Ben Jonson

George Herbert is widely celebrated for both his musical verse and for his patterned lyrics; but how might we critically engage with these two strands of his lyric technique? This article places George Herbert’s playful lyric poetic in the context of Stuart Masque culture. While these extravagant, secular entertainments are an unusual context against which to set Herbert’s more modest devotional poetic, it argues that Herbert – whose extended family was closely involved in the staging and production of these court events – cannot have been ignorant of this seventeenth-century cultural phenomenon. Building on a contemporary understanding of music as mathematical proportion, this article examines the ways in which the masque ‘staged’ ideas of harmony, in its perspectival sets and in its geometrically choreographed dances. Masque culture offers a rich and particularly vivid contemporary expression of the possibilities of interdisciplinary expression; in turn, it presents a new perspective on Herbert's visually- and aurally-rich lyric performance.

This essay asks how the boy players of the early modern English public stage and the aristocratic female performers of the early modern English court masque might have considered, and perhaps even affected, one another’s arts. Neither an aristocratic lady dancing in a masque nor a boy performing the role of such a lady on the public stage could have afforded to lose sight of the codes of elegant feminine behavior. Is it possible, then, that women’s and boys’ portrayals of elite femininity employed similar theatrical tactics? This essay proposes one methodology by which we might tease out potential relationships between boys’ and women’s performances. It begins by considering the conceptions of boy players and noble ladies inscribed in the texts of Ben Jonson’s Masque of Queens (1609) and Love Restored (1612), comparing them to the scandalous behavior of Frances and Catherine Howard at the end of the latter masque’s performance. It goes on to suggest that these contexts may help us better to imagine how the boy who first played the eponymous heroine of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (c.1612-13) portrayed her noble yet transgressive femininity. Such a comparison between the verbal and physical rhetoric of masques and those of public theater dramas may allow us to glimpse shared codes of class and gender embodiment across a range of performance cultures.

Like Old Hamlet’s Ghost, William Shakespeare has survived his own death as well as the “death of the author” to emerge as a seemingly immortal figure in his own right. The spectral persistence of the Bard in modern Anglophone culture has been discussed at length by Stephen Greenblatt, Gary Taylor, Douglas Lanier, and many others, who argue that the appearance of Shakespeare as a character in other literary works usually signals nostalgia for 19th century notions of the author as Romantic genius, personal wellspring of the narratives that have captivated centuries of readers. His presence represents the authority and authenticity of the human imagination.

Contemporary speculative fiction, however, by its very nature questions cultural and psychological verities. Shakespeare has made appearances in SF/F novels and short stories for nearly a century now, usually in the context of science-fictional time travel tales; however, several contemporary fantasy authors in particular dispense with the trappings of time travel and recreate Elizabethan England as a suburb of British Faerie, imagining Shakespeare’s encounters with the Fae as the source of his particular genius. There are now enough fantasy novels that feature William Shakespeare in a prominent character role to create a genre in themselves.

Of course, in a sense, even historical fiction about Shakespeare is fantasy, and the very real beliefs in ghosts, demons, witches, and fairies held by most of Shakespeare’s contemporaries would make even a realistic treatment of the poet qualify as literature of the supernatural. The emergence in the last few decades of serious and sustained interest on the part of scholars and artists on both sides of the pond in the pagan wellsprings of English folk traditions have resulted in a number of Britons (and their Anglophile American cousins) studying and practicing what has come to be called the “Faery Faith,” using the scholarship of archaeological, historical, folkloric, and linguistic studies to access ancient Celto-British lore and traditions in the interest of recreating an authentic spiritual and cultural ‘British” experience. Such scholars suggest that a traceable vein of pre-Christian British mysticism feeds all the English poets of the fantastic, from the Gawain-Poet to Gaiman, but lingering especially on Shakespeare.

