespeare's death, the poet and dramatist Ben Jonson (1572–1637) was the leading literary figure of the Jacobean era. Jonson's aesthetics hark back to the Middle Ages and his characters embody the theory of humours. According to this contemporary medical theory, behavioral differences result from a prevalence of one of the body's four "humours" (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile) over the other three; these humours correspond with the four elements of the universe: air, water, fire, and earth. However, the stock types of Latin literature were an equal influence.^[76] Jonson therefore tends to create types or caricatures. However, in his best work, characters are "so vitally rendered as to take on a being that transcends the type".^[77] Jonson's famous comedy Volpone(1605 or 1606)) shows how a group of scammers are fooled by a top con-artist, vice being punished by vice. Other major plays by Jonson are Epicoene (1609), The Alchemist (1610), and Bartholomew Fair (1614).

Others who followed Jonson's style include Beaumont and Fletcher, who wrote the popular comedy, The Knight of the Burning Pestle(probably 1607–08), a satire of the rising middle class, especially of those nouveaux riches who pretend to dictate literary taste without knowing much literature at all. In the story, a couple of grocers wrangle with professional actors to have their illiterate son play a leading role in a drama. He becomes a knight-errant wearing, appropriately, a burning pestle on his shield. Seeking to win a princesses' heart, the young man is ridiculed much in the way Don Quixote was. One of Beaumont and Fletcher's skills was that of portraying of how feudalism and chivalry had turned into snobbery and make-believe and that new social classes were on the rise.^[78]

Another popular style of theatre during Jacobean times was the revenge play, which was popularized in the Elizabethan era by Thomas Kyd (1558–94), and then further developed later by John Webster (?1578-?1632). Webster's most famous plays are The White Devil(1612) and The Duchess of Malfi (1613). Other revenge tragedies include The Changeling written by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, The Atheist's Tragedy by Cyril Tourneur, first published in 1611, Christopher Marlow's The Jew of Malta, The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois by George Chapman, The Malcontent (ca. 1603) of John Marston and John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. Besides Hamlet, Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus is a revenge tragedy.^[79]

George Chapman (?1559-?1634) also wrote a couple revenge tragedies, but today he is remembered chiefly for his famous translation in 1616 of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey into English verse.^[80] This was the first ever complete translations of either poem into the English language. The translation had a profound influence on English literature and inspired John Keats's famous sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" (1816).

The most important prose work of the early 17th century was the King James Bible. This, one of the most massive translation projects in the history of English up to this time, was started in 1604 and completed in 1611. This represents the culmination of a tradition ofBible translation into English that began with the work of William Tyndale, and it became the standard Bible of the Church of England. The project was headed by James I himself, who supervised the work of forty-seven scholars.^[81]

Besides Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, the major poets of the early 17th century included the Metaphysical poets: John Donne (1572–1631), George Herbert (1593–1633), Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell, and Richard Crashaw.^[82] Their style was characterized by witand metaphysical conceits, that is far-fetched or unusual similes or metaphors, such as in Andrew Marvell’s comparison of the soul with a drop of dew, in an expanded epigram format, with the use of simple verse forms, octosyllabic couplets, quatrains or stanzas in which length of line and rhyme scheme enforce the sense.^[83] The specific definition of wit which Johnson applied to the school was: "a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike."^[84] Their poetry diverged from the style of their times, containing neither images of nature nor allusions to classical mythology, as were common, and there are often allusions to scientific or geographical discoveries. There is also a frequent concern with religious subjects in their poetry^[85]