Hostile Makeovers

2021 ◽  
pp. 173-193
Author(s):  
Pamela Allen Brown
Keyword(s):  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Thomas Nashe ◽  
Italian Women

Not every playwright appreciated the diva’s gifts. When the actress-driven innamorata entered the scene, some saw her as a threat that challenged their hold over the stage. The most common countertactic was to equate actresses with whores and common courtesans, as Thomas Nashe does in Pierce Penniless. Others wrote plays that figured amorous Italian women as dangerous Circes, as Anthony Munday does in The Two Italian Gentlemen. When a play directly represents an Italian actress, the authors marginalize and silence her, as did Day, Wilkins, and Rowley with “Harlakin’s Wife” in The Travailes of the Three English Brothers. In Volpone, Ben Jonson turned his satire on Englishwomen like Fine Lady Would-Be, bent on imitating Italian courtesans and actresses. He excised all the resourcefulness from the virtuous Celia, who resembles the virgo as she falls victim to a violently venal husband and cynical lecher who strive to cast her as a flexible player-whore.

Harvey’s 1593 ‘To Be and Not To Be’

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 87-100
Author(s):  
Dennis McCarthy
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Title Page ◽  
Thomas Nashe ◽  
Gabriel Harvey

Ever since the discovery of the first quarto of Hamlet (Q1) in 1823, it has generated fierce debate among scholars about its origin. Recently, Terri Bourus has written a powerful book-length argument that Q1 was indeed by Shakespeare, as its title page states, and that he wrote it by 1589. The present article bolsters Bourus’s conclusion with a careful look at its title page claims as well as the literary satires of Thomas Nashe, Gabriel Harvey and Ben Jonson. Specifically, Q1’s title page and apparent allusions to Hamlet in the early 1590s pamphlet war of Nashe and Harvey independently confirm an earlier chronology for the tragedy. Jonson also attributes a line exclusive to Q1 to his caricature of Shakespeare in Every Man Out of His Humor (1600). The evidence suggests Shakespeare had written Q1 much earlier than conventionally assumed and that there was no ‘lost Hamlet’.

Ben Jonson

1984 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Barton
Keyword(s):  
Ben Jonson

MMPI-2 in Child Custody Litigation

2014 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 110-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Roma ◽  
Federica Ricci ◽  
Georgios D. Kotzalidis ◽  
Luigi Abbate ◽  
Anna Lubrano Lavadera ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Child Custody ◽  
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory ◽  
Personality Inventory ◽  
Custody Evaluations ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Female Population ◽  
Clinical Scales ◽  
Forensic Assessments ◽  
Child Custody Evaluations ◽  
Italian Women

In recent years, several studies have addressed the issue of positive self-presentation bias in assessing parents involved in postdivorce child custody litigations. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2) is widely used in forensic assessments and is able to evaluate positive self-presentation through its Superlative Self-Presentation S scale. We investigated the existence of a gender effect on positive self-presentation bias in an Italian sample of parents involved in court evaluation. Participants were 391 divorced parents who completed the full 567-item Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 during child custody evaluations ordered by several Italian courts between 2006 and 2010. Our analysis considered the S scale along with the basic clinical scales. North-American studies had shown no gender differences in child custody litigations. Differently, our results showed a significantly higher tendency toward “faking-good” profiles on the MMPI-2 among Italian women as compared to men and as compared to the normative Italian female population. Cultural and social factors could account for these differences.

Against Stanley Fish on Ben Jonson and the Community of the Same

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-140
Author(s):  
William Everett Ramsay
Keyword(s):  
Ben Jonson ◽  
The People ◽  
Stanley Fish ◽  
Classic Essay

In his classic essay “Authors-Readers: Ben Jonson and the Community of the Same,” Stanley Fish argues, primarily on the basis of a series of close readings, that (1) Jonson's poetry of praise hints at a community in which everyone is the same; (2) Jonson's poetry of praise is nonrepresentational, while his poetry of blame is representational; (3) Jonson's poems of praise and the members of the community mentioned in them are largely interchangeable; and (4) Jonson writes nonrepresentational poetry of praise in which everyone is the same in order to maintain his independence in a patronage society. I argue that these four theses are false. Part I argues that Fish's equivocation on the crucial word identity and his misreading of “In Authorem” undermine his claim that there is a Jonson community in which everyone is the same. Part II argues that Fish's reading of Epigrams 63, “To Robert, Earl of Salisbury,” on which reading rests his claim that Jonson's poetry of praise is nonrepresentational, introduces several textual errors, and that, once these errors are corrected, the poem no longer supports that claim. Part III argues that an awareness of Jonson's poetic art, especially his use of puns, shows that his poems of praise are not interchangeable, while an attentiveness to the “signs of specificity” (38) in the poems of praise shows that the people discussed in them are not the same. Since the truth of the fourth thesis depends on the truth of the others, it is largely ignored.

“To Corrupt a Man in the Midst of a Verse”: Ben Jonson and the Prose of the World

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-72
Author(s):  
Jacob Tootalian
Keyword(s):  
Mixed Mode ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Digital Analysis ◽  
Interactive Engagement ◽  
Sentence Level ◽  
Linguistic Patterns ◽  
The World ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
Bartholomew Fair

Ben Jonson's early plays show a marked interest in prose as a counterpoint to the blank verse norm of the Renaissance stage. This essay presents a digital analysis of Jonson's early mixed-mode plays and his two later full-prose comedies. It examines this selection of the Jonsonian corpus using DocuScope, a piece of software that catalogs sentence-level features of texts according to a series of rhetorical categories, highlighting the distinctive linguistic patterns associated with Jonson's verse and prose. Verse tends to employ abstract, morally and emotionally charged language, while prose is more often characterized by expressions that are socially explicit, interrogative, and interactive. In the satirical economy of these plays, Jonson's characters usually adopt verse when they articulate censorious judgements, descending into prose when they wade into the intractable banter of the vicious world. Surprisingly, the prosaic signature that Jonson fashioned in his earlier drama persisted in the two later full-prose comedies. The essay presents readings of Every Man Out of his Humour and Bartholomew Fair, illustrating how the tension between verse and prose that motivated the satirical dynamics of the mixed-mode plays was released in the full-prose comedies. Jonson's final experiments with theatrical prose dramatize the exhaustion of the satirical impulse by submerging his characters almost entirely in the prosaic world of interactive engagement.

Recent Ben Jonson Theatrical Events and Productions

2010 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-265
Author(s):  
David Boyles
Keyword(s):  
Ben Jonson

How Ben Jonson Berayed His Credit

2002 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 249-255
Author(s):  
Stephen Roth
Keyword(s):  
Ben Jonson

Ben Jonson

1995 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 233-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ton Hoenselaars
Keyword(s):  
Ben Jonson

Ben Jonson's Reception of Lucian

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-179
Author(s):  
Robert S. Miola
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Thomas Dekker ◽  
The Moon ◽  
True Story ◽  
News Industry ◽  
The Dead

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.

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