Jonson's Play Research Articles

Ruzante's Moscheta as a New Possible Source for Ben Jonson's Volpone

Abstract This paper sheds light on the intertextuality of Ben Jonson's Volpone (1605) by looking at the textual affinities between the Volpone and Celia subplot in acts I-II-III of Jonson's play and the Moscheta (1528), a play written and directed by Italian actor and playwright Angelo Beolco, also known as Ruzante. Considering the current impossibility of documenting the presence of Ruzante's works in England, this essay also takes into account the series of relationships that link Angelo Beolco to England and to Ben Jonson specifically, via the commedia dell'arte on the one hand and the figure of Inigo Jones on the other. This essay begins by describing the framework of known performances and textual influences of Italian, and especially Veneto, theater on English theater and of known personal contacts between Englishmen and Italians active in and around the theater, including visits of both to the others’ country. The paper will then move to specific comparisons between the two plays in their multi-layered complexity.

Magical Transformations on the Early Modern English Stage

Magical Transformations on the Early Modern English Stage

Forms of Governmentality in The Alchemist

This article argues that elements of Michel Foucault's genealogy of governmentality, specifically his account of premodern Christian pastoral government and resistances to it, illuminate crucial aspects of Ben Jonson's 1610 comedy The Alchemist. Pastoral government, an array of tactics that seek to direct the intrinsic qualities of persons and things toward salvific ends, is a more relevant paradigm for understanding the alchemical plot of the play than sovereignty, which is focused on the assertion of autonomous rights and external laws. The sovereign challenged in this reading is primarily the figure of the sovereign individual, the agent of capitalism and liberalism that critics often discern emerging from Jonson's play. Analyzing the play in relation to a genealogy of governmentality throws the secularity and sovereignty of the individual characters into question insofar as they are compelled to act within an alchemical scheme governed by pastoral principles.

The Parasite in the House: “Exotic” Inventories and Domestic Performance in Volpone

This essay explores the performative nature of probate inventories in the early modern period through a reading of Mosca's “taking an inventory” in the final act of Volpone. I argue that the capacious divide between the items listed and the domestic subject, or interior, with which we associate them, is not between intact subjects and objects, but rather between raw materials, physical and rhetorical, which are stitched together through the performance of the inventory, in an exercise of oeconomia, or “management of the household.” Jonson deftly exploits the overlap between the probate inventory and the commonplace book, as storage systems of material possessions and rhetorical copia, respectively, in order to emphasize how both contribute to managing flows of words, desires, bodies, and things in the household. In Jonson's play, the rhetorical motives of copia combine with the experiential mobility of the inventory to define relationships within the domestic space. In the process, Volpone radically destabilizes our sense of subjects and objects as discrete categories. Instead of distinct persons and things, we encounter performances like Mosca's: styles of management, mechanisms of rhetorical control, which marshal the vast storehouse of copia to organize a superabundance of material referents, and, in doing so, enable fantasies of attachments between words and things, names and objects. Through the physical, rhetorical, and social dimensions of the inventory, Jonson draws our attention to a performance at the heart of domestic experience.

A Divided Jonson?: Art and Truth in The Staple of News

Through a reading of Jonson's late play, The Staple of News, this essay challenges the longstanding critical commonplace that Jonson was divided between conflicting impulses, and that this division is reflected in his literary works. The Staple of News responds to the emerging news culture of the 1620s. Critics have tended to read the play as demonstrating that Jonson's attitude to this culture was fraught with tensions, contradictions, and inconsistencies, reflecting a deeper conflict between his impulses as a moralizer and his impulses as an artist. This essay argues that the play's complex representation of the relationship between art and truth reveals that Jonson's treatment of news is much more subtle, calibrated, and controlled than such accounts allow. The play emphasizes issues of judgement, interpretation, and taste, carefully exposing divisions not in its creator but in the society to which it responds and in which it would be received. In this way, the essay highlights the complexity of this leading playwright's dramatic art and provides a means of moving beyond the critical notion of the divided Jonson. (J. R.)

