“Original Practices” and Jonson's First Folio

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brent Griffin

Over the past twenty years or so, performance-based efforts to recreate the staging conditions and production modes of Elizabethan/Jacobean playhouses through “original practices” (OP) have developed at a considerable rate. One has only to note the popular appeal of theatre companies working from Early Modern architectural replicas (like London's Bankside Globe or Virginia's Blackfriars) to recognize the pervasive influence of the “reconstructive Shakespeare” movement on our understanding and interpretation of Renaissance drama. Yet, as the name would suggest, the movement is too often grounded in a performance aesthetic predicated solely on Shakespeare's playtexts (indeed, for many, the 1623 Folio is followed with a near religious fervor). But truth be told, other playwright/practitioners of the era have far more to say on the matter of staging verse drama than Shakespeare, and made a point of publishing their thoughts directly through prefatory material, commendatory verses, pamphlets, etc. Fletcher and Heywood immediately come to mind, but this paper will focus on the most prolific critic of the period, Ben Jonson. Not to be overshadowed by the numerous commemorations of Shakespeare's death, 2016 also marked the 400th anniversary of the publication of Jonson's landmark First Folio, and a brief review of his 1616 Workes should provide ample occasion to challenge several of the “original practices” championed by bardocentric theatre companies and their educational auxiliaries.

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Gants

This article examines the legacy of Ben Jonson's folio Workes of 1616, in particular the attention that has been paid to the volume's material instantiation. It discusses some of the bibliographical features that distinguish it from the better-known Shakespeare First Folio as well as some aspects of its printing history. It then looks at how changes in graduate training over the past forty years have affected scholarly approaches to editing and book history. Next, it looks at how three scholarly editions have incorporated important material and design characteristics of the Workes into their completed work: C. H. Hereford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson's Oxford Ben Jonson (1925–52), Ian Donaldson, Martin Butler, and David Bevington's Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson (2012), and the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson Online (2014). Finally, it offers a few thoughts on the current limits of electronic publishing and possible future developments.


How was history written in Europe and Asia between 400–1400? How was the past understood in religious, social, and political terms? And in what ways does the diversity of historical writing in this period mask underlying commonalities in narrating the past? The volume tackles these and other questions. Part I provides comprehensive overviews of the development of historical writing in societies that range from the Korean Peninsula to north-west Europe, which together highlight regional and cultural distinctiveness. Part II complements the first part by taking a thematic and comparative approach; it includes chapters on genre, warfare, and religion (amongst others) which address common concerns of historians working in this liminal period before the globalizing forces of the early modern world.


2012 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 899-938 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALEXANDRA WALSHAM

ABSTRACTThis article is a revised and expanded version of my inaugural lecture as Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, delivered on 20 Oct. 2011. It explores how the religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reshaped perceptions of the past, stimulated shifts in historical method, and transformed the culture of memory, before turning to the interrelated question of when and why contemporaries began to remember the English Reformation as a decisive juncture and critical turning point in history. Investigating the interaction between personal recollection and social memory, it traces the manner in which remembrance of the events of the 1530s, 1540s, and 1550s evolved and splintered between 1530 and 1700. A further theme is the role of religious and intellectual developments in the early modern period in forging prevailing models of historical periodization and teleological paradigms of interpretation.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anastasia Palamarchuk ◽  
◽  
Ekaterina Terenteva ◽  
Sergey Fyodorov ◽  

The monograph is a study of main trends of emergence and evolution of the national historical writing in Western Europe in the XVIIth century. Based on a complex analysis of several phenomena which defined the development of the Early Modern historical writing, it provides a comparative analysis of the regional schools of historical writing (particularly those of the English antiquaries and French érudits) in the process of their respective growth and formation accomplished by the end of XVIIth century with the advent of the national historiography. The conceptual unity of the book is verified within the context of the rise of the national states in England and France, which stipulated a consistent demand for reinforcing the nationally orientated discourses not only in a historical writing but also in legal and political thought. The perception of England as an empire, entrenched in the insular historical and legal consciousness, recurring during the reigns of the Stuarts and extending to the whole British archipelago, determined the establishment of chorography as a prevalent form characteristic of the English historiography. Chorographic structure of the narrative unfolding the space of the territorial “empire” to the reader corresponded to the method of “intellectual appropriation” of the British Isles by the English antiquarians which could be defined as “cultural-historical”. A considerable role was devoted to reactualization of ethnogenetic myths at different levels: while some of them (primarily – the Galfridian myth) were regarded as relevant to the pan-British cultural and historical past, others emphasized autonomous dimensions of the past and present of distinct composites (Scotland, Ireland, Wales) The continental French variant of proto-national historiography also utilized the idea of empire but in a different mode defined by the formula “rex in regno suo imperator est”. The emerging school of érudits modelled principles of its narratives on patrimonial structures rooted in the feudal medieval society (dynasty; royal family; aristocratic lineages; seigneurial rights and vassal obligations; the system of offices created by the monarch stemming from the royal household etc.). The unity of the subjects of the French kingdom was ensured not by the shared territorial commonality but by their loyalty to the king. Therefore, the French variant of “intellectual appropriation” was developed in a socio-political direction in contrast to the territorial.


