Eastward Ho Research Articles

Book review: E. Sridharan (ed.), Eastward Ho? India’s Relations with the Indo-Pacific

E. Sridharan (ed.), Eastward Ho? India’s Relations with the Indo-Pacific. Orient BlackSwan, 2021, pp. 487+ Bibliography and Index, ₹1825, ISBN 9789354420542.

Scottish Designs: Bedchamber Politics in Volpone

James I's accession to the English throne in 1603 was marked by the rising prominence of the Bedchamber as a powerful and semi-autonomous institution that was manned by an entourage of royal advisors and close personal associates who took care not just of the king's physical needs and private ablutions but also played a vital role in government and policy matters. Based on a prototype of the king's former integrated Scottish household this new ceremonial space became the crux around which the private and political life of the monarch was centered. Yet James' decision to reserve bedchamber positions solely for his Scottish countrymen caused deep disquiet and jealousy among the English political elite. This essay attempts to read the bedchamber setting in Volpone (notwithstanding its Venetian locale and characters) as a darkly humorous parody of the reorganized Scots-centric Jacobean Bedchamber, especially in its potential to function as a privileged site of power, homoerotic patronage, and material profit for a select few. Coming within a year of the composition of the infamous anti-Scots comedy Eastward Ho and written immediately in the aftermath of the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, Volpone (1606) is the closest albeit indirect reflection of the political disgruntlement and cultural anxiety prevailing in England in the first few years of James' reign.

도시희극 속 위기의 청년들: 크레딧 경제의 틈새 찾기

This paper aims to define and analyze young men’s credit crisis and their differentiated strategies in rebuilding their damaged credit by reading closely the two city comedies, Eastward Ho and A Trick to Catch the Old One. Theoretically, the early modern credit economy was based on the harmonious correspondences between moral credit and economic credit, thus orienting toward a “moral economy.” However, as moral credit could be constructed by performance or deceit, the credit economy based on the moral credit could also be manipulated to one’s interest by the clever use of the loopholes inherent in the credit economy. In Eastward Ho, Quicksilver, a “bad” apprentice, ruins his credit and is locked up in the Counter, a debtor’s prison, by his master and creditor, Touchstone. To get released from prison and to regain his credit, Quicksilver must receive a pardon from his former master. For that purpose, Quicksilver performs the role of a penitent prisoner and becomes an icon of penitence in the prison. Golding, a “good” apprentice, silently joins him in the plot as the director of Quicksilver’s performance, thus constructing his own credit as a merciful administrator. Touchstone, a shrewd merchant, also agrees to become a spectator of the show and admits Quicksilver as his apprentice again, thus helping to construct the moral economy of the world in the play. In A Trick, Witgood, a bankrupt prodigal, cannot rebuild his career so easily, because he has multiple creditors and his own uncle, Lucre, is the one who confiscated his land. As his credit cannot be easily rebuilt by mere performances and role-playing, Witgood appropriates the lusty widow stereotype and uses the marriage with a rich widow as leverage to get the assistance of his uncle. He also needs the power of papers and legal contracts, along with cunning manipulation of the hostility and rivalry between Lucre and Hoard, to navigate through the hostile world of London and retrieve his land and reputation. Quicksilver and Witgood, the young men in credit crisis, reveal the loopholes and dilemmas of the credit economy, and show how moral credit and economic credit defined and negotiated each other in the early modern England.

“It is become a cage of unclean birds”: The Presence of Plague in The Alchemist

This essay challenges the assertions of Patrick Philips and others that plague is not a meaningful subtext in The Alchemist by demonstrating various ways that the play can be interpreted as a satire of plague-time beliefs and practices. For example, Jonson's audiences would have recognized in the character Abel Drugger a satire of early modern medical care common in prose plague tracts. I also attempt to explain why Jonson would go to such lengths to conceal plague allusions in a play set in plague time. Ian Munro and Ernest Gilman have suggested that the plague was simply too traumatic to directly represent onstage, but it is also possible that Jonson was trying not to attract any official trouble after his experience with Eastward Ho, as David Riggs suggests. Jonson had to be careful not to directly attack the King, the Church of England, or the Royal College of Physicians, all of which had a stake in responding to plague.