The Historical Context of the Epigraph to Jonson's Catiline

THE epigraph that Ben Jonson provided for the printed edition of his play on the Catilinarian conspiracy is more complex than it first appears. Jonson modified a quotation from Horace's epistles for the epigraph: ‘his non Plebecula gaudet. / Verum Equitis quoque, iam migravit ab aure voluptas, / Omnis, ad incertos oculos, & gaudia vana’ (Jonson changes Horace's ‘nam’ to ‘non’ in the first line).1 The epigraph complains that the common people do not enjoy what Jonson presents to them, and that even the tastes of the upper class have already moved from what they hear to what they see. On one level, it is clear that Jonson is referring to the shabby treatment the play received in the theatre, where no one, not even the educated, tolerated Cicero's lengthy speech in Act IV. Jonson evidently hoped that the printed version would be easier to stomach. The play's publisher, Walter Burre, was in 1611 already making a name for himself by publishing plays that had not done well on the stage, but might be repackaged for learned readers.2 But the epigraph also refers to specific historical circumstances in Roman history that inform the events of Jonson's play. To my knowledge, no one has drawn attention to these circumstances or remarked on their relevance to the play.3

“To know the author were some ease of grief”: Ben Jonson's Lost Play

“To know the author were some ease of grief”: Ben Jonson's Lost Play

Infection, Media, and Capitalism: From Early Modern Plagues to Postmodern Zombies

This essay examines the shift in fictional representations of plague and viral infection in relation to technological, medial, and economic developments. Ben Jonson's play The Alchemist and Daniel Defoe's novel A Journal of the Plague Year revolve around historical visitations of plague in London. This study takes London as its constant variable; the city governs our choice of texts. They negotiate anxieties of the early modern era as mercantilism gives way to the process of accumulation tied to the developing free market as theorized by classical political economy. Two recent motion pictures, set during fictional London outbreaks, display a similar preoccupation with transforming economic spaces. In these texts, however, the relatively young figure of the viral zombie stands in place of and performs a function similar to the more venerable plague. Shaun of the Dead and 28 Days Later both serve as vehicles for expression of the ever-accelerating viral nature of global capitalism. By adopting a transhistorical approach, we demonstrate the relationship between media and plague that emerges, as the fact of infection generates not only a surrounding rhetoric of plague but also a veritable plague of rhetorics. In keeping with recent plague scholarship, this approach emphasizes the close kinship between plague and textuality by treating plague as a text to be read on the individual and political body and the structure of plague writing itself as a mirror of its subject, proliferating with a serial contagiousness.

Dumb Reading: The Noise of the Mute in Jonson’s Epicene

O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious, periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part, are capable of nothing but shows and --Shakespeare, Hamlet A Mute is one that acteth speakingly --Brome, The Antipodes The connection between inexplicable shows and that Hamlet makes in his speech to the players provides the impetus and conceptual framework for this investigation. What do shows and have in common with one another, and why might they be regarded asinexplicable phenomena? Jonson's Epicene, or the Silent Woman is my principal case study, a curious choice, perhaps, given that the play does not contain a show, and also given Jonson's famous resentment of theatrical production--his abhorrence of the figurative noise of theater. (1) However, Epicene is a famous play on the subject of noise--the protagonist of the play, Morose, is afflicted by it--and Jonson's treatment of is dramaturgically complex, if not contradictory. I will outline the contrariety of noise, figurative and actual, in Epicene and will analyze how is performed in various guises, positing a dialectical relationship between the expressive modes of the acoustic and the gestural in Elizabethan theater. I contend that Jonson's play is marked by the gestures of the show via the character of Mute, whose antics have hitherto evaded critical attention. I will consider the gestures made by Mute in Epicene (indications of which are given in the text) vis-a-vis those performed by the tongueless, handless Lavinia in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, whose impassioned gestures make strange the act of gesturing on the stage and signal a potentially disruptive semiotic noise. (2) The animating figure of this essay is the mute who acts as a noisy signifier--dumb but replete with meaning. Dumb shows--pantomimed sequences set to music that intervene in the action of a play--remain a controversial and contentious aspect of early modern theater. We may know the constitutive elements of the show, roughly, but we can only speculate as to their potential significance in performance. Dumb shows come to life on the stage; they are embodied gestures that imply a repertoire of actions and are but ghosts of themselves on the page. Rather than throwing our hands up at what we do not (and cannot) know, it is worthwhile, I suggest, to engage in some educated guesswork and to develop interpretive possibilities. The show is understood to symbolize the mood or theme of the main action by way of picturesque arrangements; it also prefigures aspects of the plot, marking the action to come in a few brief gestures. (3) Hamlet may disapprove of the show, and Shakespeare may have thought it old-fashioned, but one cannot dismiss it as simple fodder for the groundlings. William Engel postulates that shows open up, and to some extent are, windows onto another space--one that materially and mimetically remains contained within, but which metaphysically and allegorically reaches beyond, the contours of the main spectacle. (4)I find this conception of the show as a potential window-onto-alterity provocative, as it suggests the possibility that the show may have subverted the main action of the play by performing gestures that can signify otherwise. Gestures in shows, or that derive from shows (hereafter referred to as dumb gestures), may be semantically overdetermined, which would support the association between and shows that Hamlet makes. In his speech to the players, Hamlet advises against gestural looseness and expressive abandon. The action is to be suited to the word, the word to the action; there is to be no gap, no discrepancy, between the two. (5) In this model, a player is in control of his faculties, and the possibility of interference in his performance is reduced; neither his gesture nor his intent will be confused. …

