Martin Butler Research Articles

Ben Jonson and Posterity: Reception, Reputation, Legacy ed. by Martin Butler and Jane Rickard

Reviewed by: Ben Jonson and Posterity: Reception, Reputation, Legacy ed. by Martin Butler and Jane Rickard Abe Davies Ben Jonson and Posterity: Reception, Reputation, Legacy. Ed. by Martin Butler and Jane Rickard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2020. xv+255 pp. £75. ISBN 978–1–108–84268–6. The distinctive challenge and opportunity Ben Jonson offers for Reception Studies is perhaps most readily apprehended in the confounding permutations of his literary-historical role as Shakespeare's foil. On the one hand, to quote Jean E. Howard's contribution to this volume, Jonson has 'come down to modernity as [. . .] a kind of Falstaff to Shakespeare's Hal' (p. 64); yet Stephen Orgel points out that where Shakespeare is given a more amiable characterization the immortal Ben tends to be cast in the entirely opposite role of his 'doctrinaire, satirical, misanthropic, and bitter' counterpart (p. 178). The obvious conclusion is that the Jonsonian reputation has been wrested into its contradictory shapes by protean Shakespeare's gravitational field. However, in fact Jonson and his oeuvre have needed no aid in generating their complex legacies. As Martin Butler and Jane Rickard put it in the Introduction here, Jonson can appear either the first literary celebrity, or pedantic self-promoter; convivial father of the Cavalier poets, or envious detractor of Shakespeare and other rivals; toady to a decadent court, or bold satirist and defender of liberty; obese embodiment of excess, anally retentive misanthrope, or voice of Horatian moderation and stoic self-control. (p. 2) All these constructions and more flow just as much from Jonson's own life and work as from the dynamic in which his reputation has existed with Shakespeare's, and Ben Jonson and Posterity offers a wide-ranging yet strikingly coherent, challenging yet consistently approachable view onto them in all their endlessly complex manifestations from the Jacobean era to the twenty-first century. It does so in three sections consisting of ten chapters and an Afterword. The entries in 'Conceptualizing Jonson' consider Jonson's reputation principally in his own time; 'Jonson's Early Reception' brings us into the nineteenth century; 'Jonsonian Afterlives' takes up the baton for the period 1830 to the present—right up to it, indeed, and I was inordinately pleased to learn from Butler's chapter, 'Jonson and Modern Memory', of a brand of especially potent 'vape' liquid named after Jonson. To take a scattering of other examples from throughout the book: Adam Zucker's 'Pedantic Jonson' suggests that in fact 'elements of [Jonson's] works that might seem "pedantic" often reach out in complex ways to a Jacobean audience that was only just beginning to understand itself as a potentially objectifiable community' (p. 46); Jennie Challinor's 'Jonson's Ghost and the Restoration Stage' reveals negotiations with and over Jonson's legacy during a period in which 'despite his apparent incompatibility with much that the new playhouses and audiences embraced, Jonson was believed to be an essential part of the dramatic landscape' (p. 123); in 'Jonson and the Friends of Liberty', Tom Lockwood examines how Jonson was drawn upon in the revolutionary thought of John Thelwall and Charles Lamb in the 1790s; and later chapters by Paul Menzer and Orgel ('Anecdotal Jonson' and 'Jonson in the Shadows' respectively) consider the peculiar shifts and general decline in Jonson's [End Page 486] profile and reputation in the interim period before their resuscitation began in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since there is not space here to summarize each contribution, much less to attend to them in the depth they surely merit, it will be as well to highlight an especially appealing aspect of the collection as a whole. The book's subject is Jonson's reception, and thus, as the editors write, 'the key question is not what Jonson means but the extent to which he came to mean it, and what this tells us about his use-value for later generations' (p. 8). This is quite right, of course, but it also somewhat belies how Jonson himself and what he meant are consistently kept in view throughout these chapters. This is most obviously the case in the first section, which works to...