This trend has had a significant impact on popular depictions of Faerie, which reject the Victorian imagery of feminized sprites, and instead evoke dark, eroticized figures of generational power heavily influenced by both Tolkien’s Elves and Anne Rice’s vampires. Supporting roles played in such fantasies also include Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, the “Dark Lady,” Henry Wriothsley, and Elizabeth herself, often creating a community of humans willingly or unwillingly glamoured into cooperating with the Fae, often in enterprises that represent threats to the sovereignty and mythic heritage of England. My talk will suggest some of these common elements in a few contemporary examples -- Sarah Hoyt’s Shakespearean Fantasies trilogy, Elizabeth Bear’s Promethean Age trilogy, Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess’s Shakespeare chapters in the graphic novels series The Sandman, and a new voice, Greer Gilman, who features Shakespeare and Ben Jonson as investigators of supernatural recreants – and will discuss the critique such works provide of the popular cultural icon of Shakespeare as the progenitor of English literature.

This essay argues that female chastity figures centrally in Bartholomew Fair’s exploration of early capitalist subjectivity. In the play, Jonson suggests that the market compromises masculinity and posits Grace Wellborn’s self-conscious commoditization of her own sexual agency as a strategy for navigating commercial markets. Through Grace, Jonson revises dominant models of subject formation to account for the emergence of a bourgeois self in relation to early modern commercial forces that are often understood as compromising personal autonomy. Jonson then applies this model of commoditized subjectivity to the commercial playwright, linking his own agency as an author to his ability to negotiate the market.

This essay maps a shared field of blackface performance, tattooing, writing, and printing that I call inkface. By relating the histories of racial thought and the technologies of reading and writing, the inkface concept enables a rich account of Tudor-era performances of literacy as rituals that invented an elastic racial category of blackened characters--white women, Amerindians, Moors, and Negroes who were meant to be read and not to read.

Through analysis of literary and theatrical evidence, I argue that the black-white palette that characterized Atlantic ink and slave semiotics did not invent the slave stigma but rather, reconfigured a Mediterranean system. Seen in this light, producing and interpreting inkface helped Britons struggling with memories of their own past as tattooed slaves in ancient Rome by transferring the ink mark of servility to other ethnicities as a property of their character.

This article considers an ambiguity concerning the stage presentation of Pug, the inept devil-servant of Ben Jonson’s The Devil Is an Ass, and explores the implications that ‘complete’ or ‘partial’ costume changes have for how an audience interprets the character, and how this apparent visual ambiguity may have been resolved by cosmetics and/or through the performance of a specific King’s Men actor. The article concludes with a comparison with ‘devilish servants-types’ in Othello and The Changeling, and argues that these three plays articulate early modern insecurities about the servant through an explicit association between the servile and the demonic.

Remember Jephthah, Forget the Hobby-Horse: Ballad, Proverb, Song, and Play in Shakespeare's World
In: Panka Dániel, Pikli Natália, Ruttkay Veronika (szerk.)
Kősziklára építve. Built Upon His Rock: Írások Dávidházi Péter tiszteletére. Writings in Honour of Péter Dávidházi. 420 p.
Budapest: ELTE BTK Angol-Amerikai Intézet, Anglisztika Tanszék, 2018. pp. 285-295.
(ELTE Papers in English Studies)
(ISBN:978-963-284-944-7)

The Prologue to Jonson's Volpone claims that the play was written "According to the palates of the season" (3), but what exactly is it about Volpone that is seasonable? Perhaps the answer can be found in the Argument: "Volpone, childless, rich, feigns sick, despairs, / Offers his state to hopes of several heirs" (1-2). Thus, if the Argument can be taken seriously, the play is about inheritance, and, in light of the prominence of royal and aristocratic succession during this time, surely the play’s portrayal of inheritance is what is seasonable about it. If so, it is interesting that Volpone fails to produce an heir by the end of his play. Thus, a careful examination of the depiction of inheritance (or the lack thereof) in Volpone allows one to understand a great deal about Jonson's relationship to his period and what may have been for him, and other playwrights of the period, an important literary project: commenting on the slow transition from aristocracy to meritocracy, from feudalism to capitalism. By means of such commentary, Jonson seems to be doing one of his favorite things: satirizing the foibles of his age.
The characters who most clearly express these foibles are Volpone, a gentleman who tries to increase his inherited wealth by means of a travesty of venture capitalism and thievery, and his favorite servant, Mosca, who aids and encourages Volpone in his underhanded schemes. In the midst of this travesty, Mosca uses his cunning and artistic skill to manipulate not only Volpone's victims, but also Volpone himself, revealing the precariousness of the relationship between the aristocracy and the working class.