Theatre Censorship: From Walpole to Wilson by David Thomas, David Carlton, Anne Etienne

MLR, 104.2, 2009 553 and upright Criticus, theworth of the poet as the reformer of theCommonwealth becomes apparent. In the final crowning chapter of the section and of the book Lees-Jeffries demonstrates how Jonson adapts his knowledge of the fountains on display atNonsuch palace tomake a plea for thedisgraced Earl of Essex. Nonsuch's Diana fountain and itsGrove ofDiana, the latterelaborated with an intricate series ofmottoes and poems, prompted spectators to interactwith theOvidian myth of Diana and Actaeon and with itskey theme ofvisual transgression. Drawing a parallel between Actaeon's surprising ofDiana inher grove and themud-bespattered Essex's famously rude interruption intoElizabeth's bedchamber on 24 September 1599, the event thatarguably clinched his fall intodisfavour, is,forLees-Jeffries, irresistible. In conjunction with this,not entirely disapprobatory references to Essex are traceable in the allusions to theActaeon myth within Jonson's drama, which not so cryptically appear to petition forElizabeth's royal clemency. Interpreted accordingly, Jonson's play is a curious case of art imitating life imitating art' (p. 270). Lees-Jeffries's ambitious and persuasive studymakes us reconsider the renowned gardens, fountains, and sculptures of Theobalds, Kenilworth, and Nonsuch; italso asks us to reread and reimagine major earlymodern works in active, participatory, and interdisciplinary ways that fruitfullycombine and engage thevisual, the textual, and thematerial. Selwyn College, Cambridge Russell M. Hillier Theatre Censorship: From Walpole toWilson. By David Thomas, David Carlton, and Anne Etienne. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2007. xvi+28opp. ?50. ISBN 978-0-19-926028-7. As its title suggests, thebulk of thisbook concerns the Licensing Act of 1737, under which the Lord Chamberlain was made responsible for the authorization of theatres and the pre-approval of new plays. The Act represented something of a legislative coup for Robert Walpole, who, confronted by the increasingly biting theatrical treatment of himself and his sponsor George II, used all of his considerable political skill to pass the licensing and censorship provisions as successive amendments to a bill thathad ostensibly been intended to address the problem of public vagrancy. Apparently unaware that therewas an Enlightenment inprogress,Walpole habitually took a fairly robust attitude to censoring oppositional points of view through a variety of means (Paul Starr, The Creation of theMedia: The Political Origins of Modern Communications (New York: Basic Books, 2004), P- 39;Michael Harris, London Newspapers in the Age of Walpole (Cranbury,NJ: Associated University Press, 1978), Chapters 7 and 8), and his craftyuse of statute law to silence his critics in the theatrewas thus, ifsomewhat extreme, hardly uncharacteristic. What demands more explanation is theAct's quite remarkable longevity? while such heavy-handed measures would have been unthinkable ifapplied to newspapers, books, or poetry, itremains a startling fact that,until the law's repeal in 1968, no stage play could be publicly performed inBritain without first having been approved by the censor. The authors' examination of thisparadox takes the formof a detailed examination 554 Reviews of thekey points in theAct's history?its introduction by Walpole, the reformof the licensing provisions in 1843, the successive attempts to repeal censorship in 1832, 1909, and 1949, and its eventual abolition. At each stage the book provides a sum mary of thehistorical and theatrical background, before offering a detailed account of the parliamentary campaigns by both sides, complete with detailed references to a variety of primary sources. This might all sound a littledry, and indeed itwould be, were itnot for the fact that,being largely composed of either playwrights orMPs with an appreciation of the theatre, the constituency of those looking to have the law repealed tended to express its arguments in rathermore felicitous terms than your standard parliamentary interestgroup. Apart from the chapters explicitly dealing with the Act, the book offers brief surveys of British theatre censorship before and after theAct in the firstand final chapters. The prehistory concerns censorship under the Royal Prerogative, and as such, isactually vital to a proper understanding of thevarious attempts to repeal the Act?obfuscation about whether the Lord Chamberlain exercised censorship under the Prerogative was an important tactic in the government's effortstoblock reform. The finalchapter, forwhich the authors conducted a survey of British theatre and company managers, deals with theatre censorship inmodern...

