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.
{"title":"“Red silence”: Ben Jonson and the Breath of Sound","authors":"Laura Wright","doi":"10.3366/BJJ.2019.0238","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/BJJ.2019.0238","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":40862,"journal":{"name":"Ben Jonson Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87501989","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 discusses labor in the poetry of Ben Jonson and engages some notable recent critical assessments of Jonson's labor as a concept determined by material production. Contemporaries, such as John Donne, often drew attention to Jonson's “labor” as he himself does in a Latin phrase on the frontispiece of the 1616 folio. What did he mean by it? The characteristic integration of labor that Jonson exhibits in both his poetic practice and persona was tied to a foundational idea that he received and developed from translation of Horace's “Art of Poetry.” Rather than determined by market forces and the like, the multiplex meanings and contexts that Jonson can be seen to associate with labor suggests that it was a concept he received from classical and medieval writers who emphasized that both the material and spiritual ends of poetry were equally important. Poets such as Milton, Robert Southwell, and Herbert also display similar ideas tied to labor. A discussion of Hercules' Labors in Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, in which Jonson draws attention to the relationship between virtue, labor, and happiness, as well as demonstrates his familiarity with the association medieval writers made between labor and the labyrinth, concludes the essay.
{"title":"Laborious Ben Jonson","authors":"Steven Hrdlicka","doi":"10.3366/BJJ.2019.0237","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/BJJ.2019.0237","url":null,"abstract":"This essay discusses labor in the poetry of Ben Jonson and engages some notable recent critical assessments of Jonson's labor as a concept determined by material production. Contemporaries, such as John Donne, often drew attention to Jonson's “labor” as he himself does in a Latin phrase on the frontispiece of the 1616 folio. What did he mean by it? The characteristic integration of labor that Jonson exhibits in both his poetic practice and persona was tied to a foundational idea that he received and developed from translation of Horace's “Art of Poetry.” Rather than determined by market forces and the like, the multiplex meanings and contexts that Jonson can be seen to associate with labor suggests that it was a concept he received from classical and medieval writers who emphasized that both the material and spiritual ends of poetry were equally important. Poets such as Milton, Robert Southwell, and Herbert also display similar ideas tied to labor. A discussion of Hercules' Labors in Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, in which Jonson draws attention to the relationship between virtue, labor, and happiness, as well as demonstrates his familiarity with the association medieval writers made between labor and the labyrinth, concludes the essay.","PeriodicalId":40862,"journal":{"name":"Ben Jonson Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87628852","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}
To fulfill the ghost's injunction that he seek out his father's killer, Hamlet must learn not to expect that the opportune moment for revenge will be determined by himself within the daily sequence of chronological time or chronos. Instead, he must learn to cooperate with a divine intention that will operate through him at a time which it determines to be most advantageous. This sense of time is termed kairos or “the right time.” The play becomes a spiritual Bildungsroman in which Hamlet learns through trial and error of an inexorable kairos for which he is indispensable but not ultimately responsible. After his return from England, Hamlet's outlook has changed from being “splenetive and rash” to an attitude of alert but patient expectancy. It is not for him to pinpoint the moment of kairos, far less for him to contrive its occurrence according to his own antic plan, but to await his role in it; thus, “the readiness is all.” The coincidences of the last act are both an effective dramatic catastrophe and evidence of a larger pattern of design. Hamlet's fifth-act anagnorisis—his awareness of the reality of his situation—is not only his knowledge of a divine purposiveness, but his immediate participation in a process of providence which works through human chronos to achieve its own kairos.
{"title":"Hamlet and the Kairos","authors":"C. Baker","doi":"10.3366/BJJ.2019.0239","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/BJJ.2019.0239","url":null,"abstract":"To fulfill the ghost's injunction that he seek out his father's killer, Hamlet must learn not to expect that the opportune moment for revenge will be determined by himself within the daily sequence of chronological time or chronos. Instead, he must learn to cooperate with a divine intention that will operate through him at a time which it determines to be most advantageous. This sense of time is termed kairos or “the right time.” The play becomes a spiritual Bildungsroman in which Hamlet learns through trial and error of an inexorable kairos for which he is indispensable but not ultimately responsible. After his return from England, Hamlet's outlook has changed from being “splenetive and rash” to an attitude of alert but patient expectancy. It is not for him to pinpoint the moment of kairos, far less for him to contrive its occurrence according to his own antic plan, but to await his role in it; thus, “the readiness is all.” The coincidences of the last act are both an effective dramatic catastrophe and evidence of a larger pattern of design. Hamlet's fifth-act anagnorisis—his awareness of the reality of his situation—is not only his knowledge of a divine purposiveness, but his immediate participation in a process of providence which works through human chronos to achieve its own kairos.","PeriodicalId":40862,"journal":{"name":"Ben Jonson Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82627285","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}
An analysis is undertaken of the comic techniques employed in Shakespeare's humorous portrayal of a private language lesson in The Merry Wives of Windsor. This reveals that this Folio-only Scene (4.1) teases and amuses by means of subtly and rhythmically combining several differing comedic modes and tactics. This combination makes its comic construction exceedingly complex. A private language lesson is also portrayed in Scene 3.4 of Shakespeare's King Henry V. There, just as in The Merry Wives 4.1, audiences meet incongruous misidentifications of only-apparently ribald bi-lingual cognates. The Henry V tutorial scene is however much less complex in its dramatic and comedic construction than the Merry Wives scene. It is next proposed that when he later revisited similar themes Shakespeare typically improved on his former handling of those materials. Combining that with the contrasting complexity of treatment in two similar tutorial scenes suggests that at least Scene 4.1 in The Merry Wives was composed later than Henry V, which would be in 1600 or later. This “corroborates” the proposals in other independent arguments to the same effect. There is finally a brief discussion of applications of the principle whereby probabilistic inductive arguments are bolstered when there is a “consilience” between independent lines of enquiry.
