Jonson's Play Research Articles

The Sign of the Light Heart: Jonson's ‘The New Inn’, 1629 and 1987

In NTQ 14. Graham Holderness welcomed the Swan at Stratford as the home, at once new and old, of a ‘radical energy’ opposed to the ‘ossified establishment’ in the main house. Here Peter Womack, concentrating on John Caird's 1987 production of The New Inn, suggests a different and more suspicious interpretation of the building and its uses. By a sort of historical coincidence, the conservative nostalgia of Jonson's play reveals the close links between the Swan project and that distinctively 1980s construction of the national past – the heritage industry. Peter Womack, who lectures in English at the University of East Anglia, is the author of a book on Ben Jonson in the ‘Rereading Literature’ series. This article is based on a paper given to a conference on the politics of early seventeenth-century drama, Oxford, June 1988.

Silent Women and Shrews: Eroticism and Convention in Epicoene and Measure for Measure

In Jonson's Epicoene, the silent woman attracts Morose through reticence to speak; but once this couple undergo the false marriage ceremony, her silence metamorphoses into verbal pyrotechniques that rival those of Mistress Otter whose aggressive speech sets the measure of what a theatrical shrew should be. Jonson's play exploits the comic potential of the conventional shrew as this improvised female joins forces with the newly organized Collegiates, described by True-wit as women who crie downe, or vp, what they like, or dislike in a braine, or a fashion, with most masculine, or rather hermaphroditicall authoritie (I.i.78-80).l In Measure for Measure, Isabella speaks freely, articulately, aggressively until the final moments of the comedy when the Duke declares his intention to marry her. Whereas the comic plot of Jonson's comedy requires that marriage open up the floodgates of Epicoene's speech, the prospect of marriage to the Duke silences Isabella. At least the text forbids her character's verbal response to that possibility for reasons of theatrical economy, ideology, or inadvertence. Both comedies, despite their differences, enact a process in which the sexuality of a male character may invest a female character with power as an object of a desire that, in some sense, commands the masculine figure; and both plays appear to eroticize silence as the condition of the submission of the female. As well, these texts represent situations in which highly articulate female characters challenge

"No innocence is safe, When power contests": The Factional Worlds of Caesar and Sejanus

Ben Jonson's first Roman tragedy, His Fall, and William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, which preceded it by about four years, are very different plays. Whether Anne Barton is correct arguing that Jonson's play is in some ways a reply to Shakespeare's intuitive, free-flowing treatment of Roman history, critics have tended to focus on the differences between the visions of Rome and its politics offered the two plays. J. W. Lever, for example, sees Jonson as writing a tradition that was less preoccupied than Shakespeare with character as such: Jonson was more concerned with the political forces at work history than with virtuous or vicious individuals. And Anthony Miller argues that the two plays offer strikingly different readings of the workings and destiny of the Roman state: Sejanus effect depicts the consequences of the transition from republic to empire which was the subject of Julius Caesar, and doing so it overturns the [pro-monarchical] assumptions which govern Shakespeare's play.l To understand the different treatments of Roman politics these plays, I propose to consider them somewhat different terms, against the background of contemporary English history. I would like to focus especially on the changing mood of the last few years of Elizabeth's reign: the growing climate of intrigue and ill will arising from the rivalry between the Earl of Essex and Robert Cecil, the tensions surrounding Essex's

"Steale from the deade?": The Presence of Marlowe in Jonson's Early Plays

Previous articleNext article No Access"Steale from the deade?": The Presence of Marlowe in Jonson's Early PlaysJAMES SHAPIROJAMES SHAPIRO Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Renaissance Drama Volume 181987Essays on Sexuality, Influence, and Performance Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/rd.18.41917223 Views: 2Total views on this site Copyright © 1988 Northwestern University PressPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Ben Jonson's Plays and Masques: Texts of the Plays and Masques, Jonson on His Work, Contemporary Readers on Jonson, Criticism

Ben Jonson's Plays and Masques: Texts of the Plays and Masques, Jonson on His Work, Contemporary Readers on Jonson, Criticism