Wordsworth's Financial Sublime: Money and Meaning in Book VII of The Prelude

on the eighth of September, 1802, Charles Lamb, well pleased that William Wordsworth and his companions were visiting in London, wrote letter to Samuel Coleridge, saying: They dined with us yesterday, and I was their guide to Bartlemy Fair!1 Lamb's exclamation mark is surely more than enthusiastic ornamentation, for how astonishing it is to imagine the poet of Ye prescenses of nature, in the sky / on the earth, ye visons of the hills / and souls of lonely places2 among [s]uch place, such men, such language and such ware3 as Bartholomew Fair, watching a juggler with well-educated ape to come over the chain for the King of England and back again for the Prince, and sit still on his arse for the Pope and the King of Spain!4 Regardless of the stretch of imagination required, such rowdy environment is certainly what Wordsworth encountered in the fair of 1 802, as well as at his earlier visit in 1 795. In fact, as Jonathan Haynes has pointed out, Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, often revived both before the opening and after the closing of the fair at Smithfield, played major role in shaping Londoners' conceptions of the fair, serving as an exemplary model for fairgoers: model of the proper structure of perception, moral relation to experience, and social relation to community model called for by the Fair in particular but of course relevant to life in general.5 If he followed Jonson's model for perception, the fair Wordsworth would have been confronted with would have been one in which all things are for sale. At Jonson's fair, anything and anyone can become commodity; from wives to words, everything has its price. Critics have long noted that Jonson's play confronts the beginnings of England's transition into capitalist economy. I shall argue that Wordsworth's account of London and the fair in Book Seven of The Prelude confronts the latter stages of this same transition, transforming the sense of fluidity inherent in the frenzied buying and selling of commodity culture into what can best be described as the financial sublime. It is common, and often very fruitful, to read Romantic poetry in light of the industrial revolution that was well underway by the time of Wordsworth's birth, but arguably more relevant to Book Seven is the commercial revolution that paved the way for such innovation in

Doctor Faustus and The Devil is an Ass (review)

Doctor Faustus and The Devil is an Ass. Presented by the Left-Handed Theatre Company at the White Bear Theatre, Kennington, London. February 28-March 26, 2006. The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. Presented by the UNC Charlotte Department of Dance and Theatre at the Anne R. Belk Theater, Robinson Hall for the Performing Arts, University of North Carolina at Charlotte. April 18-22, 2007. Probably, the Faustus theme has always pulled directors in two different directions--psychological realism on the one hand, spectacle on the other--but economic constraints and the focus of most Marlowe criticism usually combine to enforce a small-scale, perhaps allegorical examination of the hero's psychology at the expense of the magic effects that were probably the reason for the play's popularity in its own time. Thus, I knew before I saw it that the double bill of Doctor Faustus and The Devil is an Ass, in the tiny playing space at the back of the White Bear pub in Kennington, south London, would have that done on the cheap look that relegates most revivals of the non-Shakespearean drama to the category of curiosities for eccentric academics. In fact, compared to most revivals, Blanche Mclntyre's production turned out to be surprisingly luxurious. As the program note said, the effect was traditionally theatrical though not period-specific. The set consisted only of stage curtains, a short flight of steps, and a box large enough for characters to hide in, but the company was large enough to let us see all seven of the Deadly Sins at once, and in the Jonson play we got the sense of complexity that results from the presence of so many characters, each with his own agenda, moving around a stage at the same time. It was appropriate that Robert Forknall, excellent in the role of Jonson's gull Fitzdottrel who has a passion for fine clothes, should be credited with the costume designs. In both plays, Lucifer was played by the same actor (Richard Keynes), appearing each time in the same stage location and making use of the deepest register of his voice so as to be immediately recognizable. Otherwise, there was no obviously thematic doubling. The one-hour Faustus retained much of what one remembers about the play: the opening and closing scenes; the Good and Evil Angels; the pact with Mephistophilis; the Seven Deadly Sins; the Helen of Troy scenes, framed by the two appearances of the Old Man; and some brief but funny episodes with Wagner, Robin, and Ralph. In the opening scene, Faustus hardly moved; the books he examines were handed him by the good and evil angels and by mysterious figures behind the curtain, creating the effect of extra hands manipulating him (the program retells the legend that in one performance the actors found one devil too many on stage). The production made the most, or rather the least, of its cramped space. In one scene, Robin entered by squeezing between two steps; the Sins mostly emerged as if from the box. However, the effect of this miniaturization was, as it usually is, to make the whole story a study in futility. The show of the Deadly Sins gave no real pleasure to Faustus, though he tried to talk himself into thinking that it was delightful. There weren't many other opportunities for him to benefit from his bargain, since the big set-pieces at the courts of the Emperor, the Pope, and the Duke were cut, as were the practical jokes that he plays. When Helen passed across the stage, the scholars agreed that she was incomparable, but the old man's horror, and Faustus's wretched state when he reentered after his sexual encounter with the succubus, canceled out their words. Increasingly exhausted and empty as the action proceeded, Richard Keightley's Faustus died alone, with no help from any visible devils. Taken on its own, this production would have come across as a decent rendition of the play for anyone who had never seen it before, but it would have been hard to understand its popularity either in its own time or thereafter. …

