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21	Positive representation of Inns of Court lawyers in Jacobean city comedy Westlake, David January 2010 (has links) This thesis examines representations of lawyers and law in examples of Jacobean city comedy, taking into account certain contemporary developments in the legal profession and the law in England. The period covered is 1598-1616. The thesis questions the conventional interpretation of city comedy as hostile to the legal profession. It suggests the topic is more complex than has been assumed, arguing that city comedy makes direct and indirect positive representation of Inns of Court lawyers, who are to be distinguished from attorneys (newly segregated in the Inns of Chancery), amateur quasi-lawyers, and university-educated civil lawyers. It is proposed that city comedy represents Inns of Court lawyers positively in two ways. Firstly, by means of legal content: representations of developments in the profession and the law demonstrate a wish to connect with the young lawyers and students of the Inns of Court, and reflect a contemporary drive by them for increased organization and regulation. Secondly, by means of literary form: ostensibly pejorative representations need not be taken at face value; instead, they may be found to be ironic. The main proposed contributions to knowledge are: that Inns of Court lawyers were a favoured part of the target audience of the private playhouses, making it questionable that they would be represented negatively in city comedy; that lawyers as represented in city comedy are not a single or a simple category; that representation of lawyers is inflected by the various forms and impulses of city comedy; and that city comedy incorporates some reflection of the increasing professionalization of legal practice in the period. 820.9003
22	The Influence of Ben Jonson on the Poetry of Yeats Chapman, Wayne Kenneth 25 May 1977 (has links) What this thesis attempts to do is to render as full a picture as possible of Yeats's interest in Ben Jonson, using to the fullest advantage the many hints that come from Yeats and secondary oriticism. Specifically, the focus of this paper is on the process by which Yeats was able, like Eliot, Pound and others, to found a tough, new poetic style with reference to this seventeenth-century period of Jonson. Yeats's reading of "Jonson and the others," which took place at the turn of this century, triggered a whole series of discoveries by Yeats which anticipated the aesthetic beliefs of his famous friends in the modern movement, whose later influence upon his poetry generally fortified poetic principles which had already found their way into his work. His early plays for the Abbey Theatre, for instance, demonstrate his call for a return to the "roots" of poet ic power that Synge associated with the best plays of Jonson and Moliere, and his poetry of that period demonstrates his first attempt at finding the "passionate syntax" of Jonson, Donne, Shakespeare and others. Yeats W. B. (William Butler) 1865-1939 -- Poetic works Ben Jonson 1573?-1637 Criticism and interpretation English Language and Literature
23	Theatricality, Cheap Print, and the Historiography of the English Civil War Choi, Jaemin 2010 May 1900 (has links) Until recent years, the historical moment of Charles II's return to England was universally accepted as a clear marker of the end of "the Cavalier winter," a welcome victory over theater-hating Puritans. To verify this historical view, literary historians have often glorified the role of King Charles II in the history of the "revival" of drama during the Restoration, whereas they tend to consider the Long Parliament's 1642 closing of the theaters as a decisive manifestation of Puritans' antitheatricalism. This historical perspective based upon what is often known as "the rupture model" has obscured the vibrant development of dramatic forms during the English civil wars and the ways in which the revolutionary energy exploded during this period continued to influence in the Restoration the deployment of dramatic forms and imagination across various social groups. By focusing on the generic development of drama and theatricality during the English civil wars, my dissertation challenges the conventional historiography of the English civil war literature, which has been overemphasizing the discontinuity between the English civil war and the periods before and after it. The first chapter shows how the theatrical energy displaced from traditional cultural domains energized an emerging cheap print market and contributed to the invention of new dramatic forms such as playlets and newsbooks. The second chapter questions the conventional association of Puritanism and antitheatricalism by rehistoricizing antitheatrical writers and their pamphlets and by highlighting the dramatic impulses at work in Puritan iconoclasm during the English civil wars. The final chapter offers the Restoration Milton as a case study to illustrate how the proposed historical perspective replacing "the rupture model" better explains not only the politics of Milton's Paradise Lost but also of Restoration drama. Paradise Lost Puritanism Theatricality Cheap Print Seventeenth Century English Literature Iconoclasm Restoration Drama English Civil War Abiezer Cooppe William Shakespeare Ben Jonson John Milton