Martin Butler and Jane Rickard (eds). Ben Jonson and Posterity: Reception, Reputation, Legacy

Martin Butler and Jane Rickard (eds). <i>Ben Jonson and Posterity: Reception, Reputation, Legacy</i>

Notes on Contributors

Previous article FreeNotes on ContributorsFull TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreHannah August is a lecturer in the School of English and Media Studies at Massey University in New Zealand. She undertook her postgraduate study at King's College London, where she specialized in the reception of early modern drama in print and performance. Her work on this topic has appeared in the collection The Senses in Early Modern England, 1558–1660 (Manchester University Press, 2015); she is also preparing a chapter for the forthcoming collection Shakespeare/Text: Contemporary Readings in Textual Studies, Editing and Performance (Arden Shakespeare Intersections, 2021). She is currently working on a monograph on the history of reading commercial drama in quarto, entitled Playbooks and Their Readers in Early Modern England.Jane Hwang Degenhardt is associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her work focuses on early modern drama with particular interests in the effects of globalizing processes, constructions of the “human,” and the intersecting histories of race and religion. She is completing a book that explores new understandings of “fortune” that developed in relation to early modern English global expansion. She is also working on a collaborative book project with Henry Turner that explores pluralistic understandings of the concept of “world” in Shakespeare’s plays as a means to imagining alternatives to globalization and an anthropocentric future.Alexander Paulsson Lash is assistant professor at National Taiwan University. His current book project, Theater Worlds: Staging Global London, 1576–1688, shows how early modern theaters shaped the spatial perceptions of playgoers, capturing their experience of disorientation and excitement as London expanded into a global city.Jane Rickard is an associate professor in seventeenth-century English literature at the University of Leeds. She is the author of Writing the Monarch in Jacobean England: Jonson, Donne, Shakespeare and the Works of King James (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and Authorship and Authority: The Writings of James VI and I (Manchester University Press, 2007), and coeditor (with Martin Butler) of Ben Jonson and Posterity: Reception, Reputation, Legacy (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). She is currently working on a monograph on Ben Jonson and his early readers.Lauren Robertson is assistant professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, where she is currently completing her first book, Entertaining Uncertainty: The Phenomenology of the Early Modern English Commercial Theater. In it, she argues that the theater actively cultivated experiences of ambiguity and confusion for its spectators, transforming the period's multifarious cultural confrontations with doubt into deeply satisfactory objects of attention.Suzanne Tartamella is associate professor of English at Henderson State University, where she teaches courses in Renaissance and eighteenth-century literature. She is the author of Rethinking Shakespeare’s Skepticism: The Aesthetics of Doubt in the Sonnets and Plays (Duquesne University Press, 2014), as well as articles appearing in English Literary Renaissance, Studies in Philology, and Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). Her recent projects include a comparative essay on silent women in Jonson and Shakespeare and a monograph on Christian self-identity and the aesthetics of foreignness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Renaissance Drama Volume 48, Number 1Spring 2020 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/709974 Views: 172 © 2020 by Northwestern University. All rights reserved. Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

"Your name shall liue / In the new yeare: as in the age of gold" Sir Thomas Salusbury's "Twelfth Night Masque, Performed at Knowsley Hall in 1641" and its Contexts

