Jonson, the Poetomachia, and the Reformation of Renaissance Satire

Jonson, the Poetomachia, and the Reformation of Renaissance Satire
Author: Jay Simons
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2018-05-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 042988897X

Does satire have the ability to effect social reform? If so, what satiric style is most effective in bringing about reform? This book explores how Renaissance poet and playwright Ben Jonson negotiated contemporary pressures to forge a satiric persona and style uniquely his own. These pressures were especially intense while Jonson was engaged in the Poetomachia, or Poets’ War (1598-1601), which pitted him against rival writers John Marston and Thomas Dekker. As a struggle between satiric styles, this conflict poses compelling questions about the nature and potential of satire during the Renaissance. In particular, this book explores how Jonson forged a moderate Horatian satiric style he championed as capable of effective social reform. As part of his distinctive model, Jonson turned to the metaphor of purging, in opposition to the metaphors of stinging, barking, biting, and whipping employed by his Juvenalian rivals. By integrating this conception of satire into his Horatian poetics, Jonson sought to avoid the pitfalls of the aggressive, violent style of his rivals while still effectively critiquing vice, upholding his model as a means for the reformation not only of society, but of satire itself.

Early Modern Intertextuality

Early Modern Intertextuality
Author: Sarah Carter
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 123
Release: 2021-04-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030689085

This book is an exploration of the viability of applying the post structuralist theory of intertextuality to early modern texts. It suggests that a return to a more theorised understanding of intertextuality, as that outlined by Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes, is more productive than an interpretation which merely identifies ‘source’ texts. The book analyses several key early modern texts through this lens, arguing that the period’s conscious focus on and prioritisation of the creative imitation of classical and contemporary European texts makes it a particularly fertile era for intertextual reading. This analysis includes discussion of early modern creative writers’ utilisation of classical mythology, allegory, folklore, parody, and satire, in works by William Shakespeare, Sir Francis Bacon, John Milton, George Peele, Thomas Lodge, Christopher Marlowe, Francis Beaumont, and Ben Jonson, and foregrounds how meaning is created and conveyed by the interplay of texts and the movement between narrative systems. This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students of early modern literature, as well as early modern scholars.

Ben Jonson and Posterity

Ben Jonson and Posterity
Author: Martin Butler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2020-10-08
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1108842682

Explores the construction of Jonson's multifaceted reputation and shifting legacy from his own time to the present.

Teaching Modern British and American Satire

Teaching Modern British and American Satire
Author: Evan R. Davis
Publisher: Modern Language Association
Total Pages: 413
Release: 2019-05-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1603293817

This volume addresses the teaching of satire written in English over the past three hundred years. For instructors covering current satire, it suggests ways to enrich students' understanding of voice, irony, and rhetoric and to explore the questions of how to define satire and how to determine what its ultimate aims are. For instructors teaching older satire, it demonstrates ways to help students gain knowledge of historical context, medium, and audience, while addressing more specific literary questions of technique and form. Readers will discover ways to introduce students to authors such as Swift and Twain, to techniques such as parody and verbal irony, and to the difficult subject of satire's offensiveness and elitism. This volume also helps teachers of a wide variety of courses, from composition to gateway courses and surveys, think about how to use modern satire in conceiving and structuring them.

Freedom and Censorship in Early Modern English Literature

Freedom and Censorship in Early Modern English Literature
Author: Sophie Chiari
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 381
Release: 2018-10-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0429684207

Broadening the notion of censorship, this volume explores the transformative role played by early modern censors in the fashioning of a distinct English literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In early modern England, the Privy Council, the Bishop of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Stationers’ Company, and the Master of the Revels each dealt with their own prerogatives and implemented different forms of censorship, with the result that authors penning both plays and satires had to juggle with various authorities and unequal degrees of freedom from one sector to the other. Text and press control thus did not give way to systematic intervention but to particular responses adapted to specific texts in a specific time. If the restrictions imposed by regulation practices are duly acknowledged in this edited collection, the different contributors are also keen to enhance the positive impact of censorship on early modern literature. The most difficult task consists in finding the exact moment when the balance tips in favour of creativity, and the zone where, in matters of artistic freedom, the disadvantages outweigh the benefits. This is what the twelve chapters of the volume proceed to do. Thanks to a wide variety of examples, they show that, in the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, regulations seldom prevented writers to make themselves heard, albeit through indirect channels. By contrast, in the 1630s, the increased supremacy of the Church seemed to tip the balance the other way.

Fortification and Its Discontents from Shakespeare to Milton

Fortification and Its Discontents from Shakespeare to Milton
Author: Adam N. McKeown
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2019-01-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351108492

Fortification and Its Discontents from Shakespeare to Milton gives new coherence to the literature of the early modern Atlantic world by placing it in the context of radical changes to urban space following the Italian War of 1494-1498. The new walled city that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on both sides of the Atlantic provided an outlet for a wide range of humanistic fascinations with urban design, composition, and community organization, but it also promoted centrality of control and subordinated the human environment to military functionality. Examining William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, John Winthrop, and John Milton, this volume shows how the literature of England and New England explores and challenges the new walled city as England struggled to define the sprawling metropolis of London, translate English urban spaces into Ireland and North America, and, later, survive a long civil war.

