Lust’s Dominion; or, the Lascivious Queen / El dominio de la lujuria, o, la reina lasciva (ca. 1598-1600), by/de Thomas Dekker, John Marston, John Day, William Haughton

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.

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The Poets' War Revisited

Ben Jonson Journal ◽

10.3366/bjj.2016.0166 ◽

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.

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Ben Jonson's Reception of Lucian

Ben Jonson Journal ◽

10.3366/bjj.2019.0253 ◽

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.

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