Download or read book Jonson s Romish Plot written by Barbara N. De Luna and published by Oxford : Clarendon P.. This book was released on 1967 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ben Jonson written by Ian Donaldson and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2012-02-20 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ben Jonson was the greatest of Shakespeare's contemporaries. In the century following his death he was seen by many as the finest of all English writers, living or dead. His fame rested not only on the numerous plays he had written for the theatre, but on his achievements over three decades as principal masque-writer to the early Stuart court, where he had worked in creative, and often stormy, collaboration with Inigo Jones. One of the most accomplished poets of the age, he had become - in fact if not in title - the first Poet Laureate in England. Jonson's life was full of drama. Serving in the Low Countries as a young man, he overcame a Spanish adversary in single combat in full view of both the armies. His early satirical play, The Isle of Dogs, landed him in prison, and brought all theatrical activity in London to a temporary — and very nearly to a permanent — standstill. He was 'almost at the gallows' for killing a fellow actor after a quarrel, and converted to Catholicism while awaiting execution. He supped with the Gunpowder conspirators on the eve of their planned coup at Westminster. After satirizing the Scots in Eastward Ho! he was imprisoned again; and throughout his career was repeatedly interrogated about plays and poems thought to contain seditious or slanderous material. In his middle years, twenty stone in weight, he walked to Scotland and back, seemingly partly to fulfil a wager, and partly to see the land of his forebears. He travelled in Europe as tutor to the mischievous son of Sir Walter Ralegh, who 'caused him to be drunken and dead drunk' and wheeled provocatively through the streets of Paris. During his later years he presided over a sociable club in the Apollo Room in Fleet Street, mixed with the most learned scholars of his day, and viewed with keen interest the political, religious, and scientific controversies of the day. Ian Donaldson's new biography draws on freshly discovered writings by and about Ben Jonson, and locates his work within the social and intellectual contexts of his time. Jonson emerges from this study as a more complex and volatile character than his own self-declarations (and much modern scholarship) would allow, and as a writer whose work strikingly foresees - and at times pre-emptively satirizes - the modern age.
Download or read book Ben Jonson and the Art of Secrecy written by William W. E. Slights and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1994-12-15 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Secrets accomplish their cultural work by distinguishing the knowable from the (at least temporarily) unknowable, those who know from those who don't. Within these distinctions resides an enormous power that Ben Jonson (1572-1637) both deplored and exploited in his art of making plays. Conspiracies and intrigues are the driving force of Jonson's dramatic universe. Focusing on Sejanus, His Fall; Volpone, or the Fox; Epicoene, or the Silent Woman; The Alchemist; Catiline, His Conspiracy, and Bartholomew Fair, William Slights places Jonson within the context of the secrecy- ridden culture of the court of King James I and provides illuminating readings of his best-known plays. Slights draws on the sociology of secrecy, the history of censorship, and the theory of hermeneutics to investigate secrecy, intrigue, and conspiracy as aspects of Jonsonian dramatic form, contemporary court/city/church politics, and textual interpretation. He argues that the tension between concealment and revelation in the plays affords a model for the poise that sustained Jonson in the intricately linked worlds of royal court and commercial theatre and that made him a pivotal figure in the cultural history of early modern England. Equally rejecting the position that Jonson was a renegade subverter of the arcana imperii and that he was a thorough-going court apologist, Slights finds that the playwright redraws the lines between private and public discourse for his own and subsequent ages.
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 Refashioning Ben Jonson written by Julie Sanders and published by Springer. This book was released on 1998-10-15 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of multi-authored essays not only refashions and revises critical understandings of the early modern dramatist Ben Jonson and his canon of work, but is also self-reflexive about the process. It includes original essays by both established and emergent Jonson scholars, and employs materialist, feminist and queer theory in the production of its readings of Jonsonian playtexts and masques, familiar and otherwise. It is intended to encourage new approaches by students to this central figure from the Renaissance.