Ben Jonson's Late Plays and the Difficulty of Judgment

Ben Jonson's Late Plays and the Difficulty of Judgment

HESTER LEES-JEFFRIES. England's Helicon: Fountains in Early Modern Literature and Culture.

This wonderful book—which might itself have been inspired by the classical mount of its title—presents a study of fountains in Elizabethan England: in both the literature of that period (in the main, the New Arcadia, the 1590 Faerie Queene, and Jonson's play, The Fountaine of Selfe-Love, better known as Cynthia's Revels) and in its material culture (fountains in Elizabeth's coronation pageant, in the Kenilworth entertainment of 1575, in country houses such as Theobalds or Nonsuch, and as represented on medals, hat-badges, tapestries, portraits and so forth). However, this book is infinitely more than a motif-study. Instead, it takes fountains as particularly dense signifiers that bring together a whole series of different operations—the relation of flux to stasis, of freeze to flow or solid to liquid, of reflection and circulation, of surface and depth, of nature and art—so as to present themselves as uniquely complex and multivalent ‘texts’. Lees-Jeffries makes a compelling case for seeing fountains not as they are largely seen today—as merely decorative, municipal and for the most part overlooked—but as elaborate, ingenious and highly designed structures, quasi-rhetorical in scope, that calculatedly make use of space, time, sculptural forms, visual allusion, literary reference, punctuation and narrative in order to guide the viewer/reader toward a deeper and more purposive understanding. As she puts it, ‘[f]ountains are not passive: they capture observers, drawing them into their surfaces, promising refreshment, and so involving those who gaze upon or into them in an active and sometimes demanding relationship’ (p. 9).