Mythologies of Internal Exile in Elizabethan Verse

Mythologies of Internal Exile in Elizabethan Verse
Author: A.D. Cousins
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2018-10-26
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0429686420

Writers of the English Renaissance, like their European contemporaries, frequently reflect on the phenomenon of exile—an experience that forces the individual to establish a new personal identity in an alien environment. Although there has been much commentary on this phenomenon as represented in English Renaissance literature, there has been nothing written at length about its counterpart, namely, internal exile: marginalization, or estrangement, within the homeland. This volume considers internal exile as a simultaneously twofold experience. It studies estrangement from one’s society and, correlatively, from one’s normative sense of self. In doing so, it focuses initially on the sonnet sequences by Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare (which is to say, the problematics of romance); then it examines the verse satires of Donne, Hall, and Marston (likewise, the problematics of anti-romance). This book argues that the authors of these major texts create mythologies—via the myths of (and accumulated mythographies about) Cupid, satyrs, and Proteus—through which to reflect on the doubleness of exile within one’s own community. These mythologies, at times accompanied by theologies, of alienation suggest that internal exile is a fluid and complex experience demanding multifarious reinterpretation of the incongruously expatriate self. The monograph thus establishes a new framework for understanding texts at once diverse yet central to the Elizabethan literary achievement.

The Early Modern Grotesque

The Early Modern Grotesque
Author: Liam Semler
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2018-10-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0429684789

The Early Modern Grotesque: English Sources and Documents 1500-1700 offers readers a large and fully annotated collection of primary source texts addressing the grotesque in the English Renaissance. The sources are arranged chronologically in 120 numbered items with accompanying explanatory Notes. Each Note provides clarification of difficult terms in the source text, locating it in the context of early modern English and Continental discourses on the grotesque. The Notes also direct readers to further English sources and relevant modern scholarship. This volume includes a detailed introduction surveying the vocabulary, form and meaning of the grotesque from its arrival as a word, concept and aesthetic in 16th century England to its early maturity in the 18th century. The Introduction, Items and Notes, complemented by illustrations and a comprehensive bibliography, provide an unprecedented view of the evolving complexity and diversity of the early modern English grotesque. While giving due credit to Wolfgang Kayser and Mikhail Bakhtin as masters of grotesque theory, this ground-breaking book aims to provoke new, evidence-based approaches to understanding the specifically English grotesque. The textual archive from 1500-1700 is a rich and intriguing record that offers much to interested readers and researchers in the fields of literary studies, theatre studies and art history.

Francis Bacon’s Contribution to Shakespeare

Francis Bacon’s Contribution to Shakespeare
Author: Barry R. Clarke
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2019-01-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0429642970

Francis Bacon's Contribution to Shakespeare advocates a paradigm shift away from a single-author theory of the Shakespeare work towards a many-hands theory. Here, the middle ground is adopted between competing so-called Stratfordian and alternative single-author conspiracy theories. In the process, arguments are advanced as to why Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623) presents as an unreliable document for attribution, and why contemporary opinion characterised Shakspere [his baptised name] as an opportunist businessman who acquired the work of others. Current methods of authorship attribution are critiqued, and an entirely new Rare Collocation Profiling (RCP) method is introduced which, unlike current stylometric methods, is capable of detecting multiple contributors to a text. Using the Early English Books Online database, rare phrases and collocations in a target text are identified together with the authors who used them. This allows a DNA-type profile to be constructed for the possible contributors to a text that also takes into account direction of influence. The method brings powerful new evidence to bear on crucial questions such as the author of the Groats-worth of Witte (1592) letter, the identifiable hands in 3 Henry VI, the extent of Francis Bacon’s contribution to Twelfth Night and The Tempest, and the scheduling of Love’s Labour’s Lost at the 1594–5 Gray’s Inn Christmas revels for which Bacon wrote entertainments. The treatise also provides detailed analyses of the nature of the complaint against Shakspere in the Groats-worth letter, the identity of the players who performed The Comedy of Errors at Gray’s Inn in 1594, and the reasons why Shakspere could not have had access to Virginia colony information that appears in The Tempest. With a Foreword by Sir Mark Rylance, this meticulously researched and penetrating study is a thought-provoking read for the inquisitive student in Shakespeare Studies.

Intricate Movements

Intricate Movements
Author: Bradley Tuggle
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2019-03-07
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0429514506

Renaissance humanism takes as one of its subjects for inquiry the category of the human itself. As Intricate Movements: Experimental Thinking and Human Analogies in Sidney and Spenser shows, late sixteenth-century English poets found some remarkably radical ways to interrogate and redefine the status of humans. The recent vogue for posthumanist theory encourages a view of non-human objects and animals in Renaissance literature as pathways to essentially anti-humanist thought. On the contrary, this book argues that Sidney, Spenser, and their contemporaries employ animals, earth, buildings, and fictions as analogies employed toward a better understanding of what makes humans a special category, both ontologically and ethically. Horses and riders are studied by Sidney as a way to understand readers and writers; the 1580 Dover Straits Earthquake provides Spenser and Gabriel Harvey an opportunity to explore human emotion; liturgical spaces are represented by Sidney and Spenser in order to reassess human community; and fictional persons are interrogated by Spenser as models for human interpersonal epistemology. This volume seeks to return critical assessments of the period's engagement with the non-human back to human concerns. Focusing on several early modern analogies between human and non-human entities, Intricate Movements argues Sidney's and Spenser's thinking about the human is both radically experimental and, ultimately, humane.