This article discusses Ben Jonson's 1609 play Epicene; or, The Silent Woman, with a particular focus on Morose's excessive solitude and aversion to noise. The article begins by demonstrating how Epicene ostensibly relies on early modern discourses of female speech. The ideal woman of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century conduct literature was silent, a quality inseparable from the associated virtues of chastity and modesty. Morose takes this imperative to its extreme in his search for a bride of “thrifty speech,” who “spends but six words a day” (1.2.28-9). In contrast, excessive female speech is associated with women's proverbial corporeal leakiness, “hermaphroditic” or “epicene” gender, and uncontrolled sexual desire. Above all, the play insists that noisy, desiring, masculine women are a product of the emergent consumer culture located in the city. This raises a contradiction: are women all inherently prone to noisiness, or does female noisiness trouble the boundaries of gender? If women are naturally noisy, what is it about early modern London that, according to the play, exacerbates this? How we understand the nature of noise has profound implications for our reception of Morose. Rather than defining Morose solely in terms of his apparent agoraphobia and miserly character, as earlier criticism tended to do, attention to the ways in which both Morose and Epicene attempt to construct intolerable noise as an innate feature of urban womanhood can illuminate the structure of social abjection at work in policing the boundaries of masculinity and male communities.
{"title":"“O'erwhelmed with noise”: Abject Female Speech in Epicene; or, The Silent Woman","authors":"L. Swift","doi":"10.3366/bjj.2021.0313","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/bjj.2021.0313","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses Ben Jonson's 1609 play Epicene; or, The Silent Woman, with a particular focus on Morose's excessive solitude and aversion to noise. The article begins by demonstrating how Epicene ostensibly relies on early modern discourses of female speech. The ideal woman of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century conduct literature was silent, a quality inseparable from the associated virtues of chastity and modesty. Morose takes this imperative to its extreme in his search for a bride of “thrifty speech,” who “spends but six words a day” (1.2.28-9). In contrast, excessive female speech is associated with women's proverbial corporeal leakiness, “hermaphroditic” or “epicene” gender, and uncontrolled sexual desire. Above all, the play insists that noisy, desiring, masculine women are a product of the emergent consumer culture located in the city. This raises a contradiction: are women all inherently prone to noisiness, or does female noisiness trouble the boundaries of gender? If women are naturally noisy, what is it about early modern London that, according to the play, exacerbates this? How we understand the nature of noise has profound implications for our reception of Morose. Rather than defining Morose solely in terms of his apparent agoraphobia and miserly character, as earlier criticism tended to do, attention to the ways in which both Morose and Epicene attempt to construct intolerable noise as an innate feature of urban womanhood can illuminate the structure of social abjection at work in policing the boundaries of masculinity and male communities.","PeriodicalId":40862,"journal":{"name":"Ben Jonson Journal","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87207927","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Sweetness Ready Penned”: On Velocity, Vision, and the Gifts of George Herbert's “Jordan (2)”","authors":"E. Green","doi":"10.3366/bjj.2021.0317","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/bjj.2021.0317","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40862,"journal":{"name":"Ben Jonson Journal","volume":"126 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88692615","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article aligns the 1605, 1606, and 1609 court sermons of Lancelot Andrewes with Ben Jonson's Masque of Blackness and Masque of Beauty (performed in 1605 and 1608, respectively) in order to argue that both genres politicize James VI and I's domestic life by commenting on Queen Anne's political and domestic roles. Scholars have examined the ways in which Anne's performance in the court masques allowed her to claim a sense of authority and agency over her body. Recent research on sermons has demonstrated how they were another form of court entertainment, more akin to masques and plays than we might expect, and that the sermon genre often commented on ongoing political and domestic situations in the Stuart court. Yet, scholars have not considered how the masques prompted a response from another popular court genre, the sermon. In placing these two genres—sermon and masque—alongside one another, I argue that Andrewes's patriarchal downplaying of the woman's body in the Biblical Nativity narrative is actually a response to Jonson's masques, rather than the normative touchstone of early modern understandings of gender and maternity. Considering Andrewes's view of the female body as a contrast to Jonson's display and celebration of the female body reveals multiple models for understanding maternity in the early modern period.