"Your name shall liue / In the new yeareas in the age of gold" Sir Thomas Salusbury's "Twelfth Night Masque, Performed at Knowsley Hall in 1641" and its Contexts Rebecca A. Bailey On Twelfth Night, 1641, James, Lord Strange, the future 7th Earl of Derby, and his wife Lady Charlotte de la Trémoille hosted a masque at Knowsley Hall, Lancashire. The principal masquer was Lord Strange's heir, Charles Stanley, and the masque itself was devised by Sir Thomas Salusbury, kinsman of the Stanleys, and head of a prominent family from North Wales in Lleweni, Denbighshire.1 In Stuart England, the elite genre of the Stuart court masque was something of a hybrid dramatic form (see Butler, Stuart; Ravelhofer; Shohet; Knowles). David Lindley, tongue in cheek, described the court masque as "an elaborate framework for an aristocratic knees-up" (Lindley x). Martin Butler further reminds us that "the masque aimed to bind the court together, represent the monarch to the political nation at large and stimulate confidence in the values with which the monarch sought to have his government associated" (Stuart 20). As Julie Sanders has argued, the provincial or regional masque is of special interest as it demonstrates the "fluid interplay" or "flow" between "amateur and metropolitan sites of performance," encouraging us to ask how these site-specific texts "reconnect us in vital ways with the complex and dynamic geographies of performance" ("Geographies" 134–35). Salusbury's "Twelfth Night Masque", which witnessed Lord Strange's children performing speaking roles, on one level smacks of amateur family dramatics, allowing us a rare glimpse into an intimate Derby family gathering. Yet, with prominent figures performing from leading North West families—such as the Molyneuxes of Sefton, Lancashire, and the Hoghtons from Hoghton Tower, Lancashire—one has to ask, how "private" [End Page 465] was this event? This is especially pertinent as masquing roles were also played by long-standing retainers from established gentry families, such as the Farington, Fox, and Tyldesley families of Lancashire. Indeed, a key aim of this essay is to tease out the Deleuzian rhizomatic logic at the heart of this performance, whereby "routes of identity" are "formed through connections and traverses" to create what Augé has pinpointed as an "organic sociality" (Deleuze and Guattari 262; Augé 94). Mike Crang in Cultural Geography elucidates Deleuze's term "rhizomatic" through the vivid image of "brambles" that "send out shoots to produce a tangle of plants each criss-crossing the other" (Crang 172). In the masquing space of Knowsley Hall, these entwined branches of identity reached London and beyond. As this essay uncovers, fascinating resonances exist between Salusbury's "Twelfth Night Masque" in Lancashire and court masques performed at Whitehall, such as Ben Jonson's and Inigo Jones's Love's Triumph Through Callipolis (1631), and William Davenant's and Inigo Jones's Britannia Triumphans (1638) (Jonson and Jones, Love's Triumph 319–42; Davenant and Jones). Of course, as 1641 dawned, such "routes of identity" were under especial scrutiny as the country teetered towards Civil War. The occasion of Salusbury's masque itself, "Twelfth Night," was famously a time of misrule, and the topsy-turvyness associated with this masquing occasion was fast becoming part of everyday life. Lord Strange, as the principal magnate of the North West, was a key figure in this growing national crisis. By the mid-1630s, Lord Strange had very deliberately removed himself from court, virtually retiring to his estates in Lancashire as a mark of his displeasure with Charles I's increasingly Laudian court. However, when the Bishops' Wars of 1638–40 broke out in Scotland, Lord Strange had rallied immediately to King Charles's standard, believing it to be "an honour to give honour to your sovereign" (James Stanley, "Letter" 22; on the Bishops' Wars see Fissel). Thus, Salusbury's "Twelfth Night Masque" offers an intrinsic insight into Lord Strange's own self-fashioning (of which the estate, the region, and the national landscape were each a part) at a moment of acute political anxiety. Employing a cultural-geographical approach allows us to consider the ramifications that this site-specific performance offers into the Stanley family, the region and the country...

Ian Donaldson (1935–2020)

Ian Donaldson (1935–2020) R. S. White, Martin Butler, and David McInnis Click for larger view View full resolution Ian Donaldson, FBA FRSE FAHA, was a much-valued member of the Parergon International Editorial Board and foundation Chairman of the Advisory Board for the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. After graduating from Trinity College, University of Melbourne (BA Honours, 1957), and Magdalen and Merton Colleges, Oxford (BA 1961, MA 1964), Ian began his career as Fellow and Lecturer in English at Wadham College, Oxford (1962–1969). At a remarkably young age, he was elected chair of the Oxford English Faculty, and later in his career he became chair of the Cambridge English Faculty (1999–2001), a possibly unique double honour at these august universities with their ancient rivalry. Perhaps only a courteous and diplomatic Australian could manage to satisfy both. In 1969 Ian returned to Australia as Professor of English at the Australian National University (1969–1991), and with apparent inevitability rapidly became Head of Department. A change which was to be prophetic in his career came in 1974, on Ian’s appointment as founding Director of the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University, a post which he held until 1990, and then again from 2004 to 2007. In a kind of interregnum he returned to teaching English, first from 1991–95 holding the Regius Professorship of Rhetoric and English Literature at Edinburgh University (1991–95; Head of Department, 1992–94; [End Page xiii] Director, Postgraduate School, 1992). This was a position which, he pointed out with bemusement, was an appointment made by the monarch personally, and was the oldest such chair in the world (instituted 1762 as the Regius Chair in Rhetoric and Belles Lettres). Then in 1995–2002 he moved to Cambridge as Grace 1 Professor of English at Cambridge University and Fellow of King’s College (1995–2002). His experience at the HRC in Canberra richly qualified him to set up a similar research environment as the Founding Director, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, Cambridge University (2001–03) which is still thriving, despite its apparent train wreck acronym, CRASSH. Returning to Australia, Ian became Honorary Professorial Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne (2007–20), where he continued to research and supervise postgraduates. He was elected President of the Australian Humanities Academy (2007–09). Some of his experiences as a life-long research administrator and leader in the Humanities were drawn together in Taking Stock: The Humanities in Australian Life since 1968, edited with Mark Finnane (The University of Western Australia Publishing, 2012). Through his contribution on the Advisory Board for the interdisciplinary ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (2011–17), he exerted continuing influence on the Humanities globally. It was a remarkable career, unrivalled in sustained prestige, peer admiration and research leadership. Ian Donaldson’s primary research field was Renaissance literature, and he was the undisputed world expert on the poet and playwright, Ben Jonson. He was chosen to edit authoritative editions, Ben Jonson: Poems (1975) and Ben Jonson (Oxford Authors, 1985). Those who work in early modern literature will know how massive and comprehensive was Jonson’s oeuvre and how significant he was in his age. Amongst Ian’s monographs were The World Upside-Down: Comedy from Jonson to Fielding (1970), The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and its Transformations (1982), and Jonson’s Magic Houses: Essays in Interpretation (1997). He wrote entries on Jonson and others for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, as well as many articles on a variety of topics, including insightful essays on Shakespeare. His own long-awaited and superbly readable biography, Ben Jonson: A Life (2011), hailed as erudite and definitive in historical and literary coverage, was short-listed for the James Tait Black Biography Prize and the H. W. Fisher Best First Biography Prize in 2012. Ian’s musings on the difficulties and craft of literary biography appeared in various essays and in his co-edited book, Shaping Lives: Reflections on Biography (1992), as well as a short monograph The Death of the Author and the Lives of the Poets...