Jonsons Volpone and Dante

Jonsorís Volpone and Dante Christopher Baker and Richard Harp No one has linked Dante's Infernoto Ben Jonson's Volpone. But there are a number ofreasons to think that the first canticle ofthe Italian poet's epic poem was influential on Jonson's most enduringly popular play. For one thing both works portray fraud as the root of all evil, as manyotherimportantworks aboutmoralitydo not.1 DanteusedAristotle to make the principal divisions of the Inferno into the sins of incontinence , malice and brutishness, the latter two classifications comprising the sins of fraud.2 Fraud, says Virgil to Dante in canto 11 when he is describing the plan of hell, "is man's peculiar vice; / God finds it more displeasing—and therefore, / the fraudulent are lower, suffering more" (è de l'uom proprio male, / più spiace a Dio; e però stan di sotto / li frodolenti, e più dolor li assale [11. 25-27]).3 Again, both Dante's and Jonson's master works are called"comedies," but both also contain harsh punishments. Jonson's play is quite distinctive here, not following in this regard his customary Roman models,and making a special effort"to put the snaffle in their mouths, that cry out, we never punish vice in our interludes." His moral labors in Volpone also required ofhim"to imitate justice, and instruct to life, as well as purity oflanguage."4 Jonson refers to Dante in the third act of Volpone when Lady Politic Would-Be, a tedious English dilettante visiting Venice with her equally shallow husband ,brags ofhaving read Petrarch,Tasso,Guarini,Ariosto,Aretino, and Dante, who, she says, "is hard, and few can understand him" (3.4.95). This couple, however, is such a pair offools that her judgment ofDante can hardly be taken for Jonson's own, and her ignorant dismissal of the poet implies exactly the opposite attitude on the part of the dramatist himself. That her remark echoes Dante's own comment to Can Grande that his epic was "polysemous" and "not simple"5 hints at more than a 55 56Comparative Drama secondary knowledge ofDante by Jonson. Jonson's satiric conception of Venice as a locus of corruption, his cast ofperverse characters, and his emphasis upon an appropriate final punishment for each of the evildoers combine to recall structural and thematic elements of Dante's work. And there is one final point: Jonson was a dramatist always sensitive to the shaping influence of native English morality plays; surely, then, he would also have been drawn to the most vigorous medieval condemnation of sin composed on the Continent, especially during those twelve years (1598-1610) when he was himself a Roman Catholic. All of these considerations would have made Dante's combination of comedy and severe morality an appealing combination to Jonson and one not easily found in most other sources available to him. Modern criticism has sometimes seen the punishment ofVolpone and Mosca as inconsistent with their sportive playfulness with folly and avarice.The pointhas also beenmade that the punishments are too harsh for the crimes.6 But Dante has manypersons in the Inferno who are admirable in manyways,such as the adulterous but winninglysympathetic Francesca, the fraudulent counselors but still upright and noble Jason and Ulysses, and the inciter to rebellion but lighthearted and gifted Bertrán de Born. All these and many others in the Inferno have been given their final hard punishment because of an overriding vice that finallydetermined their character andwhich theydesired more than their virtues. Neither Dante nor Jonson held the view that one's own personal sympathies or admiration ofintellector energyshould shape a finaljudgment of character. Jackson Campbell Boswell has recently shown knowledge of Dante to be much more extensive in England than was previously thought.7 Boswell has found 322 literaryallusionsto the Florentine in English books published between 1477 and 1640, a number ofthem by persons Jonson admired orknewwell, such as Sir Philip Sidneyand John Florio. In addition , Thomas Kyd, to whose Spanish TragedyJonson wrote additions in 1601-02, translated several verses from the Inferno in his 1588 translation ofTasso's The Householders Philosophie. Dante was often grouped by English writers with Petrarch and Boccaccio as important Italian poets and...

Liking Men: Ben Jonson's Closet Opened

I. Prologue: "You . . . May Like Men" My title, "Liking Men" alludes to the last two lines of the verse prologue with which Jonson prefaced Every Man in His Humor when he revised it for the prestigious publication event of the folio collection of his works to date in 1616. The prologue to Every Man In must be one of the most cited and least understood of Jonson's poems. Critics pay tribute, by quoting the speech, to the bracing rhythms of its announcement that something entirely new is going to start happening in English drama, but they hardly seem, in subsequent analyses, to appreciate either the long-term dramatic effects, or the wider cultural ramifications of the novelty it announces. Jonson, it is said, has with this prologue to this play introduced a new realism to English drama, through a parodic rejection of older dramatic styles.1 My argument here is that Jonson's cultural influence and creative power deserve greater credit. His formal innovation announced in the 1616 prologue both created a completely new and exceptionally durable style of urban bachelor fiction and, simultaneously, founded a no less culturally influential style of masculine intimacy. The new style of fiction, "overwhelmingly the dominant one until recent years" in English theater, is signaled by its "real-time" opening with the leisured morning activities of London gentlemen, and has endured in the English comic tradition from Restoration comedy to Noel Coward.2 The new style of masculine intimacy which became inseparable (as Eve Sedgwick has shown us) from later developments in these urbane fictions of leisured bachelorhood is what I hope to describe in this essay. I shall, in short, be attempting to analyze Every Man in His Humor as contributing crucially to the transformation of cultural attitudes towards male same-sex desire which Alan Bray demonstrated as having taken place in the course of the seventeenth century, and which Sedgwick has mapped out across various post-Renaissance literary genres as producing "intense male [End Page 1065] homosocial desire as at once the most compulsory, and the most prohibited of social bonds."3 In the prologue to the revised text of Every Man In, Jonson distinguishes the play that he presents as the "first fruits" of his dramatic career from the offerings of the more popular Shakespearean tradition, in which playwrights disregarded neoclassical poetics, happily ignoring the principle of unity of time. He declares that he has not "so loved the stage" as to follow the example of his contemporaries, who . . . make a child, now swaddled to proceed Man, and then shoot up in one beard and weed, Past threescore years; or, with three rusty swords, And help of some few foot and half-foot words, Fight over York and Lancaster's long jars, And in the tiring-house bring wounds to scars.4 The often-heard complaint of earlier humanist authors against the chronicle drama's violations of temporal probability is here given a peculiarly Jonsonian inflection in the reference to "three rusty swords" and the quick-changes of "wounds to scars" backstage. Jonson, unlike Shakespeare, persistently draws attention to the "inert materiality" and "creaking contrivances" of theater.5 Here, of course, the demystification of these contrivances works to invalidate any techniques of illusion except for those of linguistic currency and contemporaneity. Jonson's play, unlike those chronicle histories of Shakespeare, will seem real because it offers images of "deeds, and language, such as men do use" in contemporary life, enlivened by examples of the unmanly commission of "popular errors": I mean such errors as you'll all confess By laughing at them, they deserve no less: Which, when you heartily do, there's hope left then You that have so grac'd monsters may like men. ("Prologue," 26-30) The errors to be staged in Jonson's play for the delectation of the audience, then, are aspects of those plays they have elsewhere applauded or "grac'd." These will be on display as "monsters," foils...