Eastward Ho! Aspects of Eastern European Writing Translated into Irish

The article focuses on translations into Irish of literary texts by writers from several central and eastern European countries. The author adopts a historical approach by first drawing attention to the Irish language as a means of literary expression and a vehicle for the translation of classical texts in the Middle Ages. Irish came under sustained attack because of English rule from the seventeenth century onwards and was only spoken by the poor and the marginalized in the middle of the nineteenth century. However, towards the end of the nineteenth century the language experienced a revival. The latter process was intensified following the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. In 1926, a project for literacy and provision of reading material in the Irish language was implemented, and a government publishing company known as An Gúm started producing books for the new Irish-reading public. Since the start of the project, the general tendency has been for books by western European writers to be translated into Irish. However, a significant number of texts by eastern and central European authors, ranging from classics by Tolstoy and Chekhov to novels and short stories by contemporary Russian and Slovenian authors, have also been published over the years.

Volume 50 (2020)

Volume 50 (2020)

Collaborating on Credit: Ben Jonson’s Authorship in Eastward Ho!

AbstractAlthough the importance of Ben Jonson’s 1616 folio to the emergence of the author is already well established, the significance of collaboration to his early career has been somewhat overlo...

“As it was Played in the Blackfriars”: Jonson, Marston, and the Business of Playmaking

AbstractThis essay places Jonson, Chapman, and Marston’s Eastward Ho! at the center of a set of textual, theatrical, and financial negotiations that are revealed by a hitherto overlooked lawsuit in...

Shakespeare's Two Playhouses: Repertory and Theatre Space at the Globe and the Blackfriars, 1599-1613 by Sarah Dustagheer

Reviewed by: Shakespeare's Two Playhouses: Repertory and Theatre Space at the Globe and the Blackfriars, 1599-1613 by Sarah Dustagheer Tom Rutter (bio) Sarah Dustagheer. Shakespeare's Two Playhouses: Repertory and Theatre Space at the Globe and the Blackfriars, 1599-1613. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. x + 226. $99.00. From about 1609 onwards, Shakespeare's company The King's Men was in the unique position of having two permanent venues for performance, the outdoor Globe and the indoor Blackfriars. Sarah Dustagheer's book argues that this situation had implications for the company's repertory: they had to offer plays that could work in either venue or, to put it another way, that could variously exploit the different size, lighting, acoustics, audiences, and traditions of each. Dustagheer's analysis delves into the histories both of the company and of its venues, considering plays performed by the King's Men before they moved to the Blackfriars, and plays performed at the Blackfriars prior to 1609 by the Children of the Queen's Revels. Indeed, in her first chapter she goes further back to consider the Blackfriars precinct as it was before James Burbage built a [End Page 123] playhouse there in 1596: its origins as a Dominican priory, but also its repeated use as a place for royal and parliamentary business, its popularity as a residence for courtiers including Sir Thomas Cawarden, Henry VIII's Master of the Revels, its association with the making and sale of luxury goods, and its adoption as a performance space by the Children of the Chapel Royal in the 1570s. The history of the locale helps explain not only Burbage's initiative, but also the emphasis, in plays staged there later by the Children of the Queen's Revels, on court settings and traditions of court performance (exemplified by John Lyly, whose works they revived): as Dustagheer notes, that company's repertory contains an unusual number of plays that depict masques and other forms of private entertainment, thus giving a paying audience a taste of elite culture. At the outdoor Globe, meanwhile, plays like Julius Caesar and Coriolanus staged public scenes that linked the theatre with the civic life of the ancient world—a style of drama absent from the smaller, indoor, socially exclusive Blackfriars. In her subsequent chapter, Dustagheer moves from the social to the political and topographical spaces occupied by the Globe and Blackfriars. As a former monastic "liberty," Blackfriars was within the City but not of it, an anomaly that the City eventually overturned in 1608 without fully resolving it. Plays staged there over the preceding years, such as The Knight of the Burning Pestle and Eastward Ho, reflect this ambiguity in their ambivalent treatment of the urban space: detailed in their depiction of London settings, sensitive to problems of authority, but also somewhat derisive of the City's institutions. Globe plays, by contrast, tend to avoid engaging with London directly, instead veiling it under foreign locations ranging from Vienna (Measure for Measure) to Venice (Volpone)—a possible result, as Dustagheer suggests, of that playhouse's Southwark location, both less embattled politically and separated from the City by the expanse of the Thames. With The Alchemist in 1610, however, the King's Men could offer a play that was both staged in the Blackfriars and set there, and Dustagheer shows how Jonson exploits techniques previously used in the same location by the Children of the Queen's Revels: a largely indoor setting, and a blurring of the boundary between audience and action. As well as occupying different locations, the Globe and the Blackfriars were very different theatrical spaces. Shakespeare exploited the large, open-air nature of the former when scripting the loud sounds of thunder and of battle, effects that were avoided by dramatists writing for the more intimate Blackfriars. The smaller playhouse, by contrast, enabled more subtle forms of musicality, as did the long-standing association of the Children (whose origins were, after all, as choristers) with a range of musicians. Fittingly for Dustagheer's argument, The Tempest, a play written after the King's Men began performing at the Blackfriars, uses both types of effect, beginning with...