2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 613-628
Author(s):  
Vesa-Pekka Herva ◽  
Janne Ikäheimo ◽  
Matti Enbuske ◽  
Jari Okkonen

The unknown and exotic North fascinated European minds in the early modern period. A land of natural and supernatural wonders, and of the indigenous Sámi people, the northern margins of Europe stirred up imagination and a plethora of cultural fantasies, which also affected early antiquarian research and the period understanding of the past. This article employs an alleged runestone discovered in northernmost Sweden in the seventeenth century to explore how ancient times and northern margins of the continent were understood in early modern Europe. We examine how the peculiar monument of the Vinsavaara stone was perceived and signified in relation to its materiality, landscape setting, and the cultural-cosmological context of the Renaissance–Baroque world. On a more general level, we use the Vinsavaara stone to assess the nature and character of early modern antiquarianism in relation to the period's nationalism, colonialism and classicism.


2018 ◽  
Vol 285 (1888) ◽  
pp. 20180991 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrik G. Flammer ◽  
Simon Dellicour ◽  
Stephen G. Preston ◽  
Dirk Rieger ◽  
Sylvia Warren ◽  
...  

Throughout history, humans have been afflicted by parasitic worms, and eggs are readily detected in archaeological deposits. This study integrated parasitological and ancient DNA methods with a large sample set dating between Neolithic and Early Modern periods to explore the utility of molecular archaeoparasitology as a new approach to study the past. Molecular analyses provided unequivocal species-level parasite identification and revealed location-specific epidemiological signatures. Faecal–oral transmitted nematodes ( Ascaris lumbricoides and Trichuris trichiura ) were ubiquitous across time and space. By contrast, high numbers of food-associated cestodes ( Diphyllobothrium latum and Taenia saginata ) were restricted to medieval Lübeck. The presence of these cestodes and changes in their prevalence at approximately 1300 CE indicate substantial alterations in diet or parasite availability. Trichuris trichiura ITS-1 sequences grouped into two clades; one ubiquitous and one restricted to medieval Lübeck and Bristol. The high sequence diversity of T.t .ITS-1 detected in Lübeck is consistent with its importance as a Hanseatic trading centre. Collectively, these results introduce molecular archaeoparasitology as an artefact-independent source of historical evidence.


2003 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-240 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mario Baroni

Form in classical music is fundamentally a question of organising musical time in order to facilitate a listening corresponding to author's expectations. In the past this was obtained by coordinating different parameters towards a single goal. In twentieth century music, the more detached relationship between the composer and the listener meant that less importance was given to the idea of “correct” listening and to the coordination of parameters. This article is devoted to one of the extreme points in this process: A quartet by Bruno Maderna composed in 1956 under the influence of the ideologies of Darmstadt. The quartet was examined by three different groups of analysts. The first group examined the score of the quartet, while the third group only had a recorded performance at its disposal; the second group analyzed both the score and the performance. The three groups had to describe the form of the piece in terms of three hierarchical levels: Its microform {i.e. the organisation of minimal units not divisible into smaller parts); its macroform (i.e. its division into the minimum possible number of parts); the medium form {i.e. a collection of minimal units that could also be interpreted as an acceptable division of the parts at a macroformal level). Two basic criteria were used: Segmentation (local parametric discontinuity between two adjacent parts) and similarity (coherence between the parameters within each part). The results of the three analyses were somewhat diverse, thus demonstrating the tendency to relax the sense of form in such a quartet, as well as the presence of different procedures used when listening to a performance and analysing a score.


Ricercare ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 64-79
Author(s):  
Marco Alunno ◽  
Andres Gomez-Bravo

In the literature for solo instrument, etudes typically present different kinds of technical and expressive challenges. In fact, they often focus on unique and problematic aspects of performance on a specific instrument. The short group of piano etudes presented here has the same purpose, although, in some cases, it recalls writing techniques and melodic-rhythmical modules usually associated with composers and styles of both the past and present times. In this article in particular, four etudes (Scales, Expressive Fingering, Parallel Thirds and Broken Octaves) are briefly described and analyzed from both a compositional and an interpretive approach, given the case that both the composer and the interpreter were in contact during the creative and learning process of the pieces. The result of this kind of collaboration is twofold: a composition whose playability and effectiveness are warranted by the practice of the interpreter, and a performance with a better understanding of the direct wishes of the composer.


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