Download or read book Volpone written by Matthew Steggle and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-03-24 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: >
Download or read book Emulation on the Shakespearean Stage written by Vernon Guy Dickson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The English Renaissance has long been considered a period with a particular focus on imitation; however, much related scholarship has misunderstood or simply marginalized the significance of emulative practices and theories in the period. This work uses the interactions of a range of English Renaissance plays with ancient and Renaissance rhetorics to analyze the conflicted uses of emulation in the period (including the theory and praxis of rhetorical imitatio, humanist notions of exemplarity, and the stage’s purported ability to move spectators to emulate depicted characters). This book emphasizes the need to see emulation not as a solely (or even primarily) literary practice, but rather as a significant aspect of Renaissance culture, giving insight into notions of self, society, and the epistemologies of the period and informed by the period’s own sense of theory and history. Among the individual texts examined here are Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Hamlet, Jonson’s Catiline, and Massinger’s The Roman Actor (with its strong relation to Jonson’s Sejanus).
Download or read book Plotting Early Modern London written by Dieter Mehl and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the publication of Brian Gibbons's Jacobean City Comedy thirty-five years ago, the urban satires by Ben Jonson, John Marston and Thomas Middleton attained their 'official status as a Renaissance subgenre' that was distinct, by its farcical humour and ironic tone, from 'citizen comedy' or 'London drama' more generally. This retrospective genre-building has proved immensely fruitful in the study of early modern English drama; and although city comedies may not yet rival Shakespeare's plays in the amount of editorial work and critical acclaim they receive, both the theatrical contexts and the dramatic complexity of the genre itself, and its interrelations with Shakespearean drama justly command an increasing level of attention. Looking at a broad range of plays written between the 1590s and the 1630s - master-pieces of the genre like Eastward Ho, A Trick to Catch the Old One, The Dutch Courtesan and The Devil is an Ass, blends of romance and satire like The Shoemaker's Holiday and The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and bourgeois oddities in the Shakespearean manner like The London Prodigal - the twelve essays in this volume re-examine city comedy in the light of recently foregrounded historical contexts such as early modern capitalism, urban culture, the Protestant Reformation, and playhouse politics. Further, they explore the interrelations between city comedy and Shakespearean comedy both from the perspective of author rivalry and in terms of modern adaptations: the twenty-first-century concept of 'popular Shakespeare' (above all in the movie sector) seems to realign the comparatively time- and placeless Shakespearean drama with the gritty, noisy and bustling urban scene that has been city comedy's traditional preserve.
Download or read book The Ben Jonson Encyclopedia written by D. Heyward Brock and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-05-12 with total page 645 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Friend and rival of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson was one of the most learned and interesting men of his age. Throughout his fascinating life, he served not only as a bricklayer but also a soldier, an adventurer, an actor, a poet, and a playwright. The breadth of his experiences, acquaintances, friends, and enemies was legendary, and his literary canon is equally as diverse. The Ben Jonson Encyclopedia covers in detail the works, life, and times of this seminal figure of the English Renaissance. The cross-referenced entries include summaries of all Jonson’s plays, masques, and entertainments, as well as sketches of Jonson’s friends, enemies, patrons, disciples, actors, and fellow writers. In addition, the book identifies historical figures, mythological characters, and classical authors, as well as Jonson’s contemporaries and London place names mentioned in the works. Individuals who danced or participated in the masques and entertainments or tournaments for which Jonson wrote speeches are noted, as are the main actors known to have acted in the plays. All major scholars—from Jonson’s own day until the twenty-first century—who have commented on Jonson or his works are also included. An extensive bibliography completes this invaluable scholarly reference tool. Because of Jonson’s centrality to—and influence in and beyond—his age, this encyclopedia provides a dynamic, unparalleled vision of the English Renaissance literary scene. Capturing the depth and breadth of Jonson’s understanding of early Modern England, The Ben Jonson Encyclopedia will be especially useful for students, librarians, and academics interested in the literary and cultural scene from 1500 to 1650.
