scholarly journals The Poets' War Revisited

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-245
Author(s):  
Rebecca Yearling
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Small Group ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Thomas Dekker ◽  
John Marston

This essay seeks to explore the role played by John Marston in the so-called War of the Poets – the literary quarrel between a small group of playwrights, including Marston, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, and perhaps William Shakespeare, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Marston's role in the War is problematic because although there are figures in his drama who might seem intended to be read as hostile portraits of Jonson, all of these figures are ambiguous, appearing to resemble Marston himself as much as they do his rival. I argue that this is because Jonson and Marston were participating in the War for very different reasons: Jonson in order to distinguish himself from his fellow satiric dramatists and Marston to emphasise the similarities between himself and his colleague. Marston may have done this in order to mock satiric dramatists as a class, but he may also have wanted to irritate Jonson by suggesting that Jonson was not as unique or individual as he liked to believe.

Foreign

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanne L. Wofford
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Christopher Marlowe ◽  
Thomas Middleton ◽  
Thomas Dekker ◽  
John Marston ◽  
Foreign Material ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
English Drama ◽  
English Stage ◽  
European Theatre

This chapter focuses on the importation into English drama of elements that had their roots in European theatre as well as in classical sources and in English imaginations of the ancient past. It shows how this foreign material was absorbed by the plays of Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, and John Marston, becoming fully international even when they appeared to be most local. It also considers several methodological categories for thinking in new ways about the problem of cultural translation that had come to define English theatre by 1600, including the need to recognize what it calls the ‘formal agency’ of the theatre’s many different parts—the tropes, genres, emotions, characters, geographies, and ideas that imported a richly overdetermined set of foreign cultural meanings onto the English stage. Three troping actions that describe the transformations brought about by the foreign on stage are discussed: the foreign as intertext, or trope intertextual; the foreign as intertheatrical, or intertheatrical trope; and translation, or trope intercultural.

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.

Lesse Greeke? Homer in Jonson and Shakespeare

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert S. Miola
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Dark Side ◽  
Julius Caesar ◽  
Troilus And Cressida ◽  
English Translations ◽  
Love's Labor's Lost ◽  
And Function

Throughout their careers both Jonson and Shakespeare often encountered Homer, who left a deep impress on their works. Jonson read Homer directly in Greek but Shakespeare did not, or if he did, he left no evidence of that reading in extant works. Both Jonson and Shakespeare encountered Homer indirectly in Latin recollections by Vergil, Horace, Ovid and others, in English translations, in handbooks and mythographies, in derivative poems and plays, in descendant traditions, and in plentiful allusions. Though their appropriations differ significantly, Jonson and Shakespeare both present comedic impersonations of Homeric scenes and figures – the parodic replay of the council of the gods (Iliad 1) in Poetaster (1601) 4.5 and the appearance of “sweet warman” Hector (5.2.659) in the Masque of the Nine Worthies (Love's Labor's Lost, 1588–97). Homer's Vulcan and Venus furnish positive depictions of love and marriage in The Haddington Masque (1608) as do his Hector and Andromache in Julius Caesar (1599), which features other significant recollections. Both Jonson and Shakespeare recall Homer to explore the dark side of honor and fame: Circe and Ate supply the anti-masque in the Masque of Queens (1609), and scenes from Chapman's Iliad supply the comical or tragical satire, Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601). Both poets put Homer to abstract and philosophical uses: Zeus's chain and Venus's ceston (girdle), allegorized, appears throughout Jonson's work and function as central symbols in Hymenaei (1606); Homer's depiction of the tension between fate and free will, between the omnipotent gods and willing humans, though mediated, inflects the language and action of Coriolanus (c. 1608). Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare practice a kind of inventive imitatio which, according to classical and neo-classical precept, re-reads classical texts in order to make them into something new.

Learning Mingled with Nobility in Shakespeare’s England

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Warren Boutcher
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
John Marston ◽  
University Of Oxford ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
Samuel Daniel ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
The University ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Aristocratic Culture

Chapter 2.3 analyses the English school of Montaigne in the context of the relationship between Renaissance education and the early modern nobility. The Englished Montaigne––translated by John Florio and dramatized by Samuel Daniel, Ben Jonson, John Marston, and others––was introduced as a critic of the tyranny of custom and as a participant in the aristocratic culture of private learning in the late Elizabethan, early Jacobean noble household. Documents discussed range from the paratexts to Florio’s translation and the English text of ‘Of the institution and education of children’ to James Cleland’s work on the same subject and the famous portrait of Lady Anne Clifford. The chapter ends by offering a new perspective on Shakespeare’s use of Florio’s translation in The Tempest: that we should understand it in relation to Samuel Daniel’s use of similar passages in a play staged for the 1605 royal progress to the University of Oxford: The Queenes Arcadia.

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.

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.

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