“Ben Jonson made it”: The god of the theatre in the comedy of humours

Having recently completed the third chapter of my thesis, I thought I’d write my usual synopsis. Chapter three was the most difficult portion of the thesis to write. Much of what I had originally wanted to discuss in The Magnetic Lady I found I had already covered in my discussions on The Staple of News and The New Inn. Most of what was new and relevant to the humours genre[i] entailed a detailed discussion of the characters’ names (especially in Cynthia’s Revels, where plot is scarce to be found). An examination of names, however, threatens to become little more than a list of observations (”Oh, and Anaides means impudent, so he’s choleric!”).

In a play where the characters are named for the humoural composition which directs all their behaviour, though, names are critical: often, the name seems more important than the body beneath the name. In a humours play the body itself seems little more than a slate on which a name/behaviour/vice can be inscribed. Thus (on Prof. Martin’s recommendation) I began to consider the relationship between words and bodies in Jonson’s theatre through Jackie Derrida’s “The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation”. Here then, is both an excerpt and synoptic analysis of the essay:

The stage is theological for as long as it is dominated by speech, by a will to speech, by the layout of a primary logos which does not belong to the theatrical site and governs it from a distance. The stage is theological for as long as its structure, following the entirety of tradition, comports the following elements: an author-creator who, absent and from afar, is armed with a text and keeps watch over, assembles, regulates the time or the meaning of representation, letting this latter represent him as concerns what is called the content of his thoughts, his intentions, his ideas. He lets representation represent him through representatives, directors or actors, enslaved interpreters who represent characters who, primarily through what they say, more or less directly represent the thought of the “creator.” Interpretive slaves who faithfully execute the providential designs of the “master.” Who moreover – and this is the ironic rule of the representative structure which organizes all these relationships – creates nothing, has only the illusion of having created, because he only transcribes and makes available for reading a text whose nature is necessarily representative; and this representative text maintains with what is called the “real” […] an imitative and reproductive relationship. Finally, the theological stage comports a passive, seated public, a public of spectators, of consumers, of “enjoyers” – as Nietzsche and Artaud both say – attending a production that lacks true volume or depth, a production that is level, offered to their voyeuristic scrutiny. (In the theater of cruelty, pure visibility is not exposed to voyeurism.) (235)

The theatre of cruelty, because it places no limits on the stage space, no line demarcating stage and audience, “permeate[s]” (237) the viewer, allowing him or her to experience the action on stage not as an act, but as life itself; the theatre of cruelty creates a space the viewer can actively inhabit. As a result, the theatre of cruelty forces its viewer to forget that the space it inhabits is theatrical.

The theological theatre, conversely, is one which divests bodies of their capability to be seen or to move as bodies; they are representatives of a textual idea belonging to the author/god who creates the play. In the theological theatre it is impossible for the viewer to transcend the superficial representative barrier of signs for which the bodies (and objects) on stage stand; it is impossible for the audience to lose itself in the gestures of the bodies on stage, to become, in Nietzschian terms, a Dionysian participant in the action on stage.

The theological theatre transforms bodies into words (words which are themselves representatives of larger conceits). The theological theatre also draws attention to its own limits, seeming to make those limits (between audience and stage, actor and thing acted) transparent, (“diaphanous,” 240), and in this gesture of transparency, distracts the viewer from the superficiality and lack of will involved in the theological stage (on the part of the spectator, though not the poet-god). [2]

Derrida (and Artaud) believe that western theatre has always been theological, but Jonson’s, with his insistent references to himself as a character both within and without his stage world (reading an expository poem of one of the characters in The Magnetic Lady, the scholar Compass tells us that “Ben Jonson made it”), with his references to other plays (his nigh-direct parody of Jacques’s “All the world’s a stage” speech in The New Inn, his direct and indirect references to Terence and Plautus in Cynthia’s Revels and The Magnetic Lady), with his emphasis on his characters’ names, and his direct appeals to, and mocking imitations of, his audience create a stage world that is highly theological, where Jonson, the poet-god of the stage, creates a textualised world where bodies themselves merely reflect higher ideas of the poet-god, and where the audience, is allowed to “see” the limits of the stage in order to prevent it from inhabiting the bodies on stage; instead, we are to “read” the meanings which the bodies represent.