Hieronimo in Decimosexto: A Private-Theater Burlesque

Previous articleNext article No AccessHieronimo in Decimosexto: A Private-Theater BurlesqueJOHN REIBETANZJOHN REIBETANZ Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Renaissance Drama Volume 51972Essays Principally on Comedy Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/rd.5.41917093 Views: 5Total views on this site Citations: 3Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright © 1974 Northwestern University PressPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Todd M. Lidh “To know the author were some ease of grief”: Ben Jonson's Lost Play, Ben Jonson Journal 17, no.11 (May 2010): 60–75.https://doi.org/10.3366/bjj.2010.0006Lucy Munro Children of the Queen's Revels, 10 (Sep 2009).https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511486067David Mann Sir Oliver Owlet's Men: Fact or Fiction?, Huntington Library Quarterly 54, no.44 (Oct 1991): 301–311.https://doi.org/10.2307/3817853

Amarilli's Dilemma: The Pastor Fido and Some English Authors

centuries the livre de chevet of all Europe. As in other countries, so too in England its popularity was both immediate and far-reaching.1 An indication of how well known this Italian pastoral tragicomedy was and how rapidly the habit of borrowing from it spread is provided in a scene from Ben Jonson's Volpone (1605). In Jonson's play, there appears a garrulous lady who is clearly a caricature of the Italianate

The Accidence of Ben Jonson's Plays Masques and Entertainments With an Appendix of Comparable Uses in Shakespeare. Pp. 333. Studies in the Syntax of Ben Jonson's Plays.

The Accidence of Ben Jonson's Plays Masques and Entertainments With an Appendix of Comparable Uses in Shakespeare. Pp. 333. Studies in the Syntax of Ben Jonson's Plays.

The Accidence of Ben Jonson's Plays, Masques and Entertainments, with an Appendix of Comparable Uses in Shakespeare

The Accidence of Ben Jonson's Plays, Masques and Entertainments, with an Appendix of Comparable Uses in Shakespeare

Jonson's Alchemist and the Literature of Alchemy

No annotator of Jonson's play The Alchemist has looked very deeply into the mediæval and Renaissance alchemical treatises current in Jonson's day for material in illustration and explanation of the speeches in the alchemical episodes of the play. For the most part, it is true, alchemical lexicons are all that is needed to define specific terms and to indicate their relationship to the theories and practices of the alchemists. But certain of the speeches of the play take on a new and fuller meaning when read against a background of some knowledge of this body of alchemical literature.

The Influence of Ben Johnson's Catiline Upon John Oldham's Satyrs Upon the Jesuits

John Oldham's acknowledged indebtedness to Ben Jonson's Ghost (the brief prolog to the play Catiline) for the inspiration of the first of his four Satyrs Upon the Jesuits has been duly noted by all critics of the Restoration satirist. But there is nothing in the published criticism of Oldham's work to suggest that anyone has made a detailed comparison either of the prolog of Catiline, or of the body of the play itself, with Oldham's satires. My own attempt to make this comparison has led me to the conclusion that Oldham's debt to Jonson is much greater than he acknowledged. The very brief prolog, in which Sylla's ghost appears, provided Oldham with a respectable literary precedent for the ghostly monolog, a form already in use in satire of the more popular sort. His study of Jonson's play, however, provided him with far more than a framework. Moreover, a large part of the debt is to the body of the play itself. In the present paper I hope to show that the play Catiline (including the prolog and the play itself) was the primary influence on the first of Oldham's Satyrs Upon the Jesuits, inspiring the design, style, and atmosphere as well as much of the content, and further that it contributed important elements to the other satires as well, particularly to the second and third. Such a thesis, of course, is not revolutionary, considering Oldham's statement, even allowing for his reticences and vagaries in his citations of authorities.2 But the evidence in

The Music in Ben Jonson's Plays

The Music in Ben Jonson's Plays

Source-Material for Jonson's Plays. Part II

Source-Material for Jonson's Plays. Part II

Source-Material for Jonson's Plays Part I

Source-Material for Jonson's Plays Part I

A Note on Volume Two of the 1640 Folio of Ben Jonson's Plays

A Note on Volume Two of the 1640 Folio of Ben Jonson's Plays