{"title":"Queen Anne's Body in Stuart Court Sermons","authors":"Chelsea McKelvey","doi":"10.3366/bjj.2021.0315","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/bjj.2021.0315","url":null,"abstract":"This article aligns the 1605, 1606, and 1609 court sermons of Lancelot Andrewes with Ben Jonson's Masque of Blackness and Masque of Beauty (performed in 1605 and 1608, respectively) in order to argue that both genres politicize James VI and I's domestic life by commenting on Queen Anne's political and domestic roles. Scholars have examined the ways in which Anne's performance in the court masques allowed her to claim a sense of authority and agency over her body. Recent research on sermons has demonstrated how they were another form of court entertainment, more akin to masques and plays than we might expect, and that the sermon genre often commented on ongoing political and domestic situations in the Stuart court. Yet, scholars have not considered how the masques prompted a response from another popular court genre, the sermon. In placing these two genres—sermon and masque—alongside one another, I argue that Andrewes's patriarchal downplaying of the woman's body in the Biblical Nativity narrative is actually a response to Jonson's masques, rather than the normative touchstone of early modern understandings of gender and maternity. Considering Andrewes's view of the female body as a contrast to Jonson's display and celebration of the female body reveals multiple models for understanding maternity in the early modern period.","PeriodicalId":40862,"journal":{"name":"Ben Jonson Journal","volume":"40 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83486111","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay explores the significance of setting Volpone (1606) in Venice while England was recovering from a major plague epidemic in 1603. The play directly references Venice's long history with the plague as a way of indirectly referencing England's struggle with plague in and around the time of the play's production. Doing so enables the play to address from a safer distance uncomfortable realities about plague time in a way that benefits Ben Jonson's English audience. The play alludes to plague through its references to plague-time beliefs and practices such as omens, medicine, and quarantine, and associating several characters with carrion birds would have been an unmistakable reference to plague for Jonson's audience. The theme of reproduction anxiety that runs throughout the play is also a recognizable characteristic of plague literature. Volpone's association with disease, carrion birds, monstrous births, and other plague omens and signs allows the anxiety produced by these elements to be purged at the end of the play when Volpone is cast out.
{"title":"“The dwarf, the fool, the eunuch are all his”: Venice, Carnival, Reproduction and Plague in Volpone","authors":"Matthew M. Thiele","doi":"10.3366/bjj.2021.0311","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/bjj.2021.0311","url":null,"abstract":"This essay explores the significance of setting Volpone (1606) in Venice while England was recovering from a major plague epidemic in 1603. The play directly references Venice's long history with the plague as a way of indirectly referencing England's struggle with plague in and around the time of the play's production. Doing so enables the play to address from a safer distance uncomfortable realities about plague time in a way that benefits Ben Jonson's English audience. The play alludes to plague through its references to plague-time beliefs and practices such as omens, medicine, and quarantine, and associating several characters with carrion birds would have been an unmistakable reference to plague for Jonson's audience. The theme of reproduction anxiety that runs throughout the play is also a recognizable characteristic of plague literature. Volpone's association with disease, carrion birds, monstrous births, and other plague omens and signs allows the anxiety produced by these elements to be purged at the end of the play when Volpone is cast out.","PeriodicalId":40862,"journal":{"name":"Ben Jonson Journal","volume":"93 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77069013","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay challenges the assertions of Patrick Philips and others that plague is not a meaningful subtext in The Alchemist by demonstrating various ways that the play can be interpreted as a satire of plague-time beliefs and practices. For example, Jonson's audiences would have recognized in the character Abel Drugger a satire of early modern medical care common in prose plague tracts. I also attempt to explain why Jonson would go to such lengths to conceal plague allusions in a play set in plague time. Ian Munro and Ernest Gilman have suggested that the plague was simply too traumatic to directly represent onstage, but it is also possible that Jonson was trying not to attract any official trouble after his experience with Eastward Ho, as David Riggs suggests. Jonson had to be careful not to directly attack the King, the Church of England, or the Royal College of Physicians, all of which had a stake in responding to plague.
{"title":"“It is become a cage of unclean birds”: The Presence of Plague in The Alchemist","authors":"Matthew M. Thiele","doi":"10.3366/bjj.2021.0312","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/bjj.2021.0312","url":null,"abstract":"This essay challenges the assertions of Patrick Philips and others that plague is not a meaningful subtext in The Alchemist by demonstrating various ways that the play can be interpreted as a satire of plague-time beliefs and practices. For example, Jonson's audiences would have recognized in the character Abel Drugger a satire of early modern medical care common in prose plague tracts. I also attempt to explain why Jonson would go to such lengths to conceal plague allusions in a play set in plague time. Ian Munro and Ernest Gilman have suggested that the plague was simply too traumatic to directly represent onstage, but it is also possible that Jonson was trying not to attract any official trouble after his experience with Eastward Ho, as David Riggs suggests. Jonson had to be careful not to directly attack the King, the Church of England, or the Royal College of Physicians, all of which had a stake in responding to plague.","PeriodicalId":40862,"journal":{"name":"Ben Jonson Journal","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84717578","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
I will argue that the “middle comedies” of Ben Jonson, specifically The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair, address concerns that are not only social and economic but also political in nature. Or, to put it another way, the economic issues that these plays address are also political. As the economic landscape shapes social life in city comedy, so too do political concerns exert an important, if perhaps less apparent, influence over the plays that I will examine here. In The Alchemist, Sir Epicure Mammon fantasizes about relocating to a “free state” so that he may enjoy the pleasures that his newly acquired capital can afford him without drawing the ire and suspicion of the monarch (4.1.156). In Bartholomew Fair, Justice Overdo proclaims that he acts on behalf of king and commonwealth when trying to regulate the capitalistic chaos of the local fair. The prevalence of the language of politics (of commonwealth, monarchy, republicanism) in these plays suggests that their economic concerns have significant political implications. Each play offers a resolution to this conflict in accordance with dramatic propriety, what is appropriate given the circumstances. The justice that is done and the order that is achieved at the conclusion of each play is not carried out by politicians or magistrates but rather shaped by the market society in which the characters operate. The characters who try to regulate the market or expose its corruption fail miserably, while the characters who triumph at the end of each play work the system and manipulate the circumstances to their advantage.