‘As in a theatre’: scientific spectacle in Bacon's New Atlantis

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes A Conference of Pleasure, also known as ‘Of Tribute, or Giving what is Due’ of 1592 appears in Spedding, Bacon's Works, Vol. VIII, pp. 119–143; the Gesta Grayorum masque of January 1595 appears in Spedding, Bacon's Works, Vol. VIII, pp. 325–342; and the ‘Love and Self‐Love’ masque for Accession Day 1595 appears in Spedding, Bacon's Works, Vol. VIII, pp. 374–386. For discussions of the masques, see Martin (1992 Martin J (1992) Francis Bacon, the State, and the Reform of Natural Philosophy Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [Google Scholar], pp. 64–71), McCoy (1989 McCoy R (1989) The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry Berkeley: University of California Press [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], pp. 85–86), Strong (1977 Strong R (1977) The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry London: Thames and Hudson [Google Scholar], pp. 134–145 and 209) and Hammer (1998 Hammer PEJ (1998) ‘Upstaging the Queen: the Earl of Essex, Francis Bacon and the Accession Day celebrations of 1595’ in D. Bevington and P. Holbrook (Eds) The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque pp. 41–66 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [Google Scholar], pp. 41–66). Hammer gives a detailed examination of authorship questions surrounding the ‘Love and Self‐Love’ masque for Accession Day 1595 on pp. 45–46. For discussions of both Stuart masques see Jardine and Stewart (1999 Jardine L Stewart A (1999) Hostage to Fortune: The Troubled Life of Frances Bacon New York: Hill and Wang [Google Scholar], pp. 336–337 and 343–344), and Limon (1990 Limon J (1990) The Masque of Stuart Culture Newark: University of Delaware Press [Google Scholar], pp. 157–163 and 185–197). A character in Jonson's play The Silent Woman, first produced in 1609, declares, ‘My very house turns round with the tumult! I dwell in a windmill! The perpetual motion is here, and not at Eltham’ (The Complete Plays of Ben Jonson, Ed. G.A. Wilkes, Vol. III, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982, pp. 211–212). And in his Epigrams [‘On the New Motion’] he writes, ‘See yond’ motion?/Not the old fa‐ding,/Nor Captain Pod, nor yet the Eltham thing,/But one more rare' (The Oxford Authors Ben Jonson, Ed. Ian Donaldson, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 257). Quoted in Colie (1954 Colie, R. (1954). ‘Cornelis Drebbel and Salomon de Caus: two Jacobean models for Salomon's House’. Huntington Library Quarterly, 18: 245–260. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], p. 257). Boyle, who had heard accounts of Drebbel's submarine, wrote in his ‘New Experiments physico‐mechanicall’ (1660) that he had been told that ‘Drebell conceiv’d, that ‘tis not the whole body of the Air, but a certain Quintessence (as Chymists speak) or spirituous part of it, that makes it fit for respiration’ and that Drebbel had bottled a ‘chymicall liquor’ which, when released in the submarine, would ‘speedily restore to the troubled air such a proportion of vitall parts as would make it againe for a good while fit for respiration’. See Rye (1967 Rye WB (1967) England as Seen By Foreigners in the Days of Elizabeth and James the First New York: Benjamin Bloom [Google Scholar], pp. 238–239). An excerpt from Tymme's Dialogue, as well as a reproduction of Tymme's diagram, can be found in Rye (1967 Rye WB (1967) England as Seen By Foreigners in the Days of Elizabeth and James the First New York: Benjamin Bloom [Google Scholar], pp. 234–237). Additional informationNotes on contributorsDonna Coffey Address correspondence to: Donna Coffey, Associate Professor of English, Reinhardt College, 7300 Reinhardt College Circle, Waleska, GA 30183-2981, USA, E‐mail: DLK@reinhardt.edu Address correspondence to: Donna Coffey, Associate Professor of English, Reinhardt College, 7300 Reinhardt College Circle, Waleska, GA 30183-2981, USA, E‐mail: DLK@reinhardt.edu