24	Jonson's and Shakespeare's "Comedy of Affliction" Goossen, Jonathan 23 August 2011 (has links) This dissertation explores the relevance of recent studies of Aristotle’s comic theory to the central dramatists of early modern England, Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare. Applications of the Poetics to Renaissance English drama tend to treat Aristotle’s theory historically, as a set of concepts mediated to England by continental redactions. But these often conflated the Poetics’ focus on literary form with the Renaissance’s predominant interest in literature’s rhetorical effect, reducing Aristotle’s genuinely speculative theory to a series of often pedantic literary prescriptions. Recent scholarship has both undone these misinterpretations and developed the comic theory latent in the Poetics. Ironically, these studies make Jonson’s and Shakespeare’s comedy look much more Aristotelian than do Renaissance ones. So rather than taking the Poetics simply as a possible source for each dramatist, I read it primarily as a literary theory that, when reinvigorated by modern scholarship, can explain structures and effects arrived at practically by these dramatists. Three recent hypotheses are especially pertinent to Jonson and Shakespeare: that comic hoaxes aim to expose comic error, which is for Aristotle a deviation from the mean of virtue; that “righteous indignation” is the comic emotion equivalent to the “pity and fear” of tragedy; and that catharsis is a clarification, rather than purgation, of reason and emotion. In light of these, I offer detailed readings of four plays that demonstrate these authors’ comic range: from Jonson’s satirical Every Man Out of His Humour to the almost farcical Epicoene, and from Shakespeare’s romantic Much Ado About Nothing to the tragicomic Measure for Measure. These plays demonstrate a variety of ways in which catharsis, the end of drama, results directly from the comic hoax and involves both the audience’s and characters’ experience of indignation and their comprehension of its relationship to the emotions of envy and pity. In each case, Aristotle’s incisive but flexible theoretical framework enables an explanation of the emotional pain present in the these “comedies of affliction” and reveals remarkable similarities between dramatists usually described as direct opposites. Aristotle Aristotle's Poetics Shakespeare Much Ado About Nothing Measure for Measure Ben Jonson Every Man Out of His Humour Epicoene Comic Theory Catharsis Indignation Hoax Comic plot Classical literary theory Comedy
25	Networks of Social Debt in Early Modern Literature and Culture Criswell, Christopher C. 08 1900 (has links) This thesis argues that social debt profoundly transformed the environment in which literature was produced and experienced in the early modern period. In each chapter, I examine the various ways in which social debt affected Renaissance writers and the literature they produced. While considering the cultural changes regarding patronage, love, friendship, and debt, I will analyze the poetry and drama of Ben Jonson, Lady Mary Wroth, William Shakespeare, and Thomas Middleton. Each of these writers experiences social debt in a unique and revealing way. Ben Jonson's participation in networks of social debt via poetry allowed him to secure both a livelihood and a place in the Jacobean court through exchanges of poetry and patronage. The issue of social debt pervades both Wroth's life and her writing. Love and debt are intertwined in the actions of her father, the death of her husband, and the themes of her sonnets and pastoral tragicomedy. In Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596), Antonio and Bassanio’s friendship is tested by a burdensome interpersonal debt, which can only be alleviated by an outsider. This indicated the transition from honor-based credit system to an impersonal system of commercial exchange. Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One (1608) examines how those heavily in debt dealt with both the social and legal consequences of defaulting on loans. social debt Renaissance writers Shakespeare Thomas Middleton Ben Jonson Lady Mary Wroth Debt in literature.
26	'Piteous overthrows' : pity and identity in early modern English literature Johnson, Toria Anne January 2013 (has links) This thesis traces the use of pity in early modern English literature, highlighting in particular the ways in which the emotion prompted personal anxieties and threatened Burckhardtian notions of the self-contained, autonomous individual, even as it acted as a central, crucial component of personal identity. The first chapter considers pity in medieval drama, and ultimately argues that the institutional changes that took place during the Reformation ushered in a new era, in which people felt themselves to be subjected to interpersonal emotions – pity especially – in new, overwhelming, and difficult ways. The remaining three chapters examine how pity complicates questions of personal identity in Renaissance literature. Chapter Two discusses the masculine bid for pity in courtly lyric poetry, including Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella and Barnabe Barnes's Parthenophil and Parthenophe, and considers the undercurrents of vulnerability and violation that emerge in the wake of unanswered emotional appeals. This chapter also examines these themes in Spenser's The Faerie Queene and Sidney's Arcadia. Chapter Three also picks up the element of violation, extending it to the pitiable presentation of sexual aggression in Lucrece narratives. Chapter Four explores the recognition of suffering and vulnerability across species boundaries, highlighting the use of pity to define humanity against the rest of the animal kingdom, and focusing in particular on how these questions are handled by Shakespeare in The Tempest and Ben Jonson, in Bartholomew Fair. This work represents the first extended study of pity in early modern English literature, and suggests that the emotion had a constitutive role in personal subjectivity, in addition to structuring various forms of social relation. Ultimately, the thesis contends that the early modern English interest in pity indicates a central worry about vulnerability, but also, crucially, a belief in the necessity of recognising shared, human weakness. 820.9
