Download or read book Jonson and the Psychology of Public Theater written by John Gordon Sweeney and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a study of Ben Jonson's relationship with his audience in the public theater, as the relationship changed in the course of his career from the comical satires to Bartholomew Fair. Originally published in 1984. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England written by Allison P. Hobgood and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-23 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England examines the emotional effect of stage performance on the minds of the early modern theatre audience.
Download or read book Libels and Theater in Shakespeare s England written by Joseph Mansky and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-30 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive history of libels in Elizabethan England, this interdisciplinary study traces the crime across law, literature, and culture, focusing especially on the theater. Ranging from Shakespeare to provincial pageantry, it provides a fresh account of early modern drama and the viral media ecosystem springing up around it.
Download or read book Ben Jonson s Theatrical Republics written by J. Sanders and published by Springer. This book was released on 1998-08-19 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This timely book challenges conventional critical wisdom about the work of Ben Jonson. Looking in particular at his Jacobean and Caroline plays, it explores his engagement with concepts of republicanism. Julie Sanders investigates notions of community in Jonson's stage worlds - his 'theatrical republics' - and reveals a Jonson to contrast with the traditional image of the writer as conservative, absolutist, misogynist, and essentially 'anti-theatrical'. The Jonson presented here is a positive celebrant of the social and political possibilities of theatre.
Download or read book Ben Jonson written by Richard Dutton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-21 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interest in Ben Jonson is higher today than at any time since his death. This new collection offers detailed readings of all the major plays - Volpone, Epicene, The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair - and the poems. It also provides significant insights into the court masques and the later plays which have only recently been rediscovered as genuinely engaging stage pieces.
Download or read book Ben Jonson John Marston and Early Modern Drama written by Rebecca Yearling and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-01-05 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the influence of John Marston, typically seen as a minor figure among early modern dramatists, on his colleague Ben Jonson. While Marston is usually famed more for his very public rivalry with Jonson than for the quality of his plays, this book argues that such a view of Marston seriously underestimates his importance to the theatre of his time. In it, the author contends that Marston's plays represent an experiment in a new kind of satiric drama, with origins in the humanist tradition of serio ludere. His works—deliberately unpredictable, inconsistent and metatheatrical—subvert theatrical conventions and provide confusingly multiple perspectives on the action, forcing their spectators to engage actively with the drama and the moral dilemmas that it presents. The book argues that Marston's work thus anticipates and perhaps influenced the mid-period work of Ben Jonson, in plays such as Sejanus, Volpone and The Alchemist.
Download or read book Ben Jonson s 1616 Folio written by Jennifer Brady and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of nine original essays, is a major study of the 1616 Folio as a work of art, as a turning point in Jonson's career, and as an unprecedented event in English letters and printing.
Download or read book Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England written by Tanya Pollard and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-02-17 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England asks why Shakespeare and his contemporary playwrights were so preoccupied with drugs and poisons and, at a deeper level, why both critics and supporters of the theater, as well as playwrights themselves, so frequently adopted a chemical vocabulary to describe the effects of the theater on audiences. Drawing upon original medical and literary research, Pollard shows that the potency of the link between drugs and plays in the period demonstrates a model of drama radically different than our own, a model in which plays exert a powerful impact on spectators' bodies as well as minds. Early modern physiology held that the imagination and emotions were part of the body, and exerted a material impact on it, yet scholars of medicine and drama alike have not recognised the consequences of this idea. Plays, which alter our emotions and thought, simultaneously change us physically. This book argues that the power of the theater in early modern England, as well as the striking hostility to it, stems from the widely held contemporary idea that drama acted upon the body as well as the mind. In yoking together pharmacy and theater, this book offers a new model for understanding the relationship between texts and bodies. Just as bodies are constituted in part by the imaginative fantasies they consume, the theater's success (and notoriety) depends on its power over spectators' bodies. Drugs, which conflate concerns about unreliable appearances and material danger, evoked fascination and fear in this period by identifying a convergence point between the imagination and the body, the literary and the scientific, the magical and the rational. This book explores that same convergence point, and uses it to show the surprising physiological powers attributed to language, and especially to the embodied language of the theater.
Download or read book Metadrama and the Informer in Shakespeare and Jonson written by Bill Angus and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-20 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Have you ever wondered what was really going on in the inner-plays, secret overhearing, and tacit observations of early modern drama? Taking on the shadowy figure of the early modern informer, this book argues that far more than mere artistic experimentation is happening here. In case studies of metadramatic plays, and the devices which Shakespeare and Jonson constantly revisit, this book offers critical insight into intrinsic connections between informers and authors, discovering an uneasy sense of common practice at the core of the metadrama, which drives both its self-awareness and its paranoia. Drama is most self-revealing at these moments where it reflects upon its own dramatic register: where it is most metadramatic. To understand their metadrama is therefore to understand these most seminal authors in a new way.