In the context of the theological theatre, the transvestite boy actor can be excused by claiming that he only represents the idea of the female gender, while his “actual” male gender remains intact (an idea Jonson emphasises in Cynthia’s Revels by displaying the children from the acting company in a mock argument before the play starts: one of the children, when attacked during his attempts to deliver the play’s argument, announces “I’d cry a rape, but that you are children!” (151). Noting the immature sexual bodies of his two attackers, the child rejects the possibility of rape as a viable charge. The child actors expose themselves as children, neither men nor women, nor real courtiers: the audience should not mistake them for real men, women, or courtiers at any point throughout the play.

In The Magnetic Lady, Jonson employs the theological stage for more than simply negating the notion of performative gender, however; in drawing comparisons between the poet who creates and directs humourous characters on stage, and God, who creates the humours that make up real bodies outside the stage, Jonson is able to hypothesise a world in which women are banned for active social and economic roles. Given the “essentially” (unalterable and divinely-given) weaker humoural composition of their bodies [iii], which impede their ability to think and behave rationally, women should remain in hidden birthing rooms (where much of the female contributions to the plot occur) and in the “tiring houses” (4.2.554) of the theatre. As if to illustrate this principle, Placentia, the female whose body (her marriage and pregnancy) is the central question of the entire play, appears in only five scenes, and speaks only nine lines in the entire play. If they must be out in public, women’s bodies and voices should be kept under the governance of males. The results when women do participate as active members of the economy are confusion in the male community and violence in the female ones (as a fight between Placentia’s female guardians demonstrates in Act 4).

Of course, if female humoural imbalances are unalterable, so too are the humoural compositions of the male fools within the play. Jonson is, as always, in a bit of a predicament…

End Notes:

[i] humours genre. Drama where the characters are named after the composition of the four basic bodily fluids (or humours) in their blood. The four humours are sanguine (made of hot and wet properties), choler (hot and dry), black bile (cold and dry), and phlegm (cold and wet). The sanguine individual is courageous, amorous, witty and lively. The choleric is violent, ambitious, and cruel. Black bile causes melancholy, and is usually found in pining lovers, scholars, old men, and misers. Finally, the phlegmatic individual is slothful, slow-witted, corpulent and cowardly. Women are also often phlegmatic, but humours medicine is also inconsistent towards women, as Gail Kern Paster notes in her wonderful Humouring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago, London: U of Chicago P, 2004), females are often found to be without humour.

The early modern humours drama was developed and popularised by Jonson himself in his first two comedies Every Man In His Humour and Every Man Out of His Humour; the humours drama, and the medical theory on which it is based, were originally developed in classical Greek and Rome.

[ii] The theatre of cruelty [...] poet-god. I enjoy writing about my work, but am still going to be cropping much of this chapter summary directly from my chapter three. Including all this summary/analysis of Derrida’s work.

[iii] weaker humoural composition. Females in Gallenic medicine were assumed to be “cold and wet,” which should imply a phlegmatic humour, though there do not seem to be any consistent or logical rules to the physchphysiology of females, whose general humoural imbalance seems to have been thought the cause of their unstable natures (Paster, 80). Helen King observes that women “have an entirely different texture of flesh from men, being wet soft and spongy. This means they accumulate blood” (39). Women should be a hotter composition than men; their lack of external sexual organs, inability to produce semen (King, 32) and production of breast milk (“the female is too cold completely to concoct and disperse all the food she takes in, Flemming, 307), though, suggest a lack of heat; this theory is contradicted, again, however, when considering the womb: both Aristotle and Hippocrates conceive the womb as “an oven” (King, 33).

Works Cited:

Derrida, Jacques. “The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation.” Writing and Difference. Chicago, London: U of Chicago P, 1978. 232-250.

Flemming, Rebecca. Medicine and the Making of the Roman Woman: Gender, Nature, and Authority from Celsus to Galen . Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.

Jonson, Ben. Cynthia’s Revels. Ben Jonson’s Plays. Ed. Felix Schelling. Vol. 1 London: JM Dent, 1915. 149-232.

Jonson, Ben. The Magnetic Lady. Ben Jonson’s Plays. Ed. Felix Schelling. Vol. 2. London: JM Dent, 1963. 505-572.