The Queen and the Cockpit: Henrietta Maria's Theatrical Patronage Revisited

This article will take a fresh look at Queen Henrietta Maria's patronage of the commercial theatre, and, in particular, her patronage of the companies that bore her name, which operated first at the Cockpit playhouse and later at Salisbury Court. Recent work by Rebecca Bailey and Karen Britland, among others, has demonstrated that the queen consort's patronage of drama extended beyond the masque and plays staged at court such as Arténice, Florimène and The Shepherds' Paradise, encompassing the promotion of commercial plays at court and the support of dramatists such as James Shirley and William Davenant. However, the queen's household accounts, which are gradually coming to scholarly attention through the work of Britland, Martin Butler, Barbara Ravelhofer and others, suggest that her financial backing of these companies was greater than has been assumed, and that she continued to support her players after they were reconstituted at Salisbury Court in 1637. Taking as its starting point a payment of 100 marks by the queen to Queen Henrietta Maria's Men in 1630, the essay will explore in detail the company's relationship with the court in the late 1620s and early 1630s, drawing on prologues, epilogues and the paratexts of printed plays to revisit the court performances of dramas such as Thomas Heywood's The Fair Maid of the West and Love's Mistress and Marlowe's The Jew of Malta. In doing so, it will explore new questions about the queen's personal and political involvement in commercial theatre.

“MDCXVI”

This article examines the legacy of Ben Jonson's folio Workes of 1616, in particular the attention that has been paid to the volume's material instantiation. It discusses some of the bibliographical features that distinguish it from the better-known Shakespeare First Folio as well as some aspects of its printing history. It then looks at how changes in graduate training over the past forty years have affected scholarly approaches to editing and book history. Next, it looks at how three scholarly editions have incorporated important material and design characteristics of the Workes into their completed work: C. H. Hereford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson's Oxford Ben Jonson (1925–52), Ian Donaldson, Martin Butler, and David Bevington's Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson (2012), and the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson Online (2014). Finally, it offers a few thoughts on the current limits of electronic publishing and possible future developments.

Encounters with cultural difference

This essay aims to critically reassess and, ultimately, rehabilitate exoticism, understood as a particular mode of cultural representation and a highly contested discourse on cultural difference, by bringing it into dialogue with cosmopolitanism. It offers a theoretical exploration of exoticism and cosmopolitanism alongside associated critical frameworks, such as the contact zone, autoethnography, authenticity and cultural translation, and brings them to bear on two awardwinning films that aptly illustrate a new type of exoticism in contemporary world cinema. Using Tanna (Martin Butler and Bentley Dean, 2015) and Embrace of the Serpent (Ciro Guerra, 2015), both made in collaboration with Indigenous communities, as case studies, this essay proposes that exoticism is inflected by cosmopolitan, rather than colonial and imperialist, sensibilities. It therefore differs profoundly from its precursors, which are premised on white supremacist assumptions about the Other which legitimised colonial expansion and the subjugation of the subaltern. By contrast, the new type of exoticism challenges and decentres Western values and systems of knowledge and aligns itself with the ethico-political agendas of cosmopolitanism, notably the promotion of crosscultural dialogue, an ecological awareness and the empowerment of hitherto marginalised communities.

