Staple Of News Research Articles

Характер перших англійських газет очима сучасника драматурга Бена Джонсона в його п’єсі “Склад новин”

The nature of the first English newspapers through the eyes of a contemporary playwright Ben Jonson in his play “The Staple of News” is considered. These first-born publications inherited from their predecessops – actually the books, socalled “News books”, “Fair bulletins”, “News ballads”, “News”, “Newsletters”, hybrid publications (two pages of printed messages and two blank pages for handwritten information for the areas where there was still no printing press) – a book format and two-column layout, which restrained development of journalism. The things were not better in terms of filling the content of first periodicals. The journalistic profession was just getting back on its feet, and its criteria were developed through a long process of “trial and error”. In addition, the quality of news was strongly influenced by the political factor in the form of censorship bans directed to coverage of domestic political news and ethical behavior of journalists as well as by the economic factor which dictated the fastest possible profit and caused neglecting the reliability of information and other standards of journalistic profession, which were not completely comprehended at that time. On the other hand, the continuous lies or half-truths in the newspapers could also repel the regular and potential readers, and this factor played a restraining role in descent of these publications to the level of gossip and hearsay. The Dutch newspapers were dominated before the appearance of the first English newspapers in the information space of Misty Albion, which came to the attention of Robert Burton, the English clergyman, writer and scientist. Being a skeptic and pessimist, he called his book “Anatomy of Melancholy” (1621) for good reason. In the same year, the first English newspaper “Corante, or Weekely Newes from Italy, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Bogemia, France and the Law countreys” appeared under the Dutch influence. Four years later, the second newspaper “Mercurius Britannicus” was published. The first newspaper was depicted in detail and the second one was depicted briefly in the play of the English playwright Ben Jonson “The Staple of News” (1625). Оbviously this is the first English work dedicated to the newspaper and its journalists.

ABOUT CRITICISM, SELF-CRITICISM AND LEGITIMATION: the journalistic ethos in The Staple of News

The article analyzes the dispositions, perceptions and values of journalists interviewed by Brazilian documentary “O Mercado de Notícias” [“The Staple of News”] (Jorge Furtado/2014/94 min). The analysis is based on the theoretical-conceptual framework of Pierre Bourdieu's sociological thinking. Some of the main excerpts from the testimonies of the 13 professional agents invited by the filmmaker are studied and categorized to explain the representations they have about the journalistic field.

Ben Jonson's Reception of Lucian

Throughout his career Ben Jonson drew variously upon Lucian, whom he encountered in the mythographies as well as in several Greek and Latin editions he owned. Jonson's receptions take the form of glancing reminiscence in the masques, as Lucian supplies mythological decoration and literary conceit. They appear as transformative allusion in Cynthia's Revels, which draws upon several satirical Dialogues of the Gods, and in The Staple of News, which re-appropriates a favorite satirical dialogue, Timon, the Misanthrope, to satirize the greed of the news industry. Jonson practices an extended and creative imitatio of Lucian's fantastic moon voyages (A True Story and Icaromenippus) in his much neglected News from the New World Discovered in the Moon. And, likewise, Jonson reworks Lucian extensively for the action of Poetaster: The Carousal supplies the lascivious banquet of 4.5, and Lexiphanes, the humiliating purge of Crispinus. Jonson's rich engagement with Lucian comes to a climax in Volpone, which borrows directly from The Dream, and several Dialogues of the Dead. Here whimsical ancient satire enables stern moral allegory. Responding to Poetaster in Satiro-mastix, Thomas Dekker has Captain Tucca rebuke Horace (i.e. Ben Jonson) by sarcastically calling him “Lucian.” Jonson, no doubt, took the proffered insult as the highest compliment.

Gendered Circulation and the Marital Ship of State in Jonson’sThe Staple of News

Gendered Circulation and the Marital Ship of State in Jonson’s<i>The Staple of News</i>

Ben Jonson’s The Staple of News: Habermas’ Public Sphere and the Early Modern News Industry

The Staple of News is Jonson’s proactive literary response to the emerging news industry of the early seventeenth century. This essay attempts to appreciate Jonson’s critical attitude to his contemporary journalism which has resonance for our own era as well. In analyzing the play, the essay carries out a tripartite dialogue between Jonson’s dramatic text, Habermas’s philosophical proposition of the public sphere and historians’ documentary evidence. By the public sphere Habermas means a realm of private people who engage themselves in a public debate over matters of general interests. The development of these debates in a large public body makes it prerequisite for specific means to make information widely accessible to the public. Such means were provided by advancing print culture which materialized itself into the first newspaper, namely corantos, in the early 1620s. In Jonson’s play, Cymbal claims that his news-office will launch responsible journalism operating on the principles of celerity, authenticity and impartiality. These principles support the enlightenment concept that the popular press in the early modern period was part of the movement towards modern democracy by contributing to the formation of the public sphere. Despite his claim for responsible journalism, however, Cymbal deludes the audience with the sensational news which capitalizes on the reading public’s idle curiosity: for example, the King of Spain’s being chosen Pope and Emperor, the discovery of an optic glass so powerful that it could set ships afire by moonlight, and so forth. These practices confirm Marx’s proposition that publicity is false consciousness promulgated for particular class interests rather than endorsing Kant’s theory that publicity allows private individuals to overcome their conflicting interests for public welfare. Jonsons trope of the news-office as a means of interrogating the politics of commodified journalism puts forward a satirical viewpoint which is indicative not only of his early modern period but also of our modern era. Despite the unprecedented proliferation of news sources driven by the development of Internet, our modern era experiences a sense of disillusionment because these news sources are increasingly sensationalized by commercial motives and consequently detrimental to democracy.