William Shakespeare has developed the plot of his play Macbeth through the effective use of transitions<br> to the major characters. Among them, the character that is most prone to regular transitions in life is the<br> central character of Macbeth. This research paper explores the trajectory of transitions through which<br> Shakespeare develops the plot of his play through the character of Macbeth concerning his changing<br> situations and positions. While analysing the play with the help of Schlossberg's Transition theory,<br> specifically through the concept of 4S's, the perspicacity of Macbeth's trajectory of different transitions in<br> the pattern of one after the other is visible throughout the play. With the help of textual and<br> interpretative analysis of the play, the situation, psychological aspects, support and strategies to cope<br> with the transition in Macbeth are explored in the research. Through the pers...

Richard Brome, as he dedicates A Jovial Crew, or The Merry
Beggars to Thomas Stanley, claims  that his play had what he calls ‘the luck’ to ‘tumble last of all in  the epidemical ruin of the scene’: it was the last play staged  before the theatres closed in 1642 as the English Civil War began. But this dedication, written not when A Jovial Crew was performed at the Cockpit/Phoenix in 1641 or 1642, but when it was printed in 1652, gives the text a ‘certain poignancy which it would not originally have possessed’ (Butler, Theatre, 269). Put on at the conventional terminus of early modern drama, and published in the middle of a national crisis, A Jovial Crew is a work that has much to say about the history of theatre and the history of England.

A 1575 copy of the works of the Roman poet Horace that was once owned and used by William Shakespeare between 1589 and 1596 has recently been discovered in a private, Canadian collection. This paper presents an overview of Shakespeare's reception of Horace and points out the correspondence between his known borrowings and annotations in the 1575 Horace, most of which occur in Horace's Odes. Further annotations may indicate Shakespearean borrowings that have remained unnoticed so far. These annotations were very likely made by earlier owners of the 1575 Horace, and Shakespeare used them as signposts to the "good bits" of Horace's challenging Latin.

In Volpone, or the Fox, Ben Jonson conveys a moral message, blending the satirical comedy with the feigning death of the protagonist Volpone, who spreads the false news of his death to the legacy hunters. He uses the themes of avarice and moral corruption to criticise societal degeneration. Volpone, Mosca and the three legacy hunters create their self-deceit with a natural tendency towards greed, hypocrisy and disguise which also reveal their corrupt morality and the dramatic irony in the play. The play conveys serious criticism of society such as Corvino's offering his innocent and chaste wife to Volpone to reach his legacy and, also the bad treatment of women. The trial scene bears a serious portrayal of injustice, slander, false witnesses, and the victimization of the innocent and morally good characters. On the other hand, Jonson demonstrates how a person's greed leads to his downfall. Volpone's inner world and motivations for his actions show that he is initially driven by negative traits; greed, extravagance and deception. The motivation behind the excessive need for pleasure and satisfaction, initially, is his need for more material possessions and his fortune, for which he commits unjust actions and acts out deceptive behaviour. Volpone's realisation of his own negative traits and his fatal flaw eventually bring about his downfall. The play emphasises that the sinners are punished while the innocent are rewarded. In Women Beware Women, Thomas Middleton displays catastrophic consequences that stem from chaos in the tyrannical Duke's court. The play ends with the death of characters at a court masque scene. It functions as a reiteration of the moral and religious order against earthly pleasures and lust. The Duke, who should be the administrative of the order, becomes the source of corruption in the play, therefore he is punished. In both plays, the former a Jacobean city-comedy and the latter a Jacobean revenge tragedy, societal destructions stemming from a lack of morality have been portrayed. This paper aims to discuss the importance of Venetian and Florentine societies' tendencies in Jonson's and Middleton's plays that depict lack of morality and ethical values as a result of which social disorder becomes a reality and characters are portrayed in an endless endeavour to deceive one another, in order either to survive or to make profit out of any specific situation since higher authorities fail to fulfil their responsibilities.

Adopting a descriptive-analytical method, this paper aims to examine the representations of London in Ben Jonson’s early seventeenth-century play The Alchemist and Samuel Johnson’s mid-eighteenth-century poem London. The texts’ treatment of London is marked by the authors’ critical view of the city. Jonson’s drama depicts life in his native London mainly to satirize it. Likewise, Samuel Johnson’s poem denounces London life for what he thinks to be its immorality, anarchy and corruption. However, both authors seem to have been fascinated with London at the same time: while Jonson’s interest is evident from his detailed listing of city sites, Samuel Johnson gradually reconciles himself to London to finally declare it to be the city that houses all that one may wish for.

