scholarly journals Thereby Hangs a Tail: Jonson’s The Devil Is an Ass and Stage Representations of Devil-Servants

Early Theatre ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
King's Men ◽  
The Devil ◽  
Visual Ambiguity ◽  
The Demonic

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 of ‘devilish servant-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.

Internalizing the Demonic: Satan and the Self in Early Modern Scottish Piety

2015 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle D. Brock
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Self ◽  
Reformed Theology ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Anglophone World ◽  
The Devil ◽  
Personal Engagement ◽  
The Demonic

AbstractBeliefs about the Devil informed Scottish piety in a myriad of ways. This article explores, in particular, the experiential relationship between Reformed theology, the practice of introspection, and demonic belief. It locates a process of profound anxiety and self-identification as evil that occurred during inward, personal engagement with Satan. This process, loosely coined here as “internalizing the demonic,” reveals the close and consequential relationship between the clerical promotion of self-surveillance and the widely internalized belief in the Devil's natural affinity with the “evil hearts” of men and women. Through an examination of English texts circulated in Scotland and a brief comparison with Protestant groups abroad, this article suggests that internalizing the demonic was a defining component of experiential piety not just in Scotland, but also throughout the Reformed Anglophone world.

scholarly journals ‘An Honest Pair of Oars’: Players, Watermen, and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside

Early Theatre ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christi Spain-Savage
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern London ◽  
King's Men ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Key Industry

<p>This essay offers insight into two playing companies’ ties to a key industry in early modern London and the ways such interconnections shaped the neighbourhoods adjacent to the Thames. It examines Touchwood Senior’s speech in Thomas Middleton’s <em>A Chaste Maid in Cheapside</em> in relation to the Swan, the Blackfriars, and watermen’s trade to argue that this moment highlights sympathies for the watermen’s plight from the Lady Elizabeth’s Men and exposes underlying tensions between the watermen and the King’s Men in 1613 and 1614.</p>

Word and Sign in Elizabethan Conflicts with the Devil

1999 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 238-256
Author(s):  
Kathleen R. Sands
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Psychological Impact ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Emblem Books ◽  
Modern Mind ◽  
Clifford Geertz ◽  
Landed Gentry ◽  
The Devil ◽  
The Phoenix

Gloriana, Britomart, Astraea, Belphoebe, the Sun in Splendor, England’s Moses, the new Deborah, the Phoenix—Elizabeth I possessed a generous wardrobe of public personas. Monarchy, chastity, divinity, and other intangibles played in the early modern mind as images, personifications, embodiments—the invisible rendered visible. As Clifford Geertz has observed, the Elizabethan imagination was “allegorical, Protestant, didactic, and pictorial; it lived on moral abstractions cast into emblems.” These emblems were culturally ubiquitous, appearing in books and broadsides, painted and carved portraits, architecture, tapestry, jewelry and clothing, armor and weapons, monumental funerary sculpture, wall and ceiling decoration. University students neglected Aristotle in favor of fashionable continental emblem books, and the taste for embellishing houses with emblems extended from the monarchy and aristocracy to the landed gentry and the rising middle class. Peter Daly stresses the psychological impact of emblems on the early modern mind when he observes that emblems were “as immediately and graphically present in this period as illustrated advertising is today.”

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