27	The King, the Prince, and Shakespeare: Competing for Control of the Stuart Court Stage Gabriel R Lonsberry (9039344) 29 June 2020 (has links) <div>When, each holiday season, William Shakespeare’s newest plays were presented for King James I of England and his court, they shared the stage with propagandistic performances and ceremonies intended to glorify the monarch and legitimate his political ideals. Between 1608 and 1613, however, the King’s son, Prince Henry Frederick, sought to use the court stage to advance his own, oppositional ideology. By examining the entertainments through which James and Henry openly competed to control this crucial mythmaking mechanism, the present investigation recreates the increasingly unstable conditions surrounding and transforming each of Shakespeare’s last plays as they were first performed at court. I demonstrate that, once read in their original courtly contexts, these plays speak directly to each stage of that escalating rivalry and interrogate the power of ceremonial display, the relationship between fiction and statecraft, and the destabilization of monarchically imposed meaning, just as they would have then.<br></div> Literature History Drama British and Irish Literature Other European Literature British History shakespeare king james henry frederick coriolanus pericles cymbeline the tempest the winter's tale henry viii two noble kinsmen ben jonson masque inigo jones oberon masque of queens tethys' festival barriers king's men love restored beaumont john fletcher Chivalry Protestantism george chapman thomas campion memorable masque masque of truth the lord's masque
28	Cooks, cooking, and food on the early modern stage Templeman, Sally Jane January 2013 (has links) This project aims to take the investigation of food in early modern drama, in itself a relatively new field, in a new direction. It does this by shifting the critical focus from food-based metaphors to food-based properties and food-producing cook characters. This shift reveals exciting, unexpected, and hitherto unnoticed contexts. In The Taming of the Shrew and Titus Andronicus, which were written during William Shakespeare’s inn-yard playhouse period, the playwright exploits these exceptionally aromatic venues in order to trigger site-specific responses to food-based scenes in these plays. Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair brings fair-appropriate gingerbread properties onstage. When we look beneath the surface of this food effect to its bread and wine ingredients, however, it reveals a subtext that satirizes the theory of transubstantiation. Jonson expands on this theme by using Ursula’s cooking fire (a property staged in Jonson’s representation of Smithfield’s Bartholomew Fair) to engage with the prison narrative of Anne Askew, who was burned to death in front of Bartholomew Priory on the historic Smithfield for denying the doctrine of transubstantiation. This thesis also investigates water, which, for early moderns, was a complex and quasi-mystical liquid: it was a primary element, it washed sin from the world during the Great Flood, it was a marker of status, it was a medicine, and it was a cookery ingredient. Christopher Marlowe not only uses dirty water to humiliate his doomed monarch in Edward II, but he also uses it to apportion blame to the king for his own downfall. In Timon of Athens, Shakespeare draws on the theory of the elements to cast Timon as a man of water, who, Jesus-like, breaks up and divides (or splashes around) his body at his “last” supper. Fully-fledged cook characters were a relative rarity on the early modern stage. This project looks at two exceptions: Furnace in Philip Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts and the unnamed master cook in John Fletcher’s The Tragedy of Rollo, Duke of Normandy. Both playwrights use their respective gastronomic geniuses to demonstrate the danger that lower-order expertise poses to the upper classes when society is in flux. Finally, this project demonstrates that a link existed between ornate domestic food effects and alchemy. It shows how Philip Massinger’s The Great Duke of Florence and Thomas Middleton’s Women, Beware Women use food properties associated with alchemy to satirize notions of perfection in their play-worlds. 822.009
29	The Pleiadic Age of Stuart Poesie: Restoration Uranography, Dryden's Judicial Astrology, and the Fate of Anne Killigrew Brown, Morgan Alexander 30 April 2010 (has links) The following Thesis is a survey of seventeenth-century uranography, with specific focus on the use of the Pleiades and Charles's Wain by English poets and pageant writers as astrological ciphers for the Stuart dynasty (1603-1649; 1660-1688). I then use that survey to address the problem of irony in John Dryden's 1685 Pindaric elegy, "To the Pious Memory of Mrs. Anne Killigrew," since the longstanding notion of what the Pleiades signify in Dryden's ode is problematic from an astronomical and astrological perspective. In his elegiac ode, Dryden translates a young female artist to the Pleiades to actuate her apotheosis, not for the sake of mere fulsome hypberbole, but in such a way that Anne (b. 1660-d. 1685) signifies for the reign of Charles II (1660-1685) in her Pleiadic catasterism. The political underpinnings of Killigrew's apotheosis reduce the probability that Dryden's hyperbole reserves pejorative ironic potential. Hevelius Restoration prodigies Restoration prodigy birth star Pleiads Pleiades Tycho Brahe Restoration Anne Killigrew Ursa Major Charles's Wain judicial astrology Dryden Charls his wain William Bradford Gardner Edward Matthew irony Arcturus Laura Brown Howard Weinbrot Pindar uranography William Lilly Charles I Charles II uranology septentrional Polaris Ben Jonson Virgil Taygete Electra Astronomica Hyginus Fasti Ovid coronation James I vernal equinox septem triones seven stars 1660 star waine Ursa Minor Flamsteed Halley David Vieth English Language and Literature

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