While studies of the public sphere in early modern England have focused on politics, news, and rational critique, this essay—excerpted from my dissertation and currently under review at English Literary Renaissance after an invitation to revise—proposes that we move beyond Habermas’s public sphere to consider the thoroughly public dimension that characterizes all style. London’s acute expansions, this essay argues, altered the structure of social relations within the city by making anonymity, rather than familiarity, a normative pre-condition of day-to-day encounters. This new condition had the vexing effect of making Londoners public to one another in a way that they had not been before: always present to and scrutinized by other strangers as strangers themselves. This essay proposes that the city comedies of Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, and John Marston offered a solution to this novel condition of anonymity by extolling various styles of theatrical dialogue as novel models of social competency within an urban environment newly and uncomfortably defined by publicity and anonymity. That social competency comes from the power of various styles to resolve, exploit, or even intensify the newly public shape of urban, social relations. The essay ends by proposing that in modeling the capacity of styles to negotiate public, urban life, London’s city comedians were contending with the thoroughly public dimension of style itself.

Ranging from the works of Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson and Milton to those of Robert Southwell and Anna Trapnel, this study explores the conscious use of archaic style by poets and dramatists between 1590 and 1674. It focuses on the wide-ranging, complex and self-conscious uses of archaic linguistic and poetic style, analysing the uses to which writers put literary style in order to re-embody and reshape the past. It brings together scholarly conversations on temporality, memory and historiography, on the relationships between medieval and early modern literary cultures, on the workings of dramatic and poetic style, and on national history and identity. Neither pure anachronism nor pure nostalgia, the attempts of writers to reconstruct outmoded styles within their own works reveal a largely untold story about the workings of literary influence and tradition, the interactions between past and present, and the uncertain contours of English nationhood

Critics of Ben Jonson"s 1610 comedy The Alchemist, have long entertained the notion that the alchemical process of transmutation of base metals into gold served not simply as flavor text, but as integral to the plot and structure of the play. Indeed, several authors have noted a definite correlation between two central characters within early modern alchemical literature: the Red Man (representing sulphur) and the White Woman (representing mercury) with the characters of Subtle and Dol, two members of the venture tripartite, a band of rogues who lure the local dupes of the Blackfriars neighborhood (which also incidentally happened to be the location of the playhouse this play was first performed in) during the outbreak of the Plague with the allure of all the riches (health, wealth, happiness) that alchemy was said to provide while the master of the home that served as the base of operations, Lovewit, was away. Yet, as the term "tripartite" implies, there

Despite the extensive scholarly research conducted on the debatable topic of Iago's motives in Shakespeare's Othello, the debate has not yet been convincingly resolved. Following the method of psychoanalytical interpretation, this paper attempts to reconcile the puzzling contradictions between what Iago cites as his motives, on the one hand, and his inexplicably evil deeds in the play, on the other. It argues, thus, that Iago's behaviour displays major symptoms of a mentally disordered personality. Relying on various sources that cite the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (APA-DSM-5), the study attempts to identify Iago's conduct and deeds in the play with the salient features of two related "Cluster B Personality Disorders," namely, 'Histrionic' and ''Narcissistic' Personality Disorders. Shakespeare's Iago is portrayed as an egotistical young adult who has an obsession with self-esteem and who constantly seeks to be the centre of attention. His behaviour is overly dramatic, and he relishes role-playing and manipulating others as means of making him the centre of attention. Suddenly feeling underrated, underprivileged, and his self-esteem damaged, Iago develops into a victim in the grip of these personality disorders which transform him from the "honest Iago" his acquaintances used to trust and appreciate, into a "demi-devil," whose deeds are, to the same acquaintances, baffling and appalling.