Download or read book Sovereigns and Subjects in Early Modern Neo Senecan Drama written by Daniel Cadman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sovereigns and Subjects in Early Modern Neo-Senecan Drama examines the development of neo-Senecan drama, also known as ’closet drama’, during the years 1590-1613. It is the first book-length study since 1924 to consider these plays - the dramatic works of Mary Sidney, Samuel Daniel, Samuel Brandon, Fulke Greville, Sir William Alexander, and Elizabeth Cary, along with the Roman tragedies of Ben Jonson and Thomas Kyd - as a coherent group. Daniel Cadman suggests these works interrogate the relations between sovereigns and subjects during the early modern period by engaging with the humanist discourses of republicanism and stoicism. Cadman argues that the texts under study probe various aspects of this dynamic and illuminate the ways in which stoicism and republicanism provide essential frameworks for negotiating this relationship between the marginalized courtier and the absolute sovereign. He demonstrates how aristocrats and courtiers, such as Sidney, Greville, Alexander, and Cary, were able to use the neo-Senecan form to consider aspects of their limited political agency under an absolute monarch, while others, such as Brandon and Daniel, respond to similarly marginalized positions within both political and patronage networks. In analyzing how these plays illuminate various aspects of early modern political culture, this book addresses several gaps in the scholarship of early modern drama and explores new contexts in relation to more familiar writers, as well as extending the critical debate to include hitherto neglected authors.
Download or read book Ben Jonson written by David Riggs and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Compelling... Riggs's approach to the man-as-artist is to see him as a paradox, a man of reckless defiance who boasted openly about his womanizing and criminal record, and who nonetheless represented himself in Renaissance England as the great model of a self-restrained and chastely austere classical style of writing... David Riggs's eminently readable and generously illustrated study not only fully justifies our curiosity, but handles with admirable tact what might be lurid and sensational if our only interest were the gossip.'New York Times Book Review
Download or read book Poets Players and Preachers written by Anne James and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2016-08-12 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the night of November 4th 1605, the English authorities uncovered an alleged plot by a group of discontented Catholics to blow up the Houses of Parliament with the lords, princes, queen and king in attendance. The failure of the plot is celebrated to this day and is known as Guy Fawkes Day. In Poets, Players and Preachers, Anne James explores the literary responses to the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot in poetry, drama, and sermons. This book is the first full-length study of the literary repercussions of the conspiracy. By analyzing the genres of poems, plays, and sermons produced between 1605 and 1688, the author argues that not only did the continuous reinterpretation of the conspiracy serve religious and political purposes but that such literary reinterpretations produced generic changes.
Download or read book Ben Jonson in Context written by Julie Sanders and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-03 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection highlights exciting new areas of research related to Ben Jonson, including book history, social history and cultural geography.
Download or read book Threshold of a Nation written by Philip Edwards and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1979 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This imprint is established to publish in paperback for an individual readership the Press's most outstanding original monographs. These are titles which would normally appear in specialist hardback editions only, but whose quality and general academic importance justify their special promotion in this prestige imprint. The series will include both new and recent titles drawn from the whole range of the Press's very substantial publishing programmes in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and therefore represents some of the best current scholarship in the English language.
Download or read book Loyal Dissent written by Patrick Derham and published by Legend Press Ltd. This book was released on 2016-06-23 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With origins as far back as the 14th Century, Westminster School is one of the oldest in the country with a long tradition of scholarship - and outstanding results, both in academic and public life.
Download or read book Treason by Words written by Rebecca Lemon and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-23 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Under the Tudor monarchy, English law expanded to include the category of "treason by words." Rebecca Lemon investigates this remarkable phrase both as a legal charge and as a cultural event. English citizens, she shows, expressed competing notions of treason in opposition to the growing absolutism of the monarchy. Lemon explores the complex participation of texts by John Donne, Ben Jonson, and William Shakespeare in the legal and political controversies marking the Earl of Essex's 1601 rebellion and the 1605 Gunpowder Plot. Lemon suggests that the articulation of diverse ideas about treason within literary and polemical texts produced increasingly fractured conceptions of the crime of treason itself. Further, literary texts, in representing issues familiar from political polemic, helped to foster more free, less ideologically rigid, responses to the crisis of treason. As a result, such works of imagination bolstered an emerging discourse on subjects' rights. Treason by Words offers an original theory of the role of dissent and rebellion during a period of burgeoning sovereign power.
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.
