Jonson, Marston, Shakespeare and the Rhetoric of Topicality

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-176
Author(s):  
James P. Bednarz
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
John Marston ◽  
The Public ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
The Status ◽  
Public Theater

The revival of commercial “private” theater by the Children of Paul's in 1599 and the Children of the Chapel in 1600 transformed the culture of playgoing in London at the end of the sixteenth century. It was during this period that John Marston at Paul's and Ben Jonson at Blackfriars attracted attention at these theaters by ridiculing each other personally and denigrating each other's work. In doing so they converted these playhouses into forums for staging ideologically opposed interpretations of drama. Rather than aligning themselves with each other against the “public” theater, as Alfred Harbage had assumed in his influential chapter on “The Rival Repertories” in Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions, Jonson and Marston's satire of each other's work used Paul's and Blackfriars to debate the question of the legitimacy of the drama they staged and the status of the writers who composed it. Their debate on what drama should and should not be constitutes one of the most significant critical controversies in early modern English theater. It constitutes part of the first significant criticism of contemporary drama in English. The point of this essay is to account for how, when Jonson began writing for the Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars in 1600, Marston at Paul's became one of his principal targets through personal invective framed as a series of generalized strictures excoriating the obscenity and plagiarism of contemporary private theater.

Early Modern English Borders: Homogeneity and Heterogeneity

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Boyi Chen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
State Building ◽  
Channel Islands ◽  
Local Identities ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
The Status ◽  
British Case

This article discusses the process of English border-formation in Wales, Ireland, Scotland and around the Channel Islands, including efforts of the English government in border formation, and the local identities of borderlands. I evaluate political considerations, as well as examining social and cultural resonances to show that the English historical border was formed as part of the consolidation of state and nation in terms of Wales, Scotland, Ireland and the Channel Islands. I argue that border ‘building’ was not always smooth, or to be taken for granted in terms of state-building. The borderlands of the English state have manifested both a homogeneity and heterogeneity in the four regions, each with four particular forms or tendencies in their deep structures: homogeneity, from homogeneity to heterogeneity, from heterogeneity to homogeneity, and heterogeneity. In the article, I use homogeneity to refer to the status of the acculturational tendency, while using heterogeneity to refer to a deviation of the interaction between the English state and other states or nations. This article touches upon a topic not restricted to the British case, but relevant worldwide: the construction of borders in the context of the fundamental conflict between a ‘nation’, which is to say a culturally and often linguistically distinctive entity, and a ‘state’.

RELIGIOUS CHANGE AND THE TIMING OF BAPTISM IN ENGLAND, 1538–1750

2009 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-294 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. M. KITSON
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Public Performance ◽  
The Public ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Common Prayer

ABSTRACTThe religious reforms of the sixteenth century exerted a profound impact upon the liturgy of baptism in England. While historians' attention has been drawn to the theological debates concerning the making of the sign of the cross, the new baptism liturgy contained within the Book of common prayer also placed an innovative importance on the public performance of the rite in the presence of the whole congregation on Sundays and other holy days. Both religious radicals and conservatives contested this stress on ceremony and publicity throughout the early modern period. Through the collection of large numbers of baptism dates from parish registers, it is possible to measure adherence to these new requirements across both space and time. Before the introduction of the first prayer book in 1549, there was considerable uniformity among communities in terms of the timing of baptism, and the observed patterns are suggestive of conformity to the requirements of the late medieval church. After the mid-sixteenth century, parishes exhibited a range of responses, ranging from enthusiastic adoption by many communities to complete disregard in religiously conservative parts of Lancashire and Cheshire. Additionally, the popularity of saints' festivals as popular days for baptism fell markedly after 1660, suggesting a decline in the observance of these feasts.

Glimmers of the World Soul in Kabbalah

2021 ◽  
pp. 124-150
Author(s):  
Jeremy P. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status

Brown interrogates the status of the world soul in medieval and early modern Kabbalah. He advances a critical distinction between stronger and weaker fields for determining this inquiry, namely, between (a) the kabbalists’ explicit uses of the Platonic term “world soul,” which are rare and begin primarily during the sixteenth century, and (b) Kabbalah’s hypostatic psychology. The latter dates back to the infancy of Kabbalah in the thirteenth century. While sharing affinities with Neoplatonic cosmo-psychology, it does adopt its technical terminology. Special attention focuses on attempts during the Renaissance to render the teachings of Isaac Luria into the philosophical idiom of the world soul, and in particular, a nexus of Lurianic speculation that related the distillation of the primordial ether from the abyssal depth, or ʾEn Sof. Conclusion explores the dynamics of Kabbalah’s uneasy relationship with this facet of the Platonic philosophical heritage.

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.