A World of Empires: The Russian Voyage of the Frigate Pallada by Edyta M. Bojanowska

Reviewed by: A World of Empires: The Russian Voyage of the Frigate Pallada by Edyta M. Bojanowska Marina Mogilner (bio) Edyta M. Bojanowska, A World of Empires: The Russian Voyage of the Frigate Pallada (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018). 373 pp., ill. Index. ISBN: 978-0-674-97640-5. Edyta Bojanowska's A World of Empires is a remarkable accomplishment. Nominally, this is a study of one author, Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov, and one travelogue – his The Frigate Pallada (1858), a description of the government-sponsored voyage around the world, a top-secret mission that was to open Japan to "western" trade before the United States and European powers had done so. Following this one author's account, the book covers an extremely vast and diverse geographical, political, artistic, and scholarly terrain. It reconstructs a truly complex and multilayered nineteenth-century discourse of empire and Russianness, globality and civilization, human difference and sameness. In fact, "following" is not the right word, as Bojanowska does not reproduce but problematizes the travelogue's structure. Each chapter of her book suggests useful interpretative frameworks for reading The Frigate Pallada as an essentially imperial, and hence internally multilayered and incoherent, narrative. Chapter 1, "From [End Page 428] London to Cape Town, or How to Run a Successful Empire," engages with Goncharov's processing of his impressions and observations from London and Dutch southern Africa's Cape Colony. Goncharov makes sense of these experiences through imperial comparisons that prompted him to elaborate complex discourses of colonialism, subjugation, civilizing mission, and resistance. Chapter 2, "Pineapples in Petersburg, Cabbage Soup on the Equator," explores the travelogue's themes of economic colonialism and exploitation, on the one hand, and emerging economic globality, exchange, and Asian economic power – on the other. In chapter 3, "Prying Open Japan, Prospecting Korea," Bojanowska shows us Goncharov and the Pallada's team in action, performing and simultaneously reflecting on colonialism, cultural and racial distances, and Russia as a "western" power in Asia. Chapter 4, "Eastward Ho!" relocates the reader to Siberia as seen by Goncharov through much the same conceptual lens he developed during the Pallada voyage. Chapter 5, "Russians Confront Human Diversity," builds on the previous chapters by zooming in on the repertoire of concepts and hierarchies of diversity available to Goncharov. Finally, chapter 6, "The Bestseller and Its Afterlife," traces the travelogue's reception from its first publication to today, exposing transformations of views on empire, colonialism, nationalism, and the place of Russia/USSR in the global world (the discussion of Soviet-era censorship of the text, which purged it of some explicitly racist language but remained blind to other problematic moments, is particularly fascinating). The vastness of the book's geographical scale and the complexity of its analytical tasks necessitate an interdisciplinary approach and familiarity with extremely diverse literatures, covering various global and local contexts and theoretical agendas. Bojanowska delivers on all accounts, as an interdisciplinary researcher and a scholar of remarkable historiographic erudition. Reflecting on her own method in the book, Bojanowska explains that she approaches Goncharov's travelogue as a "lens." First of all, it is a lens on mid-nineteenth-century global imperial history, and hence we are introduced to many key events of the time: British wars in the Cape Colony, the Taiping Rebellion in China, the ongoing imperial economic competition, Russian diplomatic efforts in Japan (compensating for the "Perry-centrism" of traditional diplomatic history), the Crimean War, and so on. No less important, The Frigate Pallada is a lens on Russian empireness; on Siberia as a place simultaneously colonial and national; and on the formation of national Russianness. The "lens" [End Page 429] methodology excludes any possibility of approaching the travelogue as a reflection of some "objective reality." Instead, Bojanowska is busy interpreting, contextualizing, and questioning its language, genre, and objects and places selected for comparison. This makes the book a fascinating intellectual journey. It is a must-read for everyone – regardless of disciplinary affiliation – interested in how empire becomes visible in a critical discourse while at the same time remaining in the background as a context for the very act of social reflection. I read this book as a historian...