{"title":"Mammon in the Market; or, How Ben Jonson Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Capitalism","authors":"B. Krumm","doi":"10.3366/BJJ.2021.0299","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/BJJ.2021.0299","url":null,"abstract":"I will argue that the “middle comedies” of Ben Jonson, specifically The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair, address concerns that are not only social and economic but also political in nature. Or, to put it another way, the economic issues that these plays address are also political. As the economic landscape shapes social life in city comedy, so too do political concerns exert an important, if perhaps less apparent, influence over the plays that I will examine here. In The Alchemist, Sir Epicure Mammon fantasizes about relocating to a “free state” so that he may enjoy the pleasures that his newly acquired capital can afford him without drawing the ire and suspicion of the monarch (4.1.156). In Bartholomew Fair, Justice Overdo proclaims that he acts on behalf of king and commonwealth when trying to regulate the capitalistic chaos of the local fair. The prevalence of the language of politics (of commonwealth, monarchy, republicanism) in these plays suggests that their economic concerns have significant political implications. Each play offers a resolution to this conflict in accordance with dramatic propriety, what is appropriate given the circumstances. The justice that is done and the order that is achieved at the conclusion of each play is not carried out by politicians or magistrates but rather shaped by the market society in which the characters operate. The characters who try to regulate the market or expose its corruption fail miserably, while the characters who triumph at the end of each play work the system and manipulate the circumstances to their advantage.","PeriodicalId":40862,"journal":{"name":"Ben Jonson Journal","volume":"60 1","pages":"37-65"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85533074","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Since its 1605 quarto publication, Ben Jonson's Sejanus has inspired much critical commentary. Although criticism credits Jonson with a compositorial role in the Quarto's production, critics continue to assess its marginalia as a defense against application, finding in Sejanus, the play, evidence of parallelography, whether it be ideologically instructional, in the mirror of princes tradition, or threateningly Republican. More benignly, they view the Quarto's bountiful margins as a scholarly pretext, a manifestation and awkward defense of Jonson's unorthodox education. Generically, they view the play as a Juvenalian satire, an imperfect tragedy, or a Machiavellian history and, sometimes, all three. As a satire, it suffers charges of application, of pointing too directly to contemporary events. As a tragedy, it fails to supply the necessary tragic error that leads to the hero's fall, not to mention the necessary hero. As a history, it takes too many liberties with the truth of argument. Editors have pared down the marginalia, setting them as footnotes or endnotes; others have relegated them to appendices; still others have abandoned then entirely. Neither critics nor editors have weighed Jonson's marginalia beside the dramatic text they inform. Reading the Quarto Sejanus as a composite of margins and center, within its bibliographical, theoretical, and literary contexts, shows it to be a learned study in emergent theories of historiography. In its innovations, the composite redresses the inefficacies of contemporary historians and editors.
{"title":"So Exact His Text: Reading into the Margins of Sejanus","authors":"B. MacLeod","doi":"10.3366/BJJ.2021.0298","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/BJJ.2021.0298","url":null,"abstract":"Since its 1605 quarto publication, Ben Jonson's Sejanus has inspired much critical commentary. Although criticism credits Jonson with a compositorial role in the Quarto's production, critics continue to assess its marginalia as a defense against application, finding in Sejanus, the play, evidence of parallelography, whether it be ideologically instructional, in the mirror of princes tradition, or threateningly Republican. More benignly, they view the Quarto's bountiful margins as a scholarly pretext, a manifestation and awkward defense of Jonson's unorthodox education. Generically, they view the play as a Juvenalian satire, an imperfect tragedy, or a Machiavellian history and, sometimes, all three. As a satire, it suffers charges of application, of pointing too directly to contemporary events. As a tragedy, it fails to supply the necessary tragic error that leads to the hero's fall, not to mention the necessary hero. As a history, it takes too many liberties with the truth of argument. Editors have pared down the marginalia, setting them as footnotes or endnotes; others have relegated them to appendices; still others have abandoned then entirely. Neither critics nor editors have weighed Jonson's marginalia beside the dramatic text they inform. Reading the Quarto Sejanus as a composite of margins and center, within its bibliographical, theoretical, and literary contexts, shows it to be a learned study in emergent theories of historiography. In its innovations, the composite redresses the inefficacies of contemporary historians and editors.","PeriodicalId":40862,"journal":{"name":"Ben Jonson Journal","volume":"25 1","pages":"1-36"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84509209","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"2019 Scholarship on Ben Jonson: An Overview","authors":"J. Ahn","doi":"10.3366/BJJ.2021.0302","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/BJJ.2021.0302","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40862,"journal":{"name":"Ben Jonson Journal","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85156504","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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