Complexity in national legislation of the Early Modern English period

2010 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 277-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anu Lehto
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Genre Studies ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Systematic Method ◽  
National Legislation ◽  
Text Type ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
Early English

This paper concentrates on Early Modern English statutes printed in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The study considers the development of complexity and the rise of modern writing conventions by following the diachronic pragmatic view. The analysis also draws on genre studies and underlines the sociohistorical impact on linguistic changes. Complexity is assessed by a systematic method that observes the textual structure and syntax. The material consists of legislative documents in Early English Books Online; six of the documents were transcribed and compiled into a small-scale corpus. The results indicate that complexity was a common feature in the Early Modern English period: coordination and subordination are frequently used, and the sixteenth-century documents have an increasing tendency to favour subordination. During the sixteenth century, legislative sentences and text type structure become more regular and correspond to present-day practices.

May under verbs of hoping: Evolution of the modal system in the complements of hoping verbs in Early Modern English

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Igor Yanovich
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Compositional Semantics ◽  
Modal System ◽  
Present Evidence ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Recent Innovation ◽  
Two Stages ◽  
Late Modern

The chapter traces two stages of the rise of the may-under-hope construction of Late Modern English, present in examples like (i) Dearest, I hope we may be on such terms twenty years hence. Despite the archaic feel to it, this construction is in fact a very recent innovation that arose not earlier than the sixteenth century. I conjecture that its elevated flavor does not stem from its old age, but rather was inherited from another construction, with the inflectional subjunctive under hope. Along the way, I also present evidence that the textual absence of may under verbs of hoping before the rise of this construction was not due to narrow compositional semantics.

Making Murder Public

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
K.J. Kesselring
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Public ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
Formal Distinction

Homicide can seem timeless, somehow, determined by unchanging human failings. But a moment’s reflection shows this is not true: homicide has a history. In early modern England, that history saw two especially notable developments: one, the emergence in the sixteenth century of a formal distinction between murder and manslaughter, made meaningful through a lighter punishment than death for the latter in most cases, and two, a significant reduction in the rates of homicides individuals perpetrated on each other. This book explores connections between these two changes. It demonstrates the value in distinguishing between murder and manslaughter, or at least in seeing how that distinction came to matter in a period which also witnessed dramatic drops in the occurrence of homicidal violence. Focused on the ‘politics of murder’, the book examines how homicide became more effectively criminalized from c. 1480 to 1680, with chapters devoted to coroners’ inquests, appeals and private compensation, duels and private vengeance, and print and public punishment. The English had begun moving away from treating homicide as an offence subject to private settlements or vengeance long before other Europeans, at least from the twelfth century. What happened in the early modern period was, in some ways, a continuation of processes long underway, but intensified and refocused by developments from the late fifteenth to late seventeenth centuries. Exploring the links between law, crime, and politics, bringing together both the legal and social histories of the subject of homicide, the book argues that homicide became more fully ‘public’ in these years, with killings seen to violate a ‘king’s peace’ that people increasingly conflated with or subordinated to the ‘public peace’ or ‘public justice’.

Clothing and Queer Style in Early Modern English Drama

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
James M. Bromley
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Thomas Middleton ◽  
Thomas Dekker ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Early Modern English Drama ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Current Thinking ◽  
George Chapman

This book examines ‘queer style’ or forms of masculinity grounded in superficiality, inauthenticity, affectation, and the display of the extravagantly clothed body in early modern English city comedies. Queer style destabilizes distinctions between able-bodied and disabled, human and nonhuman, and the past and the present—distinctions that have structured normative ways of thinking about sexuality. Glimpsing the worldmaking potential of queer style, plays by Ben Jonson, George Chapman, Thomas Middleton, and Thomas Dekker imagine alternatives to the prevailing modes of subjectivity, sociability, and eroticism in early modern London. While the characters associated with queer style are situated in a hostile generic and historical context, this book draws on recent work on disability, materiality, and queer temporality to rethink their relationship to those contexts so as to access the utopian possibilities of early modern queer style. These theoretical frameworks also help bring into relief how the attachments and pleasures of early modern sartorial extravagance can estrange us from the epistemologies of sexuality that narrow current thinking about sexuality and its relationship to authenticity, pedagogy, interiority, and privacy.

Cacophony, or vile scrapers on vile instruments: bad music in early modern English towns

Urban History ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Cockayne
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
The Public ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Sound Environment

Drawing on contemporary musings and references from a variety of civic records, this article will consider music heard in the public spaces of urban England between the mid-sixteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries. Negative reactions to performers such as common fiddlers and street traders became increasingly common as the period progressed and were intimately connected both with fears concerning the crowd-gathering potential of such people and with a desire to control the sound environment to enable effective sleep, worship and concentration.

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