Airy Agency in Early Modern English Drama: Ho Trilogy

ABSTRACT This article aims to analyse three early modern city comedies, which are Thomas Dekker and John Webster's Westward Ho and Northward Ho, and Ben Jonson, George Chapman and John Marston's Eastward Ho, to point to the intra-action between the human body and air. The analyses of these plays provide an insight into how air pollution and early phases of toxicity in the city shows the influence of the airy agency on human and nonhuman bodies. In this context, these three city comedies mention the difference between urban (polluted) and rural (fresh) air. The aim of this study is, thus, to trace the impacts of the airy agency in the early modern period on the human body, life, nature, and culture with references to the Ho trilogy.

Eastward Ho! Japanese Settler Colonialism in Hokkaido and the Making of Japanese Migration to the American West, 1869–1888

This article examines how Japanese colonial migration to Hokkaido in the first two decades of the Meiji era paved the way for Japanese trans-Pacific migration to the United States in the 1880s. It elaborates how Japanese leaders carefully emulated the Anglo-American settler colonialism in Japan's own expansion in Hokkaido by focusing on the emergence of the overpopulation discourse and its political impact in early Meiji. This colonial imitation also inspired the Japanese expansionists to consider the American West an ideal destination for Japanese emigration in the late nineteenth century. This study thus challenges the nation-centered and territory-bound history of the Japanese empire by showing that Japan's colonial expansion in Northeast Asia and Japanese trans-Pacific migration to North America were intertwined since the very beginning of the Meiji era.

Performing repentance: (in)sincerity in prodigal son drama and the Henry IVs

The parable of the prodigal son is the most popular repentance narrative in early modern drama, yet the authenticity of these prodigals’ repentances is frequently disputed. The truly repentant prodigal and posturing sinner are functionally identical on the early modern stage, and the parable was so renowned that the prodigal’s repentance and forgiveness could not only be predicted, but expected and engineered. This essay compares prodigals’ repentances across Eastward Ho, The London Prodigal, 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, and the Henry IVs. It argues that these plays exhibit discomfort with the outward display of repentance, the irrelevance of sincerity, and the viability of the parable as a repentance narrative. While some of these repentances have been discussed in isolation, their comparison allows for the examination of ambiguous repentances not as isolated incidents but a discernible trend in early modern culture, born from anxieties regarding the indistinguishability of feigned and ‘true’ performances of inward spiritual change. The authenticity of repentance, it emerges, cannot be determined, but repentance also need not be sincere to be accepted by a plays’ community. The authenticity of repentance proves not only impossible to identify, but ultimately irrelevant to these plays’ social worlds.