Cinematic diplomacy and the exotic other in the film Tanna: implications for bilateral relations and tourism

The term the exotic other is invoked in this paper via the 2016 film, Tanna (Bentley Dean and Martin Butler). Set in the South Pacific nation Vanuatu, Tanna is an emblematic rendering of the exotic other through ethnography-inspired film. Film and narrative analysis is a fundamental method used to scrutinise and ponder the discernible and latent discourses evident and this is leveraged through the theoretical framework of cultural diplomacy. Cultural diplomacy has its genesis in its utility as a tool for foreign policy and the promotion of a nation's strategic interests abroad. Cinematic diplomacy underlines the link between film and the representations of people and place and can be considered a subset of cultural diplomacy in that it mobilises and delivers film for diplomatic and bilateral relationship-building purposes. Tanna raises multiple issues including ascertaining the extent to whether essentialising the other 'glamorises primitivity' and if so, what mitigates against this.

Cinematic diplomacy and the exotic other in the film Tanna: implications for bilateral relations and tourism

The term the exotic other is invoked in this paper via the 2016 film, Tanna (Bentley Dean and Martin Butler). Set in the South Pacific nation Vanuatu, Tanna is an emblematic rendering of the exotic other through ethnography-inspired film. Film and narrative analysis is a fundamental method used to scrutinise and ponder the discernible and latent discourses evident and this is leveraged through the theoretical framework of cultural diplomacy. Cultural diplomacy has its genesis in its utility as a tool for foreign policy and the promotion of a nation's strategic interests abroad. Cinematic diplomacy underlines the link between film and the representations of people and place and can be considered a subset of cultural diplomacy in that it mobilises and delivers film for diplomatic and bilateral relationship-building purposes. Tanna raises multiple issues including ascertaining the extent to whether essentialising the other 'glamorises primitivity' and if so, what mitigates against this.

Tanna - Directed by Martin Butler and Bentley Dean Written by Martin Butler, Bentley Dean and Carolyn Johnson

Tanna - Directed by Martin Butler and Bentley Dean Written by Martin Butler, Bentley Dean and Carolyn Johnson

Staging Authority in Caroline England: Prerogative, Law and Order in Drama, 1625–1642 by Jessica Dyson (review)

Jessica Dyson. Staging Authority Caroline England: Law and Order Drama, 1625-1642. Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2013. Pp. x + 224. $109.95. With its focus on often overlooked riches of Caroline stage and its attention to period's central political and legal debates, Jessica Dyson's Staging Authority Caroline England: Law and Order Drama, 1625-1642 makes a worthy contribution to recent scholarship on early modern theater. Dyson's work especially useful for its clear, efficient discussions of historical contexts as well as theoretical lineaments of Caroline disputes about monarchical and for its close readings of language and stakes of these debates period's drama. Dyson's introductory chapter effectively establishes her interest Caroline theater as a forum for period's competing articulations of royal and common law as they took shape against King Charles Is increasingly personal rule (2). She identifies her approach to drama as more oppositional than those of influential critics such as Martin Butler, but she careful to insist that playwrights such as Ben Jonson, Richard Brome, Philip Massinger, John Ford, or James Shirley offered challenges not to Charles's position as but rather to ability to act above, beyond or outside established laws of country (9). In these challenges, she adds eloquently, their drama diagnosed a dynamic by which Charles I, in over-asserting kingly and central authority, ... raise[d] possibilities of destabilization, fragmentation and disintegration of legitimate legal authority (13). Chapter 1, Rights, Prerogatives and Law: The Petition of Right, investigates acute constitutional issues driving 1628 Petition of Right and their enactment on stage. She reads petition, which crystallized competing interests of Parliament and King matters of taxation and martial law, as a symbol of widespread fear of royal absolutism and of a concomitant loss of traditional liberties. She then examines plays that juggle these concerns, arguing that Ben Jonson's The New Inn advocates balance of subjects' rights against a moderated, if not curtailed, royal prerogative (20) and that Richard Bromes The Love-Sick Court offers not only predictable critique of self-interested courtiers and their bad counsel--readings offered by Butler and Matthew Steggle--but also a more pointed political statement about the usefulness of parliaments and necessity of calling them (44). Chapter 2, Shaking Foundations of Royal Authority: From Divine Right to King's Will, surveys contemporary accounts of royal authority--theories of divine right, of designation, and of contract--and then charts Philip Massinger's representations, over course of three plays, of this and its relation to law. She traces an arc of declining divinity: from king as undeniably a god with extra-legal power The Roman Actor to king as undeniably mortal, willful, and fallible The Emperor of East and The Guardian. Although theoretical background here cogent, some of specific readings are overly literal ways that undermine idea of a declining divinity; it maybe true that Domitian The Roman Actor presented as a divine ruler and that his extra-legal is not denied (66), but play neither condones nor reinforces this position--it seems to put it into question order to insist on Domitians very human status and passions. Dysons treatment of The Guardian, which sees outlaw Severino as a critique of, rather than a substitute for, absolute power, more assured and convincing. The third chapter, Debating Legal Authorities: Common Law and Prerogative, sets common law center stage, as a legitimate alternative to will of monarch as foundation of realm. …