King, Helen. Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece. London, New York: Routledge, 1998.

Me! “Ben Jonson made it: The god of the theatre in the comedy of humours.” Obviously Unpublished. July 2008. 1-27.

Paster, Gail Kern. Humouring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage. Chicago, London: U of Chicago P, 2004.

13 July 2008 ~ St. Catharines.

114 pages, nothing but Ben.

Alright, there’s some Thomas and Will in there as well. Robert Burton and John Marston also make appearances. I’ve even managed to work in some Virginia Woolf.

I write all this in a casual tone, because I know I still have a number of articles to read, and (I’ve been promised) lots and lots of editing: including some gaping logical holes in my introduction. Then there’s the defense presentation to prepare, and I definitely need a new title; however,

the writing

is

done.

I’m so exhausted, I’m not even going to footnote this one.

10 July 2008 ~ St. Catharines

Things for which Gaurav Is Useful: Edition 8.

1. “So, I think we’re not just friends…”

(I would have said it given one more week. Really.)

10 July 2008 ~ St. Catharines

Non-Accredited Book Reviews: Virginia Woolf.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Selected Works of Virginia Woolf. London: Wordsworth, 2005. 531-634.

Though I haven’t written much on Virginia Woolf of late [i], I have been continuing my plan to read her major works. I finished A Room of One’s Own as I was recovering from my ear infexions last month, and am currently working my way through The Years. Reading is slow, what with Ben, articles (on Ben), Derrida essays, and my repeated efforts to create an argument that brings all these together in a cohesive whole [ii]. Woolf, though, proves consistently hilarious rest from Ben and theory.

Woolf’s skill at irony — satire and just plain sarcasm — is adept: a problem I find intriguing considering one her repeated advice to or indictments of female novelists and writers is the problem of including anger in one’s work. Comparing the writing of Austen and Charlotte Brontë, Woolf declares Austen the finer writer:

perhaps it was the nature of Jane Austen not to want what she had not. Her gift and her circumstances matched each other completely. But I doubt whether that was true of Charlotte Brontë, I said, opening Jane Eyre and laying it beside Pride and Prejudice.

I opened it to Chapter Twelve and my eye was caught by the phrase, ‘Anybody may blame me who likes.’ What are they blaming Charlotte Brontë for? I wondered. And I read how Jane Eyre used to go up on to the roof when Mrs. Fairfax was making jellies and looked over the fields at the distant view. And then she longed — and it was for this that they blamed her — [...] ‘for a power of vision which might overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen: that then I desired for practical experience than I possessed. [...] When thus alone I not unfrequently heard Grace Poole’s laugh…

That is an awkward break, I thought. It is upsetting to come upon Grace Poole all of a sudden. The continuity is disturbed. One might say, I continued, laying the book down beside Pride and Prejudice, that the woman who wrote those pages had more genius in her than Jane Austen; but if one reads them over and marks that jerk in them, that indignation, one sees that she will never get her genius expressed whole and entire. Her books will be deformed and twisted. She will write in a rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters. She is at war with her lot. How could she help but die young, cramped and thwarted? (605-606)

I have found this passage puzzling for awhile. Charlotte Brontë’s writing might end up auto-biographical and more “deformed” than Austen’s work, but if it is, it is justifiably so.

Woolf spends the first two books of A Room of One’s Own contrasting the rooms, dining halls and the intellectual company at the male-dominated Oxbridge University and the women’s Fernham College. While male scholars have access to university libraries, women are denied this access (unless accompanied by a male chaperone). Too, male scholars are consistently better fed and given better living conditions than women, and thus possess all the material conditions that foster free intellectual thought and interesting, innovative writing.

Similarly, in what may be the most frequently-discussed chapter of Woolf’s essay, Judith Shakespeare (Chapter Three) commits suicide when the material and legal conditions of her society prevent her from following the same career as her illustrious brother (a fate that is prescient of Woolf’s own suicide in 1941). Brontë/Jane Eyre’s frustration, then, at being denied the intellectual freedom and experiences that men possess, seems a position with which Woolf herself would sympathise; to hide that anger under a “perfectly natural, shapely sentence” (611), as Woolf claims Austen does, seems an unethical and insincere approach to Austen’s characters and her audience.