Obituary: Professor Clifford Edmund Bosworth, FBA, 1929–2015

The Maghreb Review, Vol. 42, 1, 2017 © The Maghreb Review 2017 This publication is printed on FSC Mix paper from responsible sources OBITUARY PROFESSOR CLIFFORD EDMUND BOSWORTH, FBA, 1929-2015 Professor Edmund Bosworth, Emeritus Professor of Arabic Studies at the University of Manchester, gained the affectionate nickname ‘Bozzy’ in some academic circles. It really suited him, echoing both Dickens and Boswell, for Bosworth certainly shared Boswell’s enormous energy for writing and Dickens’ fascination with all levels of society. Indeed, Edmund Bosworth was not always just interested in the grand sweep of Islamic history and high culture at the courts of caliphs and sultans. His desire to discover new facets of medieval Middle Eastern history led him to examine little-known byways of Muslim society, such as his lively and fascinating translation of a work in Arabic by alTha ‘alabi (d.1038) called The Book of Curious and Entertaining Information, or his book with the intriguing title of The medieval Islamic underworld: the Banu Sasan in Arabic society and literature. Bosworth’s enthusiasm and excitement were also aroused by travellers’ tales. He often ‘relaxed’ by writing about intrepid British visitors to the Middle East who recorded their experiences in a lively manner to an eager audience back home. Thus Bosworth published articles and a book about William Lithgow from Lanark in Scotland who travelled to Syria, Palestine, Turkey and North Africa in three major journeys and in 1632 wrote a book, describing what he called ‘the rare adventures and painful peregrinations of long nineteen years travails from Scotland, to the most famous kingdoms in Europe, Asia and Africa.’ Bosworth had a long-term fascination with Lithgow and others like him, such as Mrs Isabella Bishop, the first woman to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society - who went to remote Luristan and Kurdistan in 1890 - and the more famous James Elroy Flecker (d. 1915). Indeed, it is significant that the very last of Bosworth’s books, published in 2012, is entitled Eastward Ho! Diplomats, Travellers and Interpreters of the Middle East and Beyond, 1600-1940. Clifford Edmund Bosworth was born in Sheffield on 29 December 1928. His father, who came from a local family, was a government clerk. Bosworth was educated at Sheffield City Grammar School, where he acquired a lasting love of hill walking, music and history. In 1947 he won an exhibition in history to St John’s College, Oxford. Before going there, he had to spend two years in the army (1947-49). When talking about this period, he said wryly that he had learned to type then, though it was only with two fingers; this would be a useful skill for his future career. His studies in Oxford (1949-1952) were a revelation to him, and he gained a first-class degree in modern history. Whilst there, he met an American student studying Arabic. Intrigued by this he started learning 82 PROFESSOR CLIFFORD EDMUND BOSWORTH, FBA, 1929-2015 the language, and, after moving to Edinburgh (1952) to take up a Civil Service post in the Department of Agriculture for Scotland, he was able to carry on studying Arabic with the help of the Professor of Arabic at the university, the Rev. Montgomery Watt. This experience resulted in his being awarded a scholarship at Edinburgh University in 1954 to do a degree in Arabic, Persian and Turkish, and for this too he was awarded a first-class degree. He was appointed Lecturer in Arabic at St Andrews University in 1956, and remained there until 1967. He wrote his doctoral thesis whilst in St Andrews and was awarded a Ph. D. at Edinburgh University in 1961. His next move was to the Chair of Arabic Studies at the University of Manchester in 1967, where he remained until his retirement in 1990. From that time until last year he continued to publish an immense amount of high-quality scholarly work with undiminished enthusiasm and passion for his subject. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1992. He much enjoyed being affiliated from 2004 as a Visiting Professor at Exeter University. Bosworth did much more than work on his own research and teaching. He laboured...

Edward Greene, Goldsmith; William Marston, Apprentice; and Eastward Ho!

<p>This essay presents new information about the family of John Marston the dramatist. I review this material in relation to the work of Suzanne Gossett and W. David Kay, the two editors of <em>Eastward Ho!</em> for <em>The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson.</em> My article explores how our knowledge of a writer’s personal relationships may affect our understanding of that writer’s contribution to a collaborative enterprise.</p>

The Circulation of Knowledge in Early Modern English Literature by ed. Sophie Chiari