GILLES MONSARRAT, BRIAN VICKERS, and R. J. C. WATT (eds), The Collected Works of John Ford, Volume I

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, Brian Vickers begins his Introduction with an understatement: ‘readers who only know Ford’s plays may be surprised at the nature and extent of this volume’. This is understandable. A convenient edition of the non-dramatic works only became available in 1991. Sadly, it may also be said that—apart from ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore—many students graduate without a knowledge of the range of Ford’s dramatic achievements. Coverage of playwrights declines rapidly after the death of Shakespeare. Dryden dismissed Jonson’s later plays as his ‘dotages’, and twentieth-century criticism has often labelled the work of the period as ‘decadent’. The appearance of a ground-breaking study of Caroline Drama by Martin Butler in 1984 should have changed all this but, despite a major collection of essays on Ford published in 1986 and Revels editions of nearly all the single-authored plays being available, exploration of Ford’s contribution to the London theatres after 1625 remains a minority pursuit. Critical appreciation has slowly been growing over the past two decades, however, and this project is a textual landmark that cannot be ignored by anybody with an interest in English Renaissance drama.

The Life, Music, and Thought of Woody Guthrie: A Critical Appraisal

The Life, Music, and Thought of Woody Guthrie: A Critical Appraisal

Introduction

Introduction RORY LOUGHNANE, ANDREW J. POWER, AND PETER SILLITOE In late 1624 tides of change were sweeping across Europe. Louis XIII appointed Cardinal Richelieu as First Minister of France on 12 August of that year, the Siege of Breda represented a high-water mark for Spanish success in the Eighty Years’ War, and, as the health of James I declined, England faced up to the prospect of a new monarch for the first time in over two decades.1 The wider contexts for the adventoftheCarolineerainEnglishhistory—royalismandradicalism,cavalierism andparliamentarianism—hasinvitedanapproachtoliterarystudiesoftheperiod that is tied inextricably to the political and theological controversies, conflicts and crises of its day. The writing of the period itself was long treated as a type of stopgap , bridging the creative brilliance of the ‘golden age’ of English writing, from Spenser to Shakespeare to Donne, with the outbreak of civil war, the formation of the English Commonwealth, undone by the later Restoration, and the emergence of Milton, Davenant and Dryden. Thus the ‘first’ Caroline period of literature — more typically discussed as ending in 1642, such has been the predominance of critical writing on dramatic performance, but in fact ending with the execution of Charles I in 1649 — has suffered by negative comparison to what came before and what emerged later. But such a critical vantage point has come under increased attack in recent years as scholars have set out to understand and appreciate the literature of this period on its own merits and not only in the light of the literary successes of the earlier age or the bloody ruptures of the civil war to come.2 On James I’s final months, see Alan Stewart, The Cradle King: The Life of James VI and I, the 1 First Monarch of a United Great Britain (London: Chatto & Windus, 2003), pp. 330–50. Martin Butler’s Theatre and Crisis, 1632–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) 2 helped first instigate the revisionist charge. More recently, works such as Reid Barbour’s Literature and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), and Thomas N. Corns’s collection The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and his monograph A History of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007) have helped sustain it. As ever, much criticism has centred on drama in the period, and there have been several excellent revisionist studies of the period, including: Julie Sanders’s Caroline Drama: The Plays of Massinger, Ford, Shirley, and Brome (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1999) and The Cultural Geography of Early Modern Drama, 1620–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), and Adam Zucker and Alan B. Farmer’s collection Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics and Economics of the Early Modern Stage, 1625–1642 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Yearbook of English Studies, 44 (2014), 1–11© Modern Humanities Research Association 2014 We begin by attempting to situate our current enterprise within recent studies of the period. The present volume brings together fourteen established and emerging scholars of Caroline literature to assess and respond to recent critical approaches, while also shedding new light on overlooked texts, contexts and practices. We have requested that contributors ask new questions about the function, form and features of Caroline literature, shifting the critical question from ‘how is such writing distinct from what comes before?’ or, ‘how does it pre-empt the revolution to come?’ to ‘how might we approach this literature on its own terms?’ This is not to dismiss the political and theological turmoil of the period, or, indeed, to overlook the weighty sense of nostalgia for, and anxious engagement with, earlier writing that is pervasive in this period, but instead to search for new ways to approach an epoch of writing that remains (relatively) neglected in the English canon. The fruits of such an approach — from the identification of a new vogue for the ‘grotesque’ in contemporary poetry to a reconsideration of the evidence for the reputation of the Red Bull theatre and its repertory — attest to the varied ways by which we might revisit and revise opinions about Caroline literary activity. The volume is divided into three discrete sections — drama, poetry and other writing — but, as will become clear, each section...