Political Allegory in Late Elizabethan and Early Jacobean "Turk" Plays: Lust's Dominion and The Turke

Recent work on representations of in early modern literature and culture has shown the often complex and contradictory ways in which the English understood Muslim peoples at this time. (1) As Nabil Matar observes, were seen to be different and strange, infidels and 'barbarians' admirable or fearsome, but they did not constitute colonial targets. (2) In fact, it is precisely because Muslims possessed an empire that rivaled, indeed superseded that of England in this period that Britons began to demonize, polarize, and alterize them. (3) As a result, though English travelers in Islamic countries--for example, Thomas Saunders in his account of a trip to Barbarie in 1583, Richard Hasleton's narrative of ten yeares travailes in many forraine countries which was published in 1595, and the more famous early-seventeenth-century accounts of encounters with Muslims by George Sandys and William Lithgow--might describe with some admiration and envy the imperial achievement of the Ottoman Empire, by contrast early modern drama, pageants, and masques tended to emphasize negative characteristics. (4) Turks were tyrannical and cruel, Moors were lascivious and violent. (5) As a result critics have read literary representations of Muslims as playing an important role in the shaping of an anti-Muslim national consciousness. The present essay, however, suggests that this dominant view of early modern plays only provides us with a partial understanding of the significance of these cultural documents. Lust's Dominion and John Mason's The Turke are both plays that portray Islamic men in negative ways, and clearly they should be seen as contributing to contemporary popular fears and anxieties about Muslims. However, to read these plays merely as expressions of anti-Muslim sentiment is to neglect central aspects of their significance since the plays' Islamic villains and the activities in Christian courts that prove to be corrupt also must refer to domestic English political issues. In what follows, the two closely related early modern English Turk plays, Lust's Dominion and The Turke, are read against the context of the politics of the culture within which they were produced. Similar to other dramatic subgenres of the period--Roman plays, history plays, travel drama, to name just three--which have increasingly been recognized as possessing allegorical dimensions, Turk plays should also be seen as offering comments on sensitive topical issues. (6) For instance, Ben Jonson's Sejanus His Fall (1603), which concentrates on the relationship between the Emperor Tiberius and his evil minion, has been read as an equivocal allegory about James Stuart and his favorites. (7) Yet, because it was conceived and partly written while Elizabeth was on the throne, Jonson's play has also been seen as a comment on her tarnished reputation at the end of her reign and especially as a late meditation on the Essex crisis. (8) While for my purposes here the intricacies of Jonson's allegory are not relevant, its ambivalent political direction is useful since it is in a sense matched by that of the plays discussed in this article. In other words, in Lust's Dominion and The Turke we have two versions--one written in Elizabeth's reign, one in James's--of a very similar story about an evil Mohammedan's interactions with a Christian court. In what follows, the ways this allied story is able to encode shifting political allegories will be seen to be central. Just as Sejanus can be read as allegorically directed at different targets, these plays should also be understood to present political and sexual ambition as covert meditations on English domestic concerns. It is now well attested that Christopher Marlowe was not responsible for Lust's Dominion; or, The Lascivious Queen, though the play is attributed to him on the title page of the 1657 edition. (9) Rather, the playtext is thought to have involved collaboration by John Marston (who was paid for a play or part of a play called The Spanish Moor's Tragedy by Philip Henslowe in the autumn of 1599 for the Fortune or Rose) and Thomas Dekker, William Haughton, and John Day who revised and renamed it in 1600. …

Some Notes on the Printing of the Jonson Plays of 1631

Some Notes on the Printing of the Jonson Plays of 1631

More's Richard III and Jonson's Richard Crookback and Sejanus

The sum listed <£10 was substantial, suggesting either that the additions were extensive or that Jonson's play on King Richard III was nearly complete. 1 Yet no other unambiguous record of the play survives, and most catalogues list it simply as lost. However, the possibility that the play was not lost but was deliberately suppressed, as Jonson seems to have suppressed other early works, has also been raised. Various explanations have been offered for why Jonson may have chosen not to publish this play. Perhaps he rejected it as not wholly his; after all, Sejanus survives only in a rewritten version designed to eliminate the work of an anonymous collaborator. Or perhaps Jonson, dissatisfied with the work, withdrew it from posterity's judgment. Despite his early reputation as a competent