Reviewed by: The Circulation of Knowledge in Early Modern English Literature by ed. Sophie Chiari Rajiv Thind Chiari, Sophie, ed., The Circulation of Knowledge in Early Modern English Literature Farnham, Ashgate, 2015; hardback; pp. 282; 5 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £65.00; 9781472449153. This collection of sixteen articles – adapted from the proceedings of a 2012 conference on transmission and transgression in early modern England held at Aix-Marseille University – aims to freshly engage with the issues of transmission, initiation, and transgression. While the articles individually offer many useful insights, their subject matter is too varied and the volume’s focus on an activist kind of ‘transgression’ too singular to produce a really coherent whole. For this reviewer, the volume could have been more rewarding if it had addressed the issue of how knowledge could be transmitted and transformed in ways that reinforced contemporary social norms and worldviews. An example of this type of transformation would be how pre-Reformation literary anticlericalism, found for instance in the works of Dante, was turned into anti-Catholic, Protestant literature and entertainment in reformed England. Sophie Chiari and Roy Erikson mention such transmissions in their respective chapters, but do so only in passing. In her Introduction, Chiari announces that the collection’s overall argument ‘is that, in the age of Shakespeare, ideas were digested, transformed and turned upside down’ (p. 8). There is an activist purpose in this transformation and inversion: the poems and drama are seen ‘as agents of [End Page 144] change’ (p. 13). Such a reading of early modern texts, however, especially if it primarily reflects an investment in modern political concerns, runs the risk of being ahistorical. Gordon McMullan’s remarks in the volume’s Foreword seem problematic in this regard: The Taming of a Shrew’s Fernando, we are told, uses tactics that reduce ‘Kate to pious recitation of Biblical anti-feminism’ (p. xvi). This observation obliges us to make two unlikely and ahistorical assumptions: one, a kind of feminism existed in 1594; and two, the biblical text, having foreseen this feminism, is being antithetical towards it. The book’s first chapter by Richard Wilson is perhaps the most accomplished and interesting of the collection. It traces Foucault’s emergence, sinking, and eventual soaring in Shakespeare studies, when his writings could finally be pressed into service to buttress a radical Shakespeare who challenged authority through his art. While the chapter ends on an elegiac and subversive note, it subtly introduces and then dismisses Stephen Greenblatt’s powerful statement that appears in Shakespearean Negotiations: ‘Theatre is not set over against power, but is one of power’s essential modes’ (p. 25). It is also a good place to remind readers of Richard Helgerson’s illuminating and non-radical conclusion about Shakespeare’s plays, found in his momentous work, Forms of Nationhood (University of Chicago Press, 1992). The rest of the chapters offer valuable insights but are frequently circumscribed by their need to adhere to a ‘transgressive’ agenda. In the second chapter, David Levin shows how Shakespeare transforms Aristotle’s ideas of knowledge through his art, and ‘is guilty of transgressions against Aristotle’ (p. 45). In Chapter 3, Jonathan Pollock explores some intriguing echoes of Lucretius’s poem De rerum natura in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest. In Chapter 5, Christophe Hausermann uses the apprentice–master trope in city comedies such as A Shoemaker, A Gentleman (1608) and Eastward Ho! (1605) to reflect on how knowledge was transmitted. Chantal Schütz concludes in Chapter 6 that Middleton’s A Mad World, my Masters draws on older tropes of the Mother and the Courtesan, from Pietro Aretino’s Ragionamenti (1534) among others, to challenge ‘the patriarchal social code’ (p. 91). In Chapter 7, Claire Guéron’s conclusion appears strained: in Much Ado About Nothing, she writes, ‘every act of information-sharing involves both the foregrounding and the possible undermining of class and gender barriers’ (p. 103). In Chapter 11, Noam Reisner concludes, predictably, that in the character of Vindice in The Revenger’s Tragedy we ‘witness the transformation of the idea of transgression itself’ (p. 157). Laetitia Sansonetti proposes that Venus and Adonis downplays ‘the moral...

Eastward Ho and the Strength of Weak Ties for Playwrights and Patrons

1I am here, my most honoured Lord, unexamined or unheard, committed to a vile prison; and, with me, a gentleman, whose name may perhaps have come to your lordship: one Master George Chapman, a learned and honest man. The cause – would I could name some worthier, though I wish we had known none worthy our imprisonment – is, a (the word irks me, that our fortune hath necessitated us to so despised a course) play, my lord; whereof we hope there is no man can justly complain that hath the virtue to think but favourably of himself, if our judge bring an equal ear; marry, if with prejudice we be made guilty, afore our time, we must embrace the asinine virtue, patience. —Ben Jonson, letter to Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury 2 Ben Jonson was no stranger to trouble; he dueled with and killed his fellow actor Gabriel Spenser, he was tossed in prison for his involvement with the Isle of Dogs (1597), and his play Sejanus

Leaky London: Permeability and Porosity of Spaces in Eastward Ho

Leaky London: Permeability and Porosity of Spaces in Eastward Ho

Ann Baynes Coiro and Thomas Fulton Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to MiltonRethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton. Edited by Ann Baynes Coiro and Thomas Fulton. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. vii+306.

<i>Ann Baynes Coiro</i> and <i>Thomas Fulton</i> Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton<i>Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton</i>. Edited by Ann Baynes Coiro and Thomas Fulton. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. vii+306.

Economie reali ed economie simboliche nella city comedy giacomiana

This essay is focused on two samples of city comedy put on stage in the same year (1605), Eastward Ho!, written in collaboration by Ben Jonson, George Chapman, and John Marston, and A Trick to Catch the Old One , by Thomas Middleton. According to my reading, these two plays, by calling in question the traditional moral of the genre, reflect the cultural crisis and the ideological turmoils following the rise of the new mercantile economy. In Eastward Ho!, the final symbolic order is still based on moral values, but these values have now become part of the market sphere. In Middleton’s play, on the contrary, the final symbolic order is amoral, entirely compromised with the acquisitive logic, which means the impossibility of distinguishing between the market’s virtuous rules and its transgressions.