“Men and Women o’the Time”: Allegory in Three 2015 Productions

This essay starts with a comment from a choric figure in Jonson’s The Staple of News (1626): that the Vice and other figures from the older moral drama now appear onstage “attired like men and women o'the time.” After a review of contemporary evidence, the focus is on three 2015 productions. First is a clearly allegorical script, Carol Ann Duffy’s adaptation of the best known moral play, Everyman , at the National Theatre where a relatively short early Tudor play, with its homily linked to the protagonist’s preparation for Death and a final reckoning, was transformed into a much longer polemic against today’s abuse of the environment. The other two items singled out are the RSC productions at the Swan of The Jew of Malta and Volpone , neither of which contains overt allegory yet both include sections that may have been understood then in near allegorical terms, whether to depict a sleeping Christianity in Marlowe’s Malta or an ejection of Conscience in Jonson’s Venice. The goal is to call attention to the possibility of new possibilities and meanings lurking behind a familiar episode or configuration so that theatre history, rather than being reductive, can display how the play of ideas in a scene or sequence could be both entertaining and meaningful in their theatrical terms and--perhaps--still translatable into ours.

The interval and indoor playmaking

ABSTRACTAlthough early modern acting companies were adept at using different kinds of venue, performing indoors imposed a significant change in practice. Since indoor theatres required artificial lighting to augment the natural light admitted via windows, candles were employed; but the technology was such that candles could not last untended throughout an entire performance. Performing indoors thus introduced a new component into stage practice: the interval. This article explores what extant evidence (such as it is) might tell us about the introduction of act breaks, how they may have worked, and the implications for actors, audiences and dramatists. Ben Jonson's scripting of the interval in two late plays, The Staple of News and The Magnetic Lady, is examined for what it may suggest about actual practice, and the ways in which the interval may have been considered integral to composition and performance is explored through a reading of Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling. The interval offered playwrights a form of structural punctuation, drawing attention to how acts ended and began; actors could use the space to bring on props for use in the next act; spectators might use the pause between acts to reflect on what had happened and, perhaps, anticipate what was to come; and stage-sitters, the evidence indicates, often took advantage of the hiatus in the play to assert their presence in the space to which all eyes naturally were drawn.

Sing Heavenly News: Journalism and Poetic Authority in Samuel Sheppard's The Faerie King (c. 1654)

This article analyzes the relationship between poetry and news writing in revolutionary England as exemplified by the writings of the prolific royalist journalist and poet Samuel Sheppard (1624-1655?). Offering an extended analysis of Sheppard's work (and focusing particularly on his unfinished epic poem, The Faerie King ), I examine how writers might lay claim to the authority of the poet in a literary marketplace utterly transformed by pamphlet journalism. If, earlier in the century, in The Staple of News (1622), Ben Jonson observed with horror the effects that newsprint was supposedly having on the audiences of his verbal art, did the poet-journalists of the revolutionary decades share this view? Did these men, a tribe of sons and bastards supposedly loyal to the memory and legacy of Jonson, also see Parnassus and Grub Street as such very different places? Using the example of Sheppard I suggest that even if they did in theory, in practice they struggled to keep these two worlds apart. Sheppard demonstrates, however unwillingly, that by the mid-seventeenth century poetry and news could be mutually enriching modes of discourse.

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.)

Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century (review)

