Ben Jonson and the Art of Secrecy

Ben Jonson and the Art of Secrecy PDF Author: William W. E. Slights
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442656093
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Get Book Here

Book Description
Secrets accomplish their cultural work by distinguishing the knowable from the (at least temporarily) unknowable, those who know from those who don't. Within these distinctions resides an enormous power that Ben Jonson (1572-1637) both deplored and exploited in his art of making plays. Conspiracies and intrigues are the driving force of Jonson's dramatic universe. Focusing on Sejanus, His Fall; Volpone, or the Fox; Epicoene, or the Silent Woman; The Alchemist; Catiline, His Conspiracy, and Bartholomew Fair, William Slights places Jonson within the context of the secrecy- ridden culture of the court of King James I and provides illuminating readings of his best-known plays. Slights draws on the sociology of secrecy, the history of censorship, and the theory of hermeneutics to investigate secrecy, intrigue, and conspiracy as aspects of Jonsonian dramatic form, contemporary court/city/church politics, and textual interpretation. He argues that the tension between concealment and revelation in the plays affords a model for the poise that sustained Jonson in the intricately linked worlds of royal court and commercial theatre and that made him a pivotal figure in the cultural history of early modern England. Equally rejecting the position that Jonson was a renegade subverter of the arcana imperii and that he was a thorough-going court apologist, Slights finds that the playwright redraws the lines between private and public discourse for his own and subsequent ages.

Ben Jonson and the Art of Secrecy

Ben Jonson and the Art of Secrecy PDF Author: William W. E. Slights
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442656093
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Get Book Here

Book Description
Secrets accomplish their cultural work by distinguishing the knowable from the (at least temporarily) unknowable, those who know from those who don't. Within these distinctions resides an enormous power that Ben Jonson (1572-1637) both deplored and exploited in his art of making plays. Conspiracies and intrigues are the driving force of Jonson's dramatic universe. Focusing on Sejanus, His Fall; Volpone, or the Fox; Epicoene, or the Silent Woman; The Alchemist; Catiline, His Conspiracy, and Bartholomew Fair, William Slights places Jonson within the context of the secrecy- ridden culture of the court of King James I and provides illuminating readings of his best-known plays. Slights draws on the sociology of secrecy, the history of censorship, and the theory of hermeneutics to investigate secrecy, intrigue, and conspiracy as aspects of Jonsonian dramatic form, contemporary court/city/church politics, and textual interpretation. He argues that the tension between concealment and revelation in the plays affords a model for the poise that sustained Jonson in the intricately linked worlds of royal court and commercial theatre and that made him a pivotal figure in the cultural history of early modern England. Equally rejecting the position that Jonson was a renegade subverter of the arcana imperii and that he was a thorough-going court apologist, Slights finds that the playwright redraws the lines between private and public discourse for his own and subsequent ages.

Volpone

Volpone PDF Author: Ben Jonson
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719051821
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Get Book Here

Book Description
This Revels Student Edition, with a carefully modernized text, presents new material about Volpone 's debt to the popular Reynard beast epic and Italian commedia dell 'art and discusses its mockery of greed in relation to two Renaissance perversions of the myth of a Golden Age. Referring to famous productions, it pays particular attention to decisions that must be made whenever the play is performed.

The Shakespeare-secret

The Shakespeare-secret PDF Author: Edwin Bormann
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 376

Get Book Here

Book Description


Shakespeare Survey

Shakespeare Survey PDF Author: Allardyce Nicoll
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : English drama
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Get Book Here

Book Description
An annual survey of Shakespearian study and production.

Solon and Thespis

Solon and Thespis PDF Author: Dennis Kezar
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Get Book Here

Book Description
"In this attractively titled collection of essays on law and theater in the English Renaissance, Dennis Kezar has assembled an impressive array of talent to focus on the productive and yet vexed relationship of theater and the state. Plays 'tell lies' to their audiences: so argued Solon in his riposte to Thespis, to be followed in due course by Plato's attack on poetry in the Republic and all that Jonas Barish has studied under the rubric of The Antitheatrical Prejudice. This battleground here affords a rich opportunity for an exploration of 'an institutional antagonism over the tenuous distinction between theater's inconsequential fiction and the real world's socially consequential fact.' This volume is a truly valuable contribution to the growing interest in law and literature, here brought to bear on the great drama of Shakespeare, Jonson, Dekker, Marston, Chapman, and their contemporaries." --David Bevington, Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities, University of Chicago "The diversity of topics explored in this excellent collection makes it a valuable addition to the burgeoning field of early modern law, theater, and literature studies. The essays included here touch on a wide range of material--from Dekker to Shakespeare to Chapman and Bacon; and in doing so, they explore the tensions between Solon and Thespis in such a way as to make the work of analyzing the relationship between literature and the law seem not only fruitful, but in fact essential to a deeper understanding of both." --Jeremy Lopez, University of Toronto This volume contains contributions by literary critics and historians who demonstrate that theater and law were not simply relevant to each other in the early modern period; they explore the physical spaces in which early modern law and drama were performed, the social and imaginative practices that energized such spaces, and the rhetorical patterns that make the two institutions far less discrete and far more collaborative than has previously been recognized.

The Secret Drama of Shakespeare's Sonnets

The Secret Drama of Shakespeare's Sonnets PDF Author: Gerald Massey
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 512

Get Book Here

Book Description


Falstaff in Rebellion

Falstaff in Rebellion PDF Author: John William Postgate
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American drama
Languages : en
Pages : 60

Get Book Here

Book Description


University of Toronto Quarterly

University of Toronto Quarterly PDF Author: University of Toronto
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 734

Get Book Here

Book Description


Popular Lectures on Science and Art

Popular Lectures on Science and Art PDF Author: Dionysius Lardner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 644

Get Book Here

Book Description


Milton's Secrecy

Milton's Secrecy PDF Author: James Dougal Fleming
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351917501
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book Here

Book Description
Scientific modernity treats interpretation as a matter of discovery. Discovery, however, may not be all that matters about interpretation. In Milton's Secrecy, J. D. Fleming argues that the poetry and prose of John Milton (1608-1674) are about the presentation of a radically different hermeneutic model. This is based on openness within language, rather than on secrets within the world. Milton's representations of meaning are exoteric, not esoteric; recognitive, not inventive. Milton's Secrecy places its titular subject in opposition to the epistemology of modern natural science, and to the interpretative assumptions that science supports. At the same time, the book places Milton within early modern contexts of interpretation and knowledge. Drawing on Renaissance Neoplatonism, Tudor-Stuart ideology, and the Calvinist theory of conscience, Milton's Secrecy argues that the attempt to theorize interpretation without discovery is not unorthodox within early modern English culture. If anything, Milton's hostility to secrecy and discovery aligns him with his culture's ethical and hermeneutic ideal. Milton's Secrecy provides an historical framework for considering the theoretical validity of this ideal, by aligning it with the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer.