Ben Jonson and the Limits of Distributed Cognition

Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614) and The Alchemist (1610) depict characters attempting to establish and redefine themselves within and against the marketplace. In this chapter the network of goods for sale, and especially the street-sellers’ cries which were so characteristic of London life, and which are recorded in songs from the period, are seen as a cognitive ecology in which dramatic versions of distributed selfhood take particular shapes. Jonson’s plays anticipate and also comment on notions of extended, economic, and ‘soft’ selfhood like those explored by Andy Clark, Don Ross, and others.