Admittedly, a female writing when she is angry (particularly in Woolf’s society) might find herself facing charges of irrationality, or writing due to emotion [iii]; however, such anger might also act as revelatory gesture, exposing the oppressive social conditions for women. The reader must ask, then, what is to be lost by writing angrily. For Woolf, anger, by a male or female writer is simply rhetorically ineffective:

But while I pondered I had unconsciously, in my listlessness, in my desperation, been drawing a picture where I should, like my neighbour, have been writing a conclusion. I had been drawing a face, a figure. It was the face and the figure of Professor von X engaged in writing his monumental work entitled The Mental, Moral, and Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex. He was not in my picture a man attractive to women. [...] His expression suggested that he was labouring under some emotion that made him jab his pen on the paper as if he were killing some noxious insect as he wrote, but even when he had killed it that did not satisfy him; he must go on killing it; and even so, some cause for anger and irritation remained. [...] Whatever the reason, the professor was made to look very angry and very ugly in my sketch, as he wrote his great book upon the mental, moral and physical inferiority of women. Drawing pictures was an idle way of finishing an unprofitable morning’s work. Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. A very elementary exercise in psychology, not to be dignified by the name of psychoanalysis, showed me, on looking at my notebook, that the sketch of the angry professor had been made in anger. Anger had snatched my pencil while I dreamt. But what was anger doing there? Interest, confusion, amusement, boredom—all these emotions I could trace and name as they succeeded each other throughout the morning. Had anger, the black snake, been lurking among them? Yes, said the sketch, anger had. It referred me unmistakably to the one book, to the one phrase, which had roused the demon; it was the professor’s statement about the mental, moral and physical inferiority of women. My heart had leapt. My cheeks had burnt. I had flushed with anger. There was nothing specially remarkable, however foolish, in that. One does not like to be told that one is naturally the inferior of a little man [...] Soon my own anger was explained and done with; but curiosity remained. How explain the anger of the professors? Why were they angry? For when it came to analysing the impression left by these books there was always an element of heat. This heat took many forms; it showed itself in satire, in sentiment, in curiosity, in reprobation. But there was another element which was often present and could not immediately be identified. Anger, I called it. But it was anger that had gone underground and mixed itself with all kinds of other emotions. To judge from its odd effects, it was anger disguised and complex, not anger simple and open [...] I knew that he was angry by this token. When I read what he wrote about women—I thought, not of what he was saying, but of himself. When an arguer argues dispassionately he thinks only of the argument; and the reader cannot help thinking of the argument too. If he had written dispassionately about women, had used indisputable proofs to establish his argument and had shown no trace of wishing that the result should be one thing rather than another, one would not have been angry either. One would have accepted the fact, as one accepts the fact that a pea is green or a canary yellow. So be it, I should have said. But I had been angry because he was angry. (582-584)

Though Woolf confesses to her anger during her reading experience, her transcription of the event is rational, and indeed, self-reflective: her commentary on men’s treatment of women in literature and science is made through an interrogation of her own responses to the texts she reads. Her critique, though satirical, progresses logically through her line of thought, and involves textual examples (that is, “proof”) to convince her readers. [iv]

Indeed, throughout A Room of One’s Own, Woolf maintains control over her work, and despite her fear that the topic “women in fiction” will be too variable to cover adequetly in a series of lectures, manages to discuss “women and what they are like, [...] women and the fiction that they write; [...] women and the fiction that is written about them, [and] all three [...] inextricably mixed together,” (565) and does so in a logically unfolding narrative. Her comparative meals at Oxbridge and Fernham lead Woolf to wonder “Why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? What effect has poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?” (579). In order to research these questions, Woolf visits the British Museum where she encounters the book by Professor X which causes her anger; to allay this emotion, Woolf muses that contemporary conditions for women have improved signifcantly since Brontë’s time, a musing which leads her to consider a social history of women, the writing conditions and products of Shakespeare, Austen, and Brontë, to compare the evolving literary styles of women, as well as the genres open to women in her society. Having predicted that opportunities for women will only become increasingly available, Woolf then offers her suggestion of how literature ought to develop, a suggestion which, considering the topic of Orlando, and her praise of both Shakespeare and Austen for refusing to allow their circumstances and mind to enter their writing (a character she labels “integrity”), is unsurprising:

And I went on amateurishly to sketch a plan of the soul so that in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female; and in the man’s brain the man predominates over the woman, and in the woman’s brain the woman predominates over the man. The normal and comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony together, spiritually co–operating. (623-624)

Woolf’s suggestion for the cultivation of the “androgynous mind” is one that attempts to relieve the oppression of one gender not by inverting the power relationship between men an women, but by eliminating this power relationship: that is, Woolf suggests eliminating the cause of anger between men and women altogether.

Realistically, however, Woolf also suggests that a leveling of gender will not occur for span of decades, as women must actively labour to overcome their present state in which they are “dreadfully ignorant” (632), and they must do so from within their material and social limitations. This is a process which, she predicts, will take another century, at least. While it’s heartening to note that many of Woolf’s predictions about burgeoning gender equality have been realised, it can also be dismaying to realise that Anglo-American feminist literary criticism has tended to ignore or reject Woolf, reconsigning her to the obscurity which left her frustrated and angry.

End Notes:

[i] of late. It seemed incongruous writing about her during Ben’s birthday week, that old misogynist.

[ii] a cohesive whole. A process which follows the pattern: type, delete, type, delete, delete, expletives, head-on-desk-in-despair-utter-utter-despair, walk the dog, type type delete.

[iii] due to emotion. A declamation which is itself unfair, given that males, as Woolf notes at various points in her essay, are permitted to write angrily without being declared similarly irrational. Woolf cites the example of a male scholar naming Rebecca West an “arrant feminist” for writing that men are “snobs”: in response to which Woolf offers the indignant observation that “The exclamation, to me so surprising—for why was Miss West an arrant feminist for making a possibly true if uncomplimentary statement about the other sex?—was not merely the cry of wounded vanity; it was a protest against some infringe ment of his power to believe in himself” (585).

[iv] her readers. In this way, Woolf is comparable to Austen who, though she is often satirical and sarcastic, is never irrational.

25 June 2008 ~ Niagara Falls

Back with Jacques (Derrida, that is).

The theater is born in its own disappearance, and the offspring of this movement has a name: man. The theater of cruelty is to be born by separating death from birth and erasing the name of man. The theater has always been made to do that for which it was not made: “The last word on man has not been said….The theater was never made to describe man and what he does…. (WD, 231)

It’s funny how things turn out sometimes.

My initial research when considering thesis topics back in second year invlved a lot of reading: besides working my way through Jonson’s plays and poetry (and a few of his masques), I read the work of his dramatic contemporaries and followers (particularly the work of Richard Brome*), critical and philosophical contemporaries (this included anti-theatrical pamphlets, sermons, and poetic statements like that of Sidney’s Defense of Poesy), as well as current examinations of early modern culture (Gurr’s Playgoing and Constance Jordan’s Renaissance Feminism). I also read classical works on which Jonson had modelled his poetry: Horace, Martial, and (theoretically) Juvenal, and even tried my hand at (very poor) translations from Horace’s Art of Poetry. Finally, since I had never taken any in a formal class, I studied literary theory, and Prof. Martin and I practiced applying this theory to the drama we read, using Andy Mousely’s Renaissance Drama and Contemporary Theory (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000) as a discussion guide.

The third chapter of Mousely’s book concerned Poststructuralism, a school which I found both fascinating, and bewildering. Mousely’s text offers examples culled from the works of the major theorists in each school, but, because there are no complete essays, it can be difficult to understand the context and full implications of some of the ideas presented within these examples. Consequently, I found myself attempting one of Jacques Derrida’s smaller books, Limited Inc, which includes “Signature Event Context” (SEC), a response to the speech act theory of JL Austin*, and “Limited Inc a b c,” a text he wrote in response to the theorist John Searle’s own response to SEC.[i]

Derrida, the “father of deconstruction” (the literary method which he founded), would likely have appreciated my difficulties with reading fragments of his work out of context in Mousely’s book. One of the main tenets of Derrida’s theories of deconstruction and differance is that context matters:

