scholarly journals Republican friendship and the fall of the Roman Republic in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean drama

2021 ◽  
pp. 018476782110293
Author(s):  
Ross Moncrieff
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Roman Republic ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Roman History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Scholarship ◽  
Jacobean Drama ◽  
The Ideal

This article synthesises historical scholarship on early modern friendship and classical republicanism to argue that Cicero, through the ideal of ‘republican friendship’, exerted a much greater influence over early modern understandings of Roman history than has previously been realised. Exploring Roman plays by William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, with reference to other classical dramas, it examines how dramatists used the Ciceronian ideal of republican friendship to create a historical framework for the political changes they were portraying, with Jonson using it to inform a Tacitean perspective on Roman history and Shakespeare scrutinising and challenging the nature of republican friendship itself.

Last Acts

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maggie Vinter
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Christopher Marlowe ◽  
The Political ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Economic Management ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Art Of Dying

Last Acts: The Art of Dying on the Early Modern Stage argues that the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater offered playwrights, actors, and audiences important opportunities to practice arts of dying. Early modern plays also engage with devotional traditions that understand death less as an occasion for suffering or grieving than as an action to be performed, well or badly. Active deaths belie the narratives of helplessness and loss most often used to analyze representations of mortality and instead suggest ways that marginalized and constrained subjects might participate in the political, social, and economic management of life. Some of these strategies for dying resonate with ecclesiastical forms or with descriptions of biopolitics within the recent work of Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito. Yet the art of dying is not solely a discipline imposed upon recalcitrant subjects. Since it offers suffering individuals a way to enact their deaths on their own terms, it discloses both political and dramatic action in their most minimal manifestations. Rather than mournfully marking what we cannot recover, the practice of dying reveals what we can do, even in death. By analyzing representations of dying in plays by writers including Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson alongside both devotional texts and contemporary biopolitical theory, Last Acts shows how theater reflects, enables, and contests the politicization of life and death.

Virtus Romana

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catalina Balmaceda
Keyword(s):  
Roman Republic ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Political System ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
Political Concept ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Ideal

The political transformation that took place at the end of the Roman Republic was a particularly rich area for historical analysis. The crisis that saw the end of the Roman Republic and the changes which gave birth to a new political system were narrated by major Roman historians who took the Roman idea of virtus as a way of interpreting and understanding their history. Tracing how virtus informed Roman thought over time, the book explores the concept and its manifestations in the narratives of four successive Latin historians who span the late republic and early principate: Sallust, Livy, Velleius, and Tacitus. Balmaceda demonstrates that the concept of virtus in these historical narratives served as a form of self-definition which fostered and propagated a new model of the ideal Roman more fitting to imperial times. As a crucial moral and political concept, virtus worked as a key idea in the complex system of Roman socio-cultural values and norms which underpinned Roman attitudes about both present and past. This book offers a re-appraisal of the historians as promoters of change and continuity in the political culture of both the Republic and the Empire.

De advocaat in de vroegmoderne stedelijke justitie

Pro Memorie ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-236
Author(s):  
Tim van Polanen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Political ◽  
Court Case ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Modern City ◽  
The Public ◽  
Virtuous Character ◽  
General Tone ◽  
The Ideal

Abstract Hermanus Noordkerk was a famous barrister in eighteenth-century Amsterdam. After his death multiple necrologies were written in which the general tone was laudatory. This article investigates the reliability of the necrologies by answering the question why Noordkerk became such a famous barrister. What qualities did he have that made him so memorable? It becomes clear that together with his virtuous character Noordkerk was considered to be an inventive lawyer as well as an outstanding pleader and that, by combining these three characteristics, he embodied for contemporaries the ideal barrister. But besides, Noordkerk had another quality: he had the ability to exploit the public interest of a court case for the benefit of his client. Due to the political dynamics within an early modern city this might have been important for Noordkerk’s fame. The case study of Noordkerk thus sheds light on the qualities that a barrister should have in an early modern city.

Roman history and the ideological vacuum

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. P. Wiseman
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Roman Republic ◽  
Political History ◽  
Roman History ◽  
The Political ◽  
History Of ◽  
Concepts Of Democracy ◽  
The Many

For the twentieth century, the political history of Athens was essentially ideological, involving great issues of freedom and tyranny, while that of the Roman Republic was merely a struggle for power, with no significant ideological content. But why should that be? The Romans were perfectly familiar with the concepts and terminology of Greek political philosophy and used them to describe their own politics, as Cicero explains in writing in 56 bc. Not surprisingly. Greek authors who dealt with Roman politics used the concepts of democracy and oligarchy, the rule of the many or the rule of the best, without any sense that it was an inappropriate idiom.

STOICS WHO SING: LESSONS IN CITIZENSHIP FROM EARLY MODERN LUCCA

2001 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 313-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER N. MILLER
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Self ◽  
Roman History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Political Literature ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Self Image ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

Lucca was the smallest and least important of the three Italian republics that survived the Renaissance. Venice and Genoa still command the attention of historians. But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for all that it might seem out-of-the-way, Lucca developed an extraordinary political literature. The regular election of senators was marked by the musical performance of a text, generally drawn from Roman history, that illustrated the way citizens of a republic were to behave. The poet and composer were natives and the event was a lesson in citizenship. A close look at the content of these serenades, or operas, makes clear that the republic's motto might have been Libertas but its teaching emphasized constantia. The themes and the heroes of Lucca's political literature were those we associate with neo-Stoicism. The relationship between neo-Stoicism and citizenship in early modern Lucca is the focus of this article. These texts present us with the self-image of an early modern republic and its understanding of what it meant to be a citizen. They are an important source for anyone interested in early modern debates about citizenship and in the political ideas that are conveyed in the commonplaces of baroque visual and musical culture.

scholarly journals “Look No More”: Jonson's Catiline and the Politics of Enargeia

PMLA ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 134 (2) ◽  
pp. 332-350
Author(s):  
Joseph Mansky
Keyword(s):  
Roman Republic ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Visual Presence ◽  
Power Of Language

In his play Catiline His Conspiracy, Ben Jonson allegorizes Cicero's fight to save the Roman Republic as a battle against the kind of spectacular drama that, Jonson claimed, his audiences so enjoyed. This metatheatrical polemic hinges on the rhetorical technique of enargeia: the power of language to conjure an image. For the early moderns, enargeia resolved the “paradox of representation”—the contradiction between “making present” and “standing for”—by subordinating visual presence to verbal illusionism. Jonson, aligning neoclassical poetics with humanist historiography, dramatizes this hierarchy of representation. In Catiline, Cicero's rhetoric puts visions of violence before his audience's eyes only to prevent their realization onstage. The play thus seeks to exorcise the specter of political violence that haunted early modern England and the Roman Republic alike. Yet the rhetoric of Jonson's Cicero proves just as coercive as the spectacular violence that it has replaced. From Jonson's time to ours, separating rhetoric from violence has remained the challenge of republicanism.

Roman History, Essex, and Late Elizabethan Political Culture

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paulina Kewes
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
Roman History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Print Publications ◽  
Earl Of Essex ◽  
Political Figure

Roman history had a shaping influence on early modern political culture. In the historiography, the focus has been typically on court-centred uses of Roman historians, principally Tacitus, or else on Shakespeare. By contrast, this chapter explores how late Elizabethan print publications representing a variety of non-dramatic genres deployed Roman history to sway educated classes beyond the confines of the political elite. More precisely, it considers the role ofromanitasin polemical writings responding to the rise and fall of the earl of Essex, the period’s most controversial political figure. The three instances described in the chapter—Romes Monarchie(1596), Clement Edmondes’sObservations upon . . . Caesars commentaries(1600), and William Fulbecke’sHistoricall Collection(1601)—show how ancient Rome could be appropriated and utilized by authors with different political agendas wishing to appeal to a broad range of publics.

scholarly journals Shakespeare, Jonson, and the Invention of the Author

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Donaldson
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Self Presentation

This lecture discusses William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, who were the two supreme writers of early modern England. It reveals that these two writers were intricately and curiously interwoven. The lecture describes their styles of writerly self-presentation and their professional pathways. Shakespeare and Jonson also served as each others' creative stimulant, example, and irritant.

Reading

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Baynes Coiro
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
John Dryden ◽  
John Fletcher ◽  
Francis Beaumont ◽  
The Public ◽  
William Davenant ◽  
Early Modern Theatre

This chapter examines the fortunes of ‘theatricality’ after the closing of the public theatres in 1642 and into the Restoration, with particular emphasis on how reading influenced notions of early modern theatre. It considers the question of early modern theatre and its relationship to the emerging concepts of drama and literary criticism by focusing on Humphrey Moseley and John Dryden. It also explores how the plays of William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher were revived by the companies of Thomas Killigrew and William Davenant and gradually transformed into a more readerly form of literary drama by the publishing efforts of Moseley and by the retrospective judgement of Dryden’sAn Essay of Dramatick Poesie. The chapter argues that, during the Restoration, ‘the London theater was crowded with old theatrical memories and new demands’, and that it had been fundamentally altered by its passage into print.

“I'd make thee eat the mischief thou hast vented”: Discourse of Law in Ben Jonson's Catiline His Conspiracy

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-45
Author(s):  
Akihiko Shimizu
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Legal Discourse ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
State Of Emergency ◽  
Gunpowder Plot ◽  
Effective Use ◽  
Legal Procedures ◽  
The Way

This essay explores the discourse of law that constitutes the controversial apprehension of Cicero's issuing of the ultimate decree of the Senate (senatus consultum ultimum) in Catiline. The play juxtaposes the struggle of Cicero, whose moral character and legitimacy are at stake in regards to the extra-legal uses of espionage, with the supposedly mischievous Catilinarians who appear to observe legal procedures more carefully throughout their plot. To mitigate this ambivalence, the play defends Cicero's actions by depicting the way in which Cicero establishes the rhetoric of public counsel to convince the citizens of his legitimacy in his unprecedented dealing with Catiline. To understand the contemporaneousness of Catiline, I will explore the way the play integrates the early modern discourses of counsel and the legal maxim of ‘better to suffer an inconvenience than mischief,’ suggesting Jonson's subtle sensibility towards King James's legal reformation which aimed to establish and deploy monarchical authority in the state of emergency (such as the Gunpowder Plot of 1605). The play's climactic trial scene highlights the display of the collected evidence, such as hand-written letters and the testimonies obtained through Cicero's spies, the Allbroges, as proof of Catiline's mischievous character. I argue that the tactical negotiating skills of the virtuous and vicious characters rely heavily on the effective use of rhetoric exemplified by both the political discourse of classical Rome and the legal discourse of Tudor and Jacobean England.

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