This study focuses on the influence of classical authors on Ben Jonson’s dramaturgy, with particular emphasis on the playwrights Aristophanes, Plautus, and Terence, and the literary satirists Horace, Juvenal, Persius, and Lucian.  Jonson was a man of the theatre just as much as he was a man of letters, and in order to illuminate this aspect of his creative personality the thesis considers how classical performance elements (including the Aristophanic ‘Great Idea,’ chorus, and Terentian/Plautine performative strategies) as well as ‘performative’ elements from classical literature (such as the presentation of satirical personae) manifest themselves in the staging of his plays. The emphasis on performance helps to steer the thesis away from focusing purely on classical literary allusions within Jonson's playtexts, and instead encompasses non-literary elements like theatregrams, modes of performance, spatial practices, and structural techniques that are not necessarily apparent on the page but are key elements of Jonson's dramaturgy.
The thesis contends that, in performative just as much as literary terms, Jonson's appropriation of the classics fits with the creative techniques of imitatio and contaminatio, two practices that placed emphasis on the modelling of literary or dramatic works on the examples of past writers and of the creative blending of these models to produce a new aesthetic object. In addition, it is argued that the moral imperatives that drive Jonson's dramatic output are also a product of both of these creative practices, imbuing it with a blend of Greek and Roman dramaturgical and philosophical viewpoints that create a uniquely Jonsonian dramaturgy that is, in varying combinations, moralising, aggressive, sympathetic, and cynical.
The study proceeds thematically rather than chronologically, and makes use of critical methods and scholarship from a range of disciplines, including performance and comparativist criticism, English philology, classical studies, spatial theory, and reception studies. The whole thesis is unified by its emphasis on Jonson’s imitative and contaminative strategies, which serve as useful conceptual models for examining how he allowed his classical sources to become ‘guides, not commanders,’ their influence giving his work the curious quality of being simultaneously deeply indebted to the ancient authors and playwrights while never being completely beholden to them.
An appendix on all classical allusions in Jonson's comedies as documented by the plays' recent major editors and an appendix detailing the extant records of classical performances c.1450-1650 conclude the thesis.

This essay challenges the assumption that all beast fables - a genre that uses animals to speak of apparently human concerns - can have no place in literary animal studies by offering a reading of Ben Jonson's Volpone. It argues that pre-Cartesian conceptions of the human might allow fables to have something important to say about animals as well as humans.

First, I examine the aspects of the political sovereignty on the Shakespearean stage. In the light of Walter Benjamin’s Origin of the German baroque drama (1928) and of Carl Schmitt’s answer to Benjamin in Hamlet or Hecuba (1956), I show that Shakespeare stages the mortality of the political bodies and the new sovereignty of the plotter. Urged to master the art and the tempo of the plot, the prince is nonetheless unable to prevent the decomposition of the state. Then, drawing on the Elizabethan drama, I question the contemporary effort towards order and synchronization within the city. Hobbes’s theory of political and juridical representation breaks with the mystical conception of political unity and with any inspired legislation, whereas the civil scene is dedicated to the peace between individuals in order to ensure the possibility of a real autonomy in the private sphere. Reciprocally, this autonomy must consolidate the solutions to the problems of melancholy and skepticism conceptualized in Leviathan. While endorsing the tragedy of human condition and of knowledge already put on stage by Shakespeare, Leviathan prevents Schmitt’s exaltation as well as the « pure » violence which, according to Benjamin, lies in the subject’s state of exception. Yet, through the ghosts that Leviathan cannot tolerate within the public sphere, the Shakespearean stage unravels the mechanisms of perpetual order and synchronization without rejecting the law and the project of autonomy.

Keywords : Melancholy – Skepticism – Law – Discipline – Elizabethan drama – Shakespeare – Walter Benjamin – Carl Schmitt – Hobbes – Leviathan – Behemoth

In early modern England, the genre of the elegy began to emerge as a profound form of social and cultural meditation upon the common and yet painful occasion of death. By laying the foundations for the art of mourning, the elegy cemented the literature of loss and sorrow in such a manner that placed a remarkable emphasis on the individual’s private and personal experience of grief, thereby reflecting the timely recognition of the individual’s newly burgeoning sense of a distinct self. The poetics to arise out of these Renaissance humanist traditions presented the audience with both the secular and the religious arguments that were frequently employed by individuals in response to the death of a loved one. In particular, the poets of the seventeenth century milieu, such as Ben Jonson and Katherine Philips, as well as the earlier genius of William Shakespeare, were all able to capture the often incomprehensible encounter with life’s ultimate tragedy—the death of a child—and to later pose the psychological remedies that the individual can implement in order to reclaim such misfortune. In pursuit of this shared literary goal, then, Jonson, Philips, and Shakespeare offer an intimate glimpse into the crisis of parental bereavement, one which they argue can be properly mitigated through a redemptive model of self-consolation that guides the individual to triumph over the tribulations of grief.

Critic, poet, and translator, Ivan Aksenov was a remarkable representative of the Russian avant-garde but his life and works long remained forgotten. This book of essays by authors from nine different countries sheds light on the writer's extraordinary contribution to Russian culture.  – Поэт, критик и переводчик Иван Александрович Аксенов был замечательным представителем русского авангарда, но его жизнь и творчество долгое время оставались в тени. В этой книге исследователи из девяти стран освещают выдающийся вклад писателя в русскую культуру.

This article focuses on a somewhat neglected genre in studies of literary visuality: drama. It is generally assumed that theatrical performance takes over the work of visualising a drama text, and that drama is not a genre that chiefly evokes readerly visualisation. For early modern drama texts and in particular for printed playtexts (playbooks), these assumptions of drama theory must be questioned (→ 1.): playbooks from circa 1590 to 1642 are multifunctional texts written for readers as well as for stage performance. In this light, it needs to be asked if drama theory is able to correctly define the status of early modern dramatic texts in relation to early modern orders of the visible and the visual (→ 2.): stage design, relations between word and image, text and picture, performance space and spoken word. Following a survey of classical and early modern rhetoric and post-Reformation discourses on images and the theatre (→ 3.), exemplary analyses of plays by Thomas Middleton, William Shakespeare and Thomas Dekker elaborate different ways of approaching dramatic visuality and demonstrate different ways of relating the levels of analysis comprised by 'literary visuality' (→ 4.). Middleton's The Puritan Widow and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra are discussed chiefly as discourses on visuality and visibility, and as commentaries on contemporary, religious and rhetorical word-image practices. Middleton and Dekker's The Roaring Girl is analysed as an example for a playbook that attempts to conventionalise the reading of printed play texts as a practice of imagining theatrical experience. Readerly visualisation of playbooks, I argue, is not identical with modern visualisation practices shaped by prose: it has to be understood as the imagination of mediated, theatrical, and performative visibility (→ 5.).

Although set in Italy, Ben Jonson’s 1606 play, Volpone, has a striking resemblance to the shifting urban landscape of early modern London. Around Volpone’s publication, London was experiencing an expansion of commercialism with its new industrial economy. As London’s economy created new prospects for those seeking fortunes, social structures noticeably change. While Volpone portrays the negative effects of greed in the city, the characters Jonson creates reflect his anxieties over authorial competition. Examining moral upheaval in the play’s characters reveals how the feigned promise of fortunes ultimately makes them deceitful. The characters’ self-commoditization and their unscrupulous quests for wealth are corruptive. This interpersonal corruption resembles the competition between playwrights in Jonson’s London and his personal struggles with collaboration. These parallels to authorial concepts help reveal the play’s connections to Jonson’s actual urban environment, which is important for understanding how the early modern stage critiqued London’s rapidly shifting urban landscape.

The Shakespearean hobby-horse, mentioned emphatically in Hamlet, brings into focus a number of problems related to early modern popular culture. In the late 16th and early 17th centuries the word was characterised by semantic ambivalence, with simultanously valid meanings of a breed of horse, a morris character, a foolish person, and a wanton woman. The overlapping of these meanings in different cultural discourses of the age (playtexts, emblem books, popular verse, pictures) exemplifies the interaction of different productions of early modern popular culture, from social humiliating practices to festivals and public playhouses. This attests to a complex circulation of cultural memory regarding symbols of popular culture, paradoxically both ‘forgotten’ and ‘remembered’ as a basically oral-ritual culture was transformed into written forms. In this context, the Hamletian passage gains new overtones, while the different versions of the playtext (Q1 & 2: 1600-1604, F: 1623) also offer insights into the changing attitudes regarding popular culture, as it became gradually comercialised and politicised in the following decades. Finally, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and Jonson’s Bartholmew Fair solidify a critical and sceptical attitude, which seems to have signalled the end of ‘Merry Old England’ on-stage and off-stage as well. 