{"title":"The “rule of three” and the “callback”: How Comic Form in The Merry Wives of Windsor 4.1 May Help To Date Its Folio Text","authors":"B. Sokol","doi":"10.3366/BJJ.2019.0241","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/BJJ.2019.0241","url":null,"abstract":"An analysis is undertaken of the comic techniques employed in Shakespeare's humorous portrayal of a private language lesson in The Merry Wives of Windsor. This reveals that this Folio-only Scene (4.1) teases and amuses by means of subtly and rhythmically combining several differing comedic modes and tactics. This combination makes its comic construction exceedingly complex. A private language lesson is also portrayed in Scene 3.4 of Shakespeare's King Henry V. There, just as in The Merry Wives 4.1, audiences meet incongruous misidentifications of only-apparently ribald bi-lingual cognates. The Henry V tutorial scene is however much less complex in its dramatic and comedic construction than the Merry Wives scene. It is next proposed that when he later revisited similar themes Shakespeare typically improved on his former handling of those materials. Combining that with the contrasting complexity of treatment in two similar tutorial scenes suggests that at least Scene 4.1 in The Merry Wives was composed later than Henry V, which would be in 1600 or later. This “corroborates” the proposals in other independent arguments to the same effect. There is finally a brief discussion of applications of the principle whereby probabilistic inductive arguments are bolstered when there is a “consilience” between independent lines of enquiry.","PeriodicalId":40862,"journal":{"name":"Ben Jonson Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85272639","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":"A Force of Stillness: The Rhetoric of Stasis in Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece","authors":"Melissa Hudler","doi":"10.3366/BJJ.2019.0244","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/BJJ.2019.0244","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40862,"journal":{"name":"Ben Jonson Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85891034","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}
The critical field of The Masque of Blackness often annotates Queen Anne and her ladies’ blackface performance with a courtier's eye-witness comment that the “lean cheeked moors” were “loathsome” and “ugly.” Yet Ben Jonson's performance text, when read beside Dudley Carleton's correspondences, resists the undue influence of the aristocrat's anecdotal disparagement. This project refuses to take Carleton's denigration as fact. Instead, it investigates the masque's representation of Niger's daughters to develop the affective experience of pleasurable mixing across racial identities and to show how the opulence, innovation, and beauty afforded by blackface are the means to underwrite arguments of political authority. Rather than a deviation from the performance's magnificent appeal, racial impersonation is constitutive of the masque's demonstration of beauty and invention of pleasure. As such, the allegory of King James I's power hinges on a fiction of idealized incorporation that is ideologically powerful precisely because it is primarily an aestheticized, affective experience. Beyond the ostensible trope of racial transformation, Jonson presents the pleasure of mixing across racial identities as the precondition for Britannia's absorption of migrant bodies. Blackness is a visual reminder of an indelible difference that can be absorbed, incorporated, indeed “salved,” by the monarch's faculties of conversion. The affective experience afforded by blackface is thus an argument for the sovereign's power of unification, underwriting what was a largely unfulfilled and controversial political agenda: the coalition of realms under the aegis of Great Britain.
{"title":"Race and Affect: Pleasurable Mixing in Ben Jonson's The Masque of Blackness","authors":"Carol Mejia Laperle","doi":"10.3366/BJJ.2019.0236","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/BJJ.2019.0236","url":null,"abstract":"The critical field of The Masque of Blackness often annotates Queen Anne and her ladies’ blackface performance with a courtier's eye-witness comment that the “lean cheeked moors” were “loathsome” and “ugly.” Yet Ben Jonson's performance text, when read beside Dudley Carleton's correspondences, resists the undue influence of the aristocrat's anecdotal disparagement. This project refuses to take Carleton's denigration as fact. Instead, it investigates the masque's representation of Niger's daughters to develop the affective experience of pleasurable mixing across racial identities and to show how the opulence, innovation, and beauty afforded by blackface are the means to underwrite arguments of political authority. Rather than a deviation from the performance's magnificent appeal, racial impersonation is constitutive of the masque's demonstration of beauty and invention of pleasure. As such, the allegory of King James I's power hinges on a fiction of idealized incorporation that is ideologically powerful precisely because it is primarily an aestheticized, affective experience. Beyond the ostensible trope of racial transformation, Jonson presents the pleasure of mixing across racial identities as the precondition for Britannia's absorption of migrant bodies. Blackness is a visual reminder of an indelible difference that can be absorbed, incorporated, indeed “salved,” by the monarch's faculties of conversion. The affective experience afforded by blackface is thus an argument for the sovereign's power of unification, underwriting what was a largely unfulfilled and controversial political agenda: the coalition of realms under the aegis of Great Britain.","PeriodicalId":40862,"journal":{"name":"Ben Jonson Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77458606","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 argues that John Webster's 1611 drama, The Duchess of Malfi, attests to the power of death to shape selfhood and demonstrates the influence of textual monuments on the living. As Webster notes, posthumous fame is not based solely on its ability to console, but rather on “the dignity of a great example,” which is shown at the end of the play through the Duchess’ continuing influence on other characters. Reactions to both her dead body and the edifice constructed in her honor highlight the transformative power of the Duchess’ death and monumentalization. Specifically, The Duchess of Malfi offers audiences a gendered type of memorial, one based on the ability of a female character to posthumously influence the actions of others.