Reviewed by: Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century Albert Lloret (bio) Roger Chartier. Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century. Translation by Arthur Goldhammer. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2007. (Material Texts Series). xiii + 203 pp. There are a number of reasons why we constantly interrogate poetical texts to learn about the past, and also to better understand the societies we live in: the high symbolic value bestowed on literature by the educational system, institutional inertia, economic interests created around culture, urgent psychological and political needs to get in touch with traditions that are part of ourselves, and so forth. This [End Page 928] book by Roger Chartier—proficiently translated by Arthur Goldhammer—would add another reason to the list: namely, that any progress achieved within a humanistic discipline that crosses boundaries to neighboring fields has the potential both to find unexplored objects of study and to raise new questions. Inscription and Erasure disputes the long-standing division between the interpretation of texts and the description of the material supports and socio-historical environments in which texts appeared and circulated. Throughout the eight chapters that constitute this book—some of them had already been published independently—Chartier examines from a middle-ground between a socio-historical study of graphic culture and the hermeneutics of the poetical text "the manifold relationship between inscription and erasure, between the durable record and the ephemeral text, by studying the way in which writing was made literature by certain works belonging to various genres and composed in various times and places" (vi). The choice of texts studied in the book has not been made following any systematic criteria, nor does Chartier claim to have exhausted his methodological approach (xi). However, the selection of texts seems fully justified by the representative character of the issues at stake. In the first chapter (1–12), Chartier deals with an implement of written culture that was fundamental until the widespread use of paper. Between the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Benedictine abbot and later archbishop Baudri de Borgueil wrote some 250 Latin poems containing recurrent allusions to the wax tablets in which he composed his works before those works were copied onto another, more definitive support, such as parchment. When addressing Baudri's poetization of a writing tool, Chartier stresses its place in the bigger picture of contemporary mechanisms of writing, and extracts numerous references to the processes of text composition, copying, reading and memorization to which the use of wax tablets was intrinsically related. Chapter 2 (13–27) focuses on the Sierra Morena episode in the first part of Don Quixote (1604), and on the appearance therein of a librillo de memoria. Chartier gathers all the evidence available to describe what that librillo was. Definitions from contemporary dictionaries, a reference from Shakespeare's Hamlet, the history of similar devices (like the writing tablets of Elizabethan England), and surviving examples of the librillo from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain, all seem to point to a small booklet with varnished pages that allowed for writing and wiping off notes of a transient nature. Moreover, Chartier shows [End Page 929] how the functioning of such a device is analogically represented in the functioning of Sancho's memory throughout the entire episode. Chapter 3 (28–45) remains centered on Cervantes' masterpiece, discussing Don Quixote's visit to a print shop in Barcelona. Chartier underscores how the details about the printing process in this episode—notoriously affecting the very book in the incongruous episode of Sancho's stolen ass—along with the hints to Avellaneda's apocryphal second part of Don Quixote throughout the book, are another side of the constant interchange between fiction and, in this case, "the technical and literary circumstances in which the book was composed (in both senses of the word composed: aesthetic and typographical)" (42). Chapter 4 (46–62) tackles a play by Ben Jonson—The Staple of News (staged in 1626)—which satirizes the handwritten newsletters and printed gazettes that proliferated in seventeenth-century England and disseminated unreliable news which, nevertheless, were avidly welcomed by the uncritical audiences. Chartier differentiates between the...

Ben Jonson and the Business of News

The key events in the history of English printed journalism are fairly clear: the earliest known royal proclamation appeared in 1486; the first extant prose report on a current event, the battle of Flodden Field, appeared in 1513; printed news ballads multiplied dramatically during the sixteenth century; the first periodicals of foreign news were published in the 1620s; newsbooks covering domestic news proliferated wildly during the 1640s; the first daily English newspaper appeared in 1702. Yet these milestones mask some important complications in the development of-and resistance to-the printed mass news media. The standard journalism histories, although most are now thirty to seventy years old, have adequately catalogued the media and the official government response. But we know much less, for example, about writers' reactions to the growth of news reporting. Our ignorance derives partly from these past writers' relative silence, but partly from our uncritical immersion in the news reporting of our own time-John Carey has gone so far as to assert that reportage has replaced religion in providing us our most basic, unexamined intellectual and emotional framework.' Ben Jonson's The Staple of News, for example, is almost universally pigeonholed as a satire of the seventeenth-century news business; the play's complexity and Jonson's long-standing interest in journalism have thus not been explored. More than any of his contemporaries, Jonson showed in his work an awareness of the rapidly changing news reporting of his time-and, as we might expect, Jonson responded to these changes with a complex mixture of pointed documentary and ethical judgment.

Reviews

Journal Article Reviews Get access G. Chapman (ed. J. Margeson ), The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron . Pp. xiv + 287 (The Revels Plays). Manchester and New York : Manchester University Press , 1988 . £35.00. B. Jonson (ed. A. Parr ), The Staple of News . Pp. xvi + 267 (The Revels Plays). Manchester and New York : Manchester University Press , 1988 . £35.00. PETER HYLAND PETER HYLAND Huron College, University of Western Ontario Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 37, Issue 1, March 1990, Pages 88–89, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/37-1-88 Published: 01 March 1990

The Staple of News

The Staple of News

A Celebration of Ben Jonson ed. by William Blissett, Julian Patrick, R. W. Van Fossen

A Celebration of Ben Jonson ed. by William Blissett, Julian Patrick, R. W. Van Fossen

Jonson's 'Staple of News' Gossips and Fulwell's 'Like Will to Like': 'The Old Way' in a 'New' Morality Play

Jonson's 'Staple of News' Gossips and Fulwell's 'Like Will to Like': 'The Old Way' in a 'New' Morality Play

The Staple of News: Jonson's Festive Comedy

The Staple of News: Jonson's Festive Comedy

Dryden's Paraphrase of Horace and 'The Staple of news'

Dryden's Paraphrase of Horace and 'The Staple of news'

A Note on Jonson's The Staple of News

A Note on Jonson's The Staple of News

A Note on Jonson's Staple of News

A Note on Jonson's Staple of News

Two Notes on Ben Jonson's Staple of News

Two Notes on Ben Jonson's Staple of News