KEY WORDS
William Shakespeare, early modern popular culture, transition, cultural memory, Ben Jonson

This course introduces students to the history of world theatre and corresponding dramatic literature from the prehistoric rituals to the eighteenth century. The student will be introduced to the ways in which the theatre played a crucial social, political, and cultural role throughout its early history. The course will also examine the various lenses that effect the writing of history and problematize the idea of a singular and linear historical narrative.

This chapter follows on directly from Hilary Gatti’s work, and draws on several of her essays that deal with the presence of Giordano Bruno in early modern English drama. The chapter takes its moves specifically from Gatti’s demonstration in an article from 2012 of the presence of Bruno’s 1582 play, Candelaio, in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair. Besides offering further evidence of intertextual links between these authors, it explores the rationale for the use of Bruno’s work in those two comedies, demonstrating that it lies in a shared critique of extreme Protestant or Puritan attitudes. Tarantino concludes with the suggestion that there may have been a line of English comedies springing more or less directly from Candelaio that commemorated the 1572 St Bartholomew massacre at 10-year intervals as a means of offering advice for averting future instances of large-scale religiously-motivated violence.

This essay argues that character is a form of parody; or, conversely, that parody is the device that discloses the formalizing logic of character. It does so by surveying a range of parodic characters—from the Theophrastan portraits of Joseph Hall, Thomas Overbury, and John Earle; the comic types of Ben Jonson’s drama; the amphibious personae of Thomas Nashe’s fiction—that thrived in England around the turn of the seventeenth century, when social changes called for new forms of classification. These characters, the essay suggests, draw out an impulse to self-classification at the heart of character generally. The first half of the essay examines the parodic logic of character as a device of typology: a way of construing persons, of making them readable, and of enacting them through habitual action. The second half turns to Nashe’s Jack Wilton and Jonson’s Mosca in order to consider a kind of character that disrupts this account of character—a kind defined precisely by its aptitude for parody. In treating the kinds that character articulates as alienable, such parodic subjects aim for an elasticity that eludes and dissolves characterization.

This paper examines Renaissance representations of failed masculinity in Ben Jonson’s two plays Epicoene and Volpone. Jonson employs dark comedy to mock society’s most austere and revered gendered subjects. He subverts aspects of the Renaissance ideal image of masculinity, which is shaped by a patriarchal society that constructs masculinity in relation to gender, sexual desire and social status. This paper explores how Jonson subtly utilizes two characteristics of black humor, namely amusement through repulsion and pleasure from wicked pranks, to ridicule falsely imagined ideals of Renaissance manhood.
Keywords: Dark Comedy, Ben Jonson, Masculinity, Gender, Renaissance

This essay considers considers two pamphlets from the early career of John Taylor the Water Poet, The Pennyles Pilgrimage (1618) and The Praise of Hemp-seed (1620), and explores Taylor’s description of writing as a branch of domestic industry whose virtues reside in plainness rather than fineness. Most early modern theorists of poetry privileged ingenium or natural wit, arguing that literary excellence originated in the smooth, spontaneous workings of the imagination. Drawing resourcefully from contemporary theories of authorship, including Ben Jonson’s, Taylor proposed instead that literary value depended upon exercitatio, the intellectual and physical labour involved in writing. It is argued that the familiar contemporary figure of the pot-poet enabled Taylor to contribute in important ways to contemporary debates about literary worth. Although pot-poetry was associated with both social roughness and aesthetic worthlessness, this category of literature nevertheless provided Taylor with a vocabulary to describe and enact new strategies of professionalism in print.

The aim of this research is to outline a brief panel on the theatrical work of the writer and playwright Ben Jonson (1572-1637) and his place in the production of the Elizabethan, Jacobin and Carolinian theatre. The research, of a qualitative nature, is carried out from a bibliographical basis, through which it is sought to draw a perspective about the importance of Ben Jonson’s plays.

where he teaches courses on a variety of topics such as early modern English and Spanish literature, gender and religion, US Hispanic literature, and popular culture. He is the 2020 recipient of the University System of Maryland's Board of Regents Excellent in Teaching Award.