“Red silence”: Ben Jonson and the Breath of Sound

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-61
Author(s):  
Laura Jayne Wright
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
Early Readers ◽  
Sound Effects ◽  
Stage Directions ◽  
The Voice

In the prologue to Every Man in His Humour, Ben Jonson dismissed sound effects in favour of the spoken word; yet, throughout his work, Jonson uses sound to shocking and even violent effect. By examining the acoustics of Jonson's poem, A Panegyre on the Happy Entrance of James… to His First High Session of Parliament (1604), this article demonstrates that Jonson developed a distinct theory of sound, drawn from and often disagreeing with the work of Aristotle and Horace. It considers Jonson's pencil annotations on a copy of Thomas More's Carmen Gratulatorium (1509), to which his own poem is greatly indebted, and shows that these annotations are often made beside lines concerned with noise. Jonson's acoustic theory – which is dependent on an early modern understanding of the voice and of breath – is then traced throughout three of his comedies (Volpone, The Alchemist, and Epicoene). The article finally considers the responses of early readers of Jonson's dramatic work and their engagement with his sonic stage directions in Epicoene. It concludes that Jonson equivocates about the importance of sound, dismissing such “noise” only to discuss it at length in the next breath.

scholarly journals From directions to descriptions: Reading the theatrical Nebentext in Ben Jonson’s Workes as an authorial outlet

Sederi ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 7-26
Author(s):  
David J. Amelang
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Miguel De Cervantes ◽  
Stage Directions ◽  
The Way

This article explores how certain dramatists in early modern England and in Spain, specifically Ben Jonson and Miguel de Cervantes (with much more emphasis on the former), pursued authority over texts by claiming as their own a new realm which had not been available—or, more accurately, as prominently available—to playwrights before: the stage directions in printed plays. The way both these playwrights and/or their publishers dealt with the transcription of stage directions provides perhaps the clearest example of a theatrical convention translated into the realm of readership.

scholarly journals Speaking for the People in Early Modern England*

2019 ◽  
Vol 244 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Coast
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
Common People ◽  
Wide Audience ◽  
The People ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Voice

Abstract The voice of the people is assumed to have carried little authority in early modern England. Elites often caricatured the common people as an ignorant multitude and demanded their obedience, deference and silence. Hostility to the popular voice was an important element of contemporary political thought. However, evidence for a very different set of views can be found in numerous polemical tracts written between the Reformation and the English Civil War. These tracts claimed to speak for the people, and sought to represent their alleged grievances to the monarch or parliament. They subverted the rules of petitioning by speaking for ‘the people’ as a whole and appealing to a wide audience, making demands for the redress of grievances that left little room for the royal prerogative. In doing so, they contradicted stereotypes about the multitude, arguing that the people were rational, patriotic and potentially better informed about the threats to the kingdom than the monarch themselves. ‘Public opinion’ was used to confer legitimacy on political and religious demands long before the mass subscription petitioning campaigns of the 1640s.

Et Cetera/Etcetera/&c; or, the Aposiopetic Page

2020 ◽  
pp. 109-170
Author(s):  
Laurie Maguire
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Body ◽  
Punctuation Mark ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Physical Functions ◽  
Rhetorical Figure ◽  
Stage Directions

Chapter 2 looks at the etcetera, a mark which today functions solely as an abbreviation, indicating the continuation of properties in a list. But in the early modern period that was only one of its several meanings. As a noun and a verb, early modern etcetera represents the body and bawdy (sexual parts and activities, or physical functions such as urination or defecation). As a punctuation mark, it is a forerunner of the punctuation mark which indicates silence or interruption—the em-dash. As a rhetorical term, it represents silence or the form of breaking off known rhetorically as aposiopesis. As an abbreviation at the ends of lists in stage directions, or lines in actors’ parts, it represents stage action, inviting continuation of dialogue or listed props. These four categories are linked in that etcetera directs the eye to a vacancy. We can see why it might be associated with aposiopesis, a rhetorical figure that is paradoxically about silence.

scholarly journals From Poetry to Politics: The Gifts and Talents of Michael Rosen

1944 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie Steigel ◽  
Joyce Bainbridge
Keyword(s):  
Oral Language ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
Children's Writing ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Voice

Michael Rosen is a well-known poet, author, radio broadcaster, playwright and speaker in the UK, with over a hundred books to his credit. In his writing and in the many workshops he gives, Rosen focuses on the spoken word and the “voice” of the child. He believes oral language forms the basis for children’s writing. To that end, he encourages teachers to capitalize on the child’s voice and experiences as they introduce children to the art of writing and motivate them to write for pleasure.

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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