Continuity and Change on the English Popular Stage

he Staple of News, Ben Jonson’s indictment of the seventeenth-century newspaper industry, is surely due for revival now that the press is under fire frommore than one direction. The play is designed, Jonson explains “To the Readers,” to show the public the folly of its own hunger for sensational stories—“and no syllable of truth in them” (line 13). But, however pertinent the theme, in a faithful production something would stand to be lost for twenty-firstcentury audiences, since The Staple of News was itself a revival of sorts. The play reinvents an old genre, the moral interlude, that had flourished, evidently within living memory, on the early modern stage. What continuities and what changes went into the making of a new play that alluded so confidently to the past?