Spiritual Alchemy through Embodied Hieroglyphs in Jonson’s Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists at Court

In his verse epistle to Aurelian Townshend, Thomas Carew describes wit- nessing a court masque, Townshend's 1632 Tempe Restored, as a wondrous, transformative experience:It filled us with amazement to beholdLove made all spirit, his mould,Dissected into atoms, melt awayTo empty air, and from the gross allayOf mixtures and compounding accidents,Refined to immaterial elements. (77-82)Townshend 's masque replaces the representative of earthly desire, Circe, with the embodiment of divine beauty, played by Queen Henrietta Maria. Here Carew's language figures that transformation as alchemical refinement: love is disassembled into its component parts, like a metallic allay of mixtures, and refined into something transcendent. The corporeal mould becomes imma- terial, a perfected neoplatonic essence. Carew speaks for the audi- ence, ventriloquizing their collective wonder, and he also implies that the audience partakes in this transmutation by beholding it. The audience mem- bers witness an act of (which Carew's reference to dissection ties to another scientific context, that of the anatomical theater), but they also are the material upon which that works. The spectators will join with the masquers in dance, during which the masquers' perfection spreads to the rest of the court. For observers of the Stuart masque, entailed much more than the making of gold: it included transformation both per- sonal and global, both divine and divinely sanctioned. In Carew's account of Tempe Restored, the physical performance space becomes a theatrical alembic in which the noble masquers and their elite audience are refined by watching and enacting the verbal, visual, and kinetic process of the masque.But how can we reconcile a widespread contemporary belief in spiritual alchemy with the equally widespread satirical representation of practical al- chemy? These seemingly contradictory intellectual trends coexist within Ben Jonson's masque Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists at Court. Like The Al- chemist, Mercury Vindicated seems to deride as a discipline filled with charlatans who erroneously value art over nature and who cozen the foolish or greedy for financial or social gain. Performed at Whitehall on 6 January 1615 by the professional actors of the King's Men and twelve male masquers, the masque begins in an alchemical laboratory, in which the personified Mercury escapes from a furnace, complains of the many abuses committed against him by alchemists, and begs for King James to save him from his oppressors.1 While Mercury opines about his situation, the alchemists, led by Vulcan and his as- sistant Cyclope, attempt to recapture him in two alchemically themed anti- masques. Eventually, the king's presence banishes the alchemists; a glorious bower containing an embodied Nature, accompanied by the masquers and Prometheus, replaces the laboratory; and the performance culminates in the noble masquers joining with the audience in a courtly dance. It is easy to read the alchemical content of Mercury Vindicated as an unambiguous condemna- of practical and a useful satirical tool.2 In arguing that Jonson only denounces or calls upon its figurative resonance for poetic pur- poses, such readings neglect the full import of the masque's complex emblem- atic and alchemical context.Mercury Vindicated has received less scholarly attention than other works like The Masque of Blackness, and recent criticism has most often focused on the masque's immediate courtly context: the rivalry between Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, and the king's new favorite, George Villiers.3 The transforma- tion of men, then, has both philosophical and topical relevance. As Martin Butler suggests, this particular masque staged a contrast between false pro- ductivity and true creation in senses at once material and social (222). …

MARTIN BUTLER. The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture.

MARTIN BUTLER. The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture.