Download or read book Ben Jonson Authority Criticism written by R. Dutton and published by Springer. This book was released on 1996-03-27 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ben Jonson: Authority: Criticism is the first book-length study of Jonson's literary criticism, and examines the ways that criticism defines his unprecedented role as a professional author. Each chapter explores a different facet: 'The Lone Wolf' looks at Jonson's role in creating a critical discourse to respond to a new literary market-place; 'Poet and Critic' explores the relationship between his 'creative' and 'critical' writing; 'Poet and State' traces his accommodations as an author with censorship and other forms of authority; 'The Laws of Poetry' relates his appeals to classical precedent to his insecurity in a world where literary conditions were very different from those of ancient Greece and Rome; 'Jonson and Shakespeare' examines the old supposed rivalry as evidence of competing definitions of authorship. Throughout Richard Dutton suggests how Jonson's criticism set the terms for the profession of letters in England for more than a century. Finally an appendix provides a representative selection of Jonson's critical work.
Download or read book Ben Jonson written by Ben Johnson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-11 with total page 712 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edition of Ben Jonson's four middle comedies places the works in the popular history and culture of the times, 1605-1614, and surveys the influences, both classical and contemporary, on Jonson as a playwright. On-the-page annotations recreate the audiences perception of the plays as performances by commenting on the stage-directions, the self-conscious theatricality of characters and scenes, and the vivid colloquialisms of early modern London that give the dialogue a heightened dimension of realism. Brief introductions to each play discuss the local settings, sources, theatre history and further readings. The general introduction includes a biography of Jonson, a chronology of the plays and masques, and separate essays on each play, dealing particularly with Jonson's satirical treatments of trends and shams of the day, whether political, social, commercial, or spiritual.
Download or read book Ben Jonson written by D. H. Craig and published by Taylor & Francis US. This book was released on 2010-02-10 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Stage Wrights written by Paul Yachnin and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To many of their contemporaries, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Middleton were little more than artisanal craftsmen, "stage-wrights" who wrote plays for money, to be performed in common playhouses and in a manner often antithetical to what Jonson himself viewed as the higher calling of poetry. In response to the conflicting pressures of censorship and commercialism, Paul Yachnin contends, players and dramatists alike had promulgated the idea of drama's irrelevance, creating a recreational theater that failed to influence its audience in any purposeful way. In Stage-Wrights Yachnin shows how Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton struggled to reclaim not only the importance of their art, but their own social legitimacy as well as through the reshaping of the commercial theater. His bold readings of their works unveil the strategies by which they sought power from their privileged but powerless position on the margins. Adopting a hermeneutical approach, he explores a wide range of historical evidence to describe how English Renaissance drama depicted the world in ways refracted by the interests of the playing companies; throughout, he challenges recent historicist models that have overrated the importance of dramatic productions to society and its institutions of authority. Paul Yachnin offers a new way of understanding dramatic texts in relation to their social history. In showing how the efforts of three playwrights helped shape the area of discourse we now call "the literary," Stage-Wrights represents both a major rereading of the place of theater in Shakespeare's London and an important clarification of the social context of contemporary criticism.
Download or read book Volpone written by Matthew Steggle and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-01-20 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive introduction to Ben Jonson's Volpone - introducing its critical history, performance history, current critical landscape and new directions in research on the play.
Download or read book English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama written by Mary Floyd-Wilson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-02-20 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Table of contents
Download or read book Jonson Versus Bakhtin written by Rocco Coronato and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ben Jonson has often been accused of needless erudition and of a morose refusal to join in the festive spirit. Further aggravation has come from the application of Bakhtin’s theory of carnival, especially in its posthumous form as a political allegory portraying the clash of high and low cultures. In an attempt to turn the tables on this tradition, Jonson Versus Bakhtin goes back to the sources, arguing that Jonson’s theatre allows for an original interpretation of the grotesque as a formal culture of antithesis and opposition that includes carnival. A robust observer of popular myths of festive liberation by way of a uniquely compendious adaptation of his sources, Jonson’s grotesque uncannily delves deep into the Renaissance theory of the coincidence of opposites as a way of envisaging virtue and other concepts of the mind, rather than serving up a pompous application of moral precepts or offering a political arena for ritual transgression. While richly based on an appropriate repertory of underlying sources, Jonson Versus Bakhtin steers away from any tiresome reference hunting mania, appealing to a broader audience interested in re-appraising Ben Jonson’s genius for richly contrastive imagery, as well as re-considering the relevance of Bakhtin’s theory to Elizabethan and Jacobean drama and to the Renaissance culture of the grotesque.
Download or read book Clowning and Authorship in Early Modern Theatre written by Richard Preiss and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-06 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To early modern audiences, the 'clown' was much more than a minor play character. A celebrity performer, he was a one-man sideshow whose interactive entertainments - face-pulling, farce interludes, jigs, rhyming contests with the crowd - were the main event. Clowning epitomized a theatre that was heterogeneous, improvised, participatory, and irreducible to dramatic texts. How, then, did those texts emerge? Why did playgoers buy books that deleted not only the clown, but them as well? Challenging the narrative that clowns were 'banished' by playwrights like Shakespeare and Jonson, Richard Preiss argues that clowns such as Richard Tarlton, Will Kemp, and Robert Armin actually made playwrights possible - bridging, through the publication of their routines, the experience of 'live' and scripted performance. Clowning and Authorship tells the story of how, as the clown's presence decayed into print, he bequeathed the new categories around which theatre would organize: the author, and the actor.
