scholarly journals Shakespeare, Jonson, and the Invention of the Author

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Donaldson
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Self Presentation

This lecture discusses William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, who were the two supreme writers of early modern England. It reveals that these two writers were intricately and curiously interwoven. The lecture describes their styles of writerly self-presentation and their professional pathways. Shakespeare and Jonson also served as each others' creative stimulant, example, and irritant.

Doubtful Readers

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin A. McCarthy
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
English Literature ◽  
John Donne ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Aemilia Lanyer ◽  
Quantitative Evidence ◽  
Early Modern Poetry ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
Over Time

Doubtful Readers: Print, Poetry, and the Reading Public in Early Modern England focuses on early modern publishers’ efforts to identify and accommodate new readers of verse that had previously been restricted to particular social networks in manuscript. Focusing on the period between the maturing of the market for printed English literature in the 1590s and the emergence of the professional poet following the Restoration, this study shows that poetry was shaped by—and itself shaped—strong print publication traditions. By reading printed editions of poems by William Shakespeare, Aemilia Lanyer, John Donne, and others, this book shows how publishers negotiated genre, gender, social access, reputation, literary knowledge, and the value of English literature itself. It uses literary, historical, bibliographical, and quantitative evidence to show how publishers’ strategies changed over time. Ultimately, Doubtful Readers argues that although—or perhaps because—publishers’ interpretive and editorial efforts are often elided in studies of early modern poetry, their interventions have had an enduring impact on our canons, texts, and literary histories.

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 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 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.

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.

“Tumbled into the dirt”

2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 156-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phil Withington
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Robert Greene ◽  
Over Time

This paper considers notions of “wit” in early modern England. It deploys quantitative methodologies to trace the term’s general discursive importance over time; it also looks at the use and conceptualisation of the term by canonical writers — Robert Greene and William Shakespeare in the 1590s, Thomas Hobbes in the 1650s, and the “libertines” of the Restoration era. The paper argues that whereas cultural and social historians have tended to regard impoliteness in the period as either the deliberate inversion or cultural absence of “civil” norms — “anti-civility”, in the words of Anna Bryson — wit provided a range of conventions and conversational repertoires outwith the normal bounds of civility. More to the point, in the hands of Thomas Hobbes wit demarcated a historicised theory of social practice.

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.

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