KEVIN CURRAN, Marriage, Performance, and Politics at the Jacobean Court. * JOANNE ROCHESTER, Staging Spectatorship in the Plays of Philip Massinger.

THESE two volumes make welcome additions to an already wide-ranging and stimulating series. They explore subjects that a generation ago would have been labelled ‘minor’ but which have attracted increasing critical attention since the 1980s. A landmark collection of essays edited by David Lindley and a major study of Caroline Drama by Martin Butler were both published in 1984. Consequently, sufficient time has elapsed for their contents to be digested, revaluated, and challenged. Kevin Curran and Joanne Rochester survey the territory and provide new directions for today's students. The Jacobean Masque has received considerable attention from the New Historicists. Curran, developing the micropolitical criticism that challenged the regicentric emphasis of scholars such as Orgel and Goldberg, argues that far from reproducing ‘a pre-established rhetoric of Jacobean kingship’, the masques that are the focus of his study ‘were, in fact, constructing a Jacobean political idiom, not being determined by one that...

A "Birthright into a New World": Representing the Town on Brome's Stage

England in the 1630s witnessed increasing hostilities between Puritans and Royalists as different religious and political groups competed to shape the way the English conceptualized the newly constructed town locales. During this period, sites such as Covent Garden, Asparagus Garden in Lambeth across from Whitehall, and the New Exchange in the Strand at Westminster, among others, emerged as contested spaces among the court, the city, and the country. (1) Most critics characterize the dramatist Richard Brome as siding with the town gentry and depicting these upscale districts in his plays as oppositional hotbeds to Charles's increasingly autocratic rule. While R. J. Kaufmann, Julie Sanders, Martin Butler, and, more recently, Matthew Steggle and Adam Zucker emphasize the setting in Brome's plays, they largely overlook the way these suburban developments were imagined as colonial ventures. (2) This essay examines how the establishment of the town, as represented in Brome's plays, is framed by European models of both internal colonialism and New World expansion. (3) Although my essay treats mainly Carolinian drama, I also discuss Ben Jonson's plays, in order to contextualize the ways in which Brome brings together two seemingly different functions of Jacobean drama: to familiarize recent arrivals to London to their fast-changing milieu and to marginalize an English underclass that cannot assimilate into the competitive marketplace of these new urban spaces. Teasing out the tensions of these two representational models, Brome identifies how elite speculators and the state collude as they attempted to increase profit margins and solidify their control of these expanding districts. By dramatizing how developers incorporate foreign architecture, install foreign workers in the town, and construct the town as an overseas territory, Brome lays bare an urban topography that upends traditional social relationships grounded in land ownership among the underclass, middling sort, and aristocracy. (4) In the first section of the essay, I analyze Ben Jonson's The Entertainment at Britain's Burse (1609), which registers the bewilderment of Londoners who have trouble comprehending the transformation of the western suburbs, as formerly remote green spaces became integrated into a global network of commerce. In this masque, which was performed before James I at the inaugural ceremony of the New Exchange in the Strand at Westminster, Jonson depicts this high-end shopping center as an initial foray into the town by developers who intended to displace the area's inhabitants. The New Exchange, one of the main developments of the West End, along with Hyde Park, Tottenham Court, and Covent Garden, specializes in luxury consumer items from the Far East--products from a region of the world that testified to Dutch trading supremacy. As I will demonstrate, because the Netherlands permeates the way the English conceive of the town, these sites come to be characterized as extensions of Dutch commercial activities, alienating the English from their homeland. (5) I then consider the construction of London's suburbs as a New World plantation that must weed undesirable elements in order to form a community fit for the nobility in Brome's topographical comedy, or placerealism play, The Weeding of Covent Garden (1633). Alternately called a forest and a lawless precinct inhabited by Amazonian trulls and tribe[s] of men and women, (6) Covent Garden contains an underclass thriving on the disorder inherent in this new suburb. Primarily, developers of the suburbs introduced foreign architecture to draw the city's elite to the area to maximize profits; in his study of this play, Zucker points out that the building of the Covent Garden piazza signaled the consolidation of the city's first neighborhood based on wealth. (7) As contemporary pamphlets demonstrate, this gentrification was disguised as a colonial venture--an inducement to nonlocals to settle in the area, but only if they strictly conform to the builders' image of the development as an exclusive setting designed for a new merchant elite. …

MARTIN BUTLER, The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture.

MARTIN BUTLER, The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture.