5. Resurrection, Dualism, and Legal Personhood: Bodily Presence in Ben Jonson

2021 ◽  
pp. 148-180
Keyword(s):  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Legal Personhood ◽  
Bodily Presence

Resurrection, Dualism, and Legal Personhood: Bodily Presence in Ben Jonson

2021 ◽  
pp. 148-180
Author(s):  
Daniel Juan Gil
Keyword(s):  
Genetic Code ◽  
Critical Power ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Specific Form ◽  
Cultural Shift ◽  
Legal Personhood ◽  
The World ◽  
Computer Based ◽  
Textual Bodies ◽  
Death Knell

This chapter argues that Ben Jonson’s Volpone charts a massive cultural shift in which, within a rising capitalist order, a fully dualist understanding of resurrection is transformed into a legal personhood that allows the individual’s will to survive past the limit of death. Volpone represents the elegiac death knell for the specific form of counter-secularization that the rest of the book charts in which materialist and monist ideas of resurrection are celebrated for their critical power. However, Jonson’s own corpus of work is bifurcated between Volpone and his poetry, and most especially his poetry of praise and memorialization. In Jonson’s poetry he imagines that the separation of soul and body creates a gap in the symbolic fabric of the world, and he wants his poetry to fill this gap and he imagines his poems as an ersatz body. Jonson’s fantasy about poetry’s ability to make people present as textual bodies is similar to modern fantasies about the special incantatory power of “code” whether genetic code or computer-based code as a kind of language that does not represent but that enacts presence in the world.

Ben Jonson

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

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.

“Swell, swell, my joys”: Ben Jonson, Quotation, and A Help to Memory and Discourse

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-204
Author(s):  
Charles Cathcart
Keyword(s):  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Advanced Head ◽  
Knock Out ◽  
The Third ◽  
Biblical Commentary

Sejanus His Fall has always been a succès d'estime rather than a popular triumph. Neverthless, there was an odd and pervasive valency for the speech that opens the play's fifth act, a speech that starts, “Swell, swell, my joys,” and which includes the boast, “I feel my advancèd head/Knock out a star in heav'n.” The soliloquy has an afterlife in printed miscellanies; it was blended with lines from Volpone's first speech; the phrase “knock out a star in heav'n” was turned to by preachers warning of the sin of pride; John Trapp's use of the speech for his biblical commentary was plundered by John Price, Citizen, for the polemic of 1654, Tyrants and Protectors Set Forth in their Colours; and in the year between the Jonson Folio of 1616 and the playwright's journey to Scotland, William Drummond of Hawthornden borrowed directly from the speech for his verse tribute to King James. For all Jonson's punctilious itemising of his tragedy's classical sources, his lines were themselves shaped by a contemporary model: John Marston's Antonio and Mellida. What are we undertaking when we examine an intertextual journey such as this? Is it a case study in Jonson's influence? Is it a meditation upon the fortunes of a single textual item? Alternatively, is it a study of appropriation? The resting place for this essay is the speech's appearance in the third and final edition of Leonard Becket's publication, A Help to Memory and Discourse (1630), an appearance seemingly unique within the Becket canon and one that suggests that Jonson's verse gained an afterlife as a poem.

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