{"title":"“Beyond Death”: John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi and Posthumous Influence","authors":"Jennifer Lillian Lodine-Chaffey","doi":"10.3366/BJJ.2019.0242","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/BJJ.2019.0242","url":null,"abstract":"This essay argues that John Webster's 1611 drama, The Duchess of Malfi, attests to the power of death to shape selfhood and demonstrates the influence of textual monuments on the living. As Webster notes, posthumous fame is not based solely on its ability to console, but rather on “the dignity of a great example,” which is shown at the end of the play through the Duchess’ continuing influence on other characters. Reactions to both her dead body and the edifice constructed in her honor highlight the transformative power of the Duchess’ death and monumentalization. Specifically, The Duchess of Malfi offers audiences a gendered type of memorial, one based on the ability of a female character to posthumously influence the actions of others.","PeriodicalId":40862,"journal":{"name":"Ben Jonson Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3366/BJJ.2019.0242","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72490096","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}
Written in the midst of the eight-year Jacobean Peace (1604–1612), Coriolanus turns the physiology of war and peace inside out. “No body can be healthfull without Exercise, neither Naturall Body, nor Politique,” Francis Bacon had written. “And certainly, to a Kingdome or Estate, a Just and Honourable Warre, is the true Exercise… . [A] Forraine Warre, is like the Heat of Exercise, and serveth to keepe the Body in Health: For in a Slothful Peace, both Courages will effeminate, and Manners Corrupt.” Bacon's claims were based upon Galenic medical theory that asserts that bloodletting purges the human body of debilitating toxins so that the four humours achieve a balance insuring both physical and psychological health. Shakespeare shows Coriolanus, repeatedly likened to a disease or toxin, disturbing the public body's peace. The playwright transforms the standard physiology of war and peace when Coriolanus—in keeping with the tail-end of his name—is vented through the Roman equivalent of London's Dungate. Then Romans enjoy a harmonious peace (4.6.2–9). When he returns to Rome leading a Volscian army, Coriolanus, advised by Volumnia, negotiates a peace that, while costing him his life, appears to persist at play's end when a calm Aufidius, all passion spent, never utters hostile words concerning Rome. The social importance of peace in other late plays—Antony and Cleopatra, Cymbeline, and The Life of Henry VIII—agrees with Shakespeare's revaluation of war and peace in Coriolanus.
{"title":"The Physiology of Peace and Coriolanus","authors":"Maurice Hunt","doi":"10.3366/BJJ.2019.0240","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/BJJ.2019.0240","url":null,"abstract":"Written in the midst of the eight-year Jacobean Peace (1604–1612), Coriolanus turns the physiology of war and peace inside out. “No body can be healthfull without Exercise, neither Naturall Body, nor Politique,” Francis Bacon had written. “And certainly, to a Kingdome or Estate, a Just and Honourable Warre, is the true Exercise… . [A] Forraine Warre, is like the Heat of Exercise, and serveth to keepe the Body in Health: For in a Slothful Peace, both Courages will effeminate, and Manners Corrupt.” Bacon's claims were based upon Galenic medical theory that asserts that bloodletting purges the human body of debilitating toxins so that the four humours achieve a balance insuring both physical and psychological health. Shakespeare shows Coriolanus, repeatedly likened to a disease or toxin, disturbing the public body's peace. The playwright transforms the standard physiology of war and peace when Coriolanus—in keeping with the tail-end of his name—is vented through the Roman equivalent of London's Dungate. Then Romans enjoy a harmonious peace (4.6.2–9). When he returns to Rome leading a Volscian army, Coriolanus, advised by Volumnia, negotiates a peace that, while costing him his life, appears to persist at play's end when a calm Aufidius, all passion spent, never utters hostile words concerning Rome. The social importance of peace in other late plays—Antony and Cleopatra, Cymbeline, and The Life of Henry VIII—agrees with Shakespeare's revaluation of war and peace in Coriolanus.","PeriodicalId":40862,"journal":{"name":"Ben Jonson Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76158422","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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