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.

Facing Justice

2019 ◽  
pp. 351-372
Author(s):  
Subha Mukherji
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Literary Imagination ◽  
The Law ◽  
Dramatic Practice ◽  
The Way

Law and the literary imagination in early modern England had shared stakes in the relation between face and intent, surface and significance, truth and semblance, nature and artifice. Using the legally attuned dramatist John Webster’s The White Devil as its central example, this chapter probes law’s preoccupation with legibility and the way in which drama enters into dialogue with it. In the process, law emerges an interface between an expressive mode and a hermeneutic model, and thus an imaginative resource for literary writers interested in selfhood and inwardness. Ultimately, the argument intimates how the gaps and dualities of the interrelation between the theatre and the law are used by early modern dramatic practice to conceptualize the larger interrelation between literary and legal epistemologies.

Ben Jonson and Religion

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Searle
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Professional Career ◽  
Religious Conversions ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines the complex role played by religion in Jonson’s life; his relationship to the theatre; his works in various genres (plays, poetry, and masques), and in the critical reception of his writings. It considers the biographical evidence surrounding Jonson’s multiple religious conversions within the broader context of recusancy culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. It then examines some of the ways in which religion is represented in his plays and how this influenced and was shaped by the changes in religious culture that characterized Jonson’s lengthy professional career from the 1590s until the 1630s. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the relationship between religion and the theatre as it impacted upon Jonson’s writing and his own instrumentality—as a key cultural player—in redefining that relationship in early modern England.

The Law of Patronage in Early Modern England

1975 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 247-260
Author(s):  
Rosemary O'Day
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Law ◽  
Patronage System ◽  
The Way

The calibre of the early Elizabethan clergy left much to be desired and much criticism was levelled by contemporaries and near contemporaries at the bishops for their failure to check the flow of insufficient ministers into benefices. While historians have acknowledged the existence of legal obstacles in the way of a firm episcopal policy in this regard, and have come gradually to realise some of the profound implications of the patronage system, no one has charted in detail the law of patronage which so hampered hierarchical attempts to raise the standard of the parochial clergy.

Music and Catholic culture in post-Reformation Lancashire: piety, protest, and conversion

2015 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 492-525 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emilie K. M. Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Musical Expression ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Catholic Culture ◽  
Stuart Period ◽  
Manuscript Collections ◽  
The Way ◽  
Entertainment Culture

AbstractThis essay adds to our existing understanding of what it meant to be a member of the English Catholic community during the late Elizabeth and early Stuart period by exploring Catholic musical culture in Lancashire. This was a uniquely Catholic village, which, like the majority of villages, towns and cities in early modern England, was filled with the singing of ballads. Ballads have almost exclusively been treated in scholarship as a ‘Protestant’ phenomenon and the ‘godly ballad’ associated with the very fabric of a distinctively Protestant Elizabethan and Stuart entertainment culture. By investigating the songs and ballads in two manuscript collections from the Catholic network surrounding the Blundell family this essay will show how Catholics both composed and ‘converted’ existing ballads to voice social, devotional, and political concerns. The ballads performed in Little Crosby highlight a vibrant Catholic community, where musical expression was fundamental. Performance widened the parochial religious divide, whilst enhancing Catholic integration. This essay uncovers the way Catholics used music to voice religious and exhort protest as much as prayer. Finally, by investigating the tunes and melodies preserved in the manuscripts, I demonstrate how priests serving this network used ballads as part of their missionary strategy.

“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 “Look No More”: Jonson's Catiline and the Politics of Enargeia

PMLA ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 134 (2) ◽  
pp. 332-350
Author(s):  
Joseph Mansky
Keyword(s):  
Roman Republic ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Visual Presence ◽  
Power Of Language

In his play Catiline His Conspiracy, Ben Jonson allegorizes Cicero's fight to save the Roman Republic as a battle against the kind of spectacular drama that, Jonson claimed, his audiences so enjoyed. This metatheatrical polemic hinges on the rhetorical technique of enargeia: the power of language to conjure an image. For the early moderns, enargeia resolved the “paradox of representation”—the contradiction between “making present” and “standing for”—by subordinating visual presence to verbal illusionism. Jonson, aligning neoclassical poetics with humanist historiography, dramatizes this hierarchy of representation. In Catiline, Cicero's rhetoric puts visions of violence before his audience's eyes only to prevent their realization onstage. The play thus seeks to exorcise the specter of political violence that haunted early modern England and the Roman Republic alike. Yet the rhetoric of Jonson's Cicero proves just as coercive as the spectacular violence that it has replaced. From Jonson's time to ours, separating rhetoric from violence has remained the challenge of republicanism.

Tradition and Exclusion: Parochial Officeholding in Early Modern England, A Case Study from North Norfolk, 1580–1640

Rural History ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAN PITMAN
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The North ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Shared Understandings ◽  
The Way

This article suggests that there has been a tendency to understate the degree to which officeholding during the early modern period was embedded within the community, moulded by local influences and fulfilling a range of different functions in the parish. An over-emphasis upon national processes of social and cultural change has resulted in a failure to appreciate the complexity of the politics of officeholding. There has been only limited recognition of both the presence of constraints upon the actions of parochial elites and the mechanisms through which particular groups established and maintained control over parochial institutions. A detailed analysis of officeholding within seven parishes lying on the north Norfolk coast stresses the extent to which ‘parochial traditions’ determined the way in which things were done. It is argued that the effective linkage of officeholding to these shared understandings and to ideals of participation and inclusion created a powerful rhetoric through which the exclusion of a large minority of the populace and uneven distributions of officeholding were justified.

scholarly journals Objects, Words, and Religion: Popular Belief and Protestantism in Early Modern England

2017 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-145
Author(s):  
Joanna Ludwikowska
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Popular Belief ◽  
Popular Imagination ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Reformation England ◽  
The Way

Abstract This article deals with selected aspects of popular belief in post-Reformation England as compared to the pre-Reformation popular tradition of the fourteenth and fifteenth century. Through a discussion of the politics of superstition and religiously-shaped concepts of reason in Early Modern England, this article discusses medicinal magic, and the power of objects and words in the context of religion and popular belief, focusing in particular on leprosy and exorcism. By examining the Protestant understanding of the supernatural as well as its polemical importance, the article investigates the perseverance of popular belief after the Reformation and outlines some of the reasons and politics behind this perseverance, while also examining the role of the supernatural in the culture of belief in Early Modern England by tracing the presence and importance of particular beliefs in popular imagination and in the way religion and confessional rhetoric made use of popular beliefs.

‘The Nausea of Sin’: The Early Modern Hangover

The Hangover ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 33-68
Author(s):  
Jonathon Shears
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
The Body ◽  
Political Writing ◽  
The Way ◽  
Recovery Methods ◽  
Robert Herrick

The chapter pursues the representation of the hangover in poetry and drama, religious and political writing and in the culture wars of the seventeenth century in England. It begins by exploring why the hangover has been obscured in writing about early modern depictions of drunkenness through a study of Anacreontic verse by Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick and Richard Lovelace. Hangovers, it contends, are more prominent in other forms of literature such as Protestant tracts and sermons and in bawdy verse and drama of the Restoration. They also feature regularly in what the chapter terms ‘anti-symposiastic’ verse written by Whigs in the 1690s. The chapter argues throughout that the hangover – whether leading to feelings of guilt and shame or defiance – takes us beyond studies of male fellowship and tavern culture, increasing our understanding of the way that the body becomes a route to discuss moral and spiritual failings in this period. It also gives examples of the way Withdrawal-Relief recovery methods – sometimes known as the hair of the dog – became associated with defiance.

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