A written sign, in the current meaning of this word, is a mark that subsists, one which does not exhaust itself in the moment of inscription and which can give rise to an iteration in the absence and beyond the presence of the empirically determined subject who, in a given context, has emitted or produced it. (”Signature Event Context,” 9)

Derrida here is responding to the theories of structuralists like Ferdinand de Saussure* who claim that words function within closed systems of meaning: while syntactical context alters, somewhat, the nuanced meaning a word possesses, that meaning can always be fully understood by any reader, no matter who the writer of the words.[ii] Words can be understood by all readers because their meaning is conventionally agreed upon, as are the grammatical systems in which the word operates.[iii] For Derrida, words do bear conventionally agreed-upon meanings, but every repeated utterance (”iteration”) alters, and thus adds one more memory to the word’s collective “meaning”. Conversely:

At the same time, a written sign carries with it a force that breaks with its context, that is, with the collectivity of presences organising the moment of its inscription. This breaking force [force de rupture] is not an accidental predicate but the very structure of the written text. […] This force of rupture is tied to the spacing [espacement] that constitutes the written sign: spacing which separates it from other elements of the internal contextual chain (the always open possibility of its disengagement and graft), but also from all forms of present reference[.] (SEC, 9)

If specific context adds to the history of collected meanings of any given word, then those collected meanings/uses also haunt each successive use of the word. Context, then, both matters and does not matter. [iv] In an effort to demonstrate how words can operate without even grammatical context, Derrida offers Husserl’s example of “the green is either” (SEC, 12), a phrase for which we can create contexts - especially poetical contexts - even though grammatically, it appears nonsense: this is because the individual words themselves still carry meaning, even when placed in the wrong order in the syntactical system.

Not only can the signifier* function without conventional grammatical contexts, but even when it functions within these contexts, the “mark” (signifier) carries a “nonpresent remainder” (SEC, 10): meaning that is “nonpresent” because it is not indicated by the specific context in which the signifier is used, yet remains present, nonetheless, capable of being employed at any moment, in any other hypothetical context.

Further, Derrida emphasises in “Limited Inc a b c…”, his follow-up essay to “Signature Event Context,” the importance of rupture and absence – the rupture created by the written marks of the text (the physical spaces between words on the page), the rupture of words from context and conventional grammar, and finally, the rupture of the text or of the reader/audience from the writer (through physical, ontological, and temporal absence). This absence allows the opportunity of mistranslation, misinterpretation, misunderstanding – it allows the “remainder” of the mark to enter into play:

This re-move [of author and intention from writing] makes its [the remainder’s] movement possible. Which is another way of saying that if this remove is its condition of possibility, it is not an eventuality, something that befalls it here and there, by accident. Intention is a priori (at once) differante: differing and deferring, in its inception. (LI, 56)

For Derrida, it is impossible to understand the full meaning of any word: not only are we always understanding the meaning of every word based on how it “differs” from related words (as Saussure proposed),[v] but we are always also comparing each word use to how that same word was used “differently” in the past. Too, accounting for the countless potential misunderstandings and mistakes in word usage, we see how meaning easily slips, or defers, from our understanding.

Derrida is an odd reading experience: his prose is renowned for being difficult to untangle (it usually involves the OED, hopefully the one with eytmologies as well as biographical entries to look up all the philosophers/poets/apologists to whom Derrida responds). Yet painstakingly re-reading each sentence a few times often reveals an idea that seems breath-takingly simple: until he starts to play with it, that is.

Play* is an important word for Derrida’s writings: frustrating and opaque as they may sometimes be, understanding Derrida’s concept of differance and the non-existence of complete systematic meaning begins to allow the reader insight into why Derrida so frequently employs double entendres, and long, winding sentences, delves into philosophical terms or untranslateable French, or simply makes up words: his work attempts to demonstrate the very theories it proposes. Too, Derrida’s method provided the model on which many contemporary post-structuralist and postmodern counter-hegemonic theories are built. [vi]

This long over-view of Derrida’s work is not without purpose. Derrida, being the first theorist I studied in any serious and extended manner, has obviously had an impact on my critical methodology. I had originally planned to use Derrida in my thesis, but as my reasearch developed, his work became less obviously relevant. It’s been more than six months since I last read him outside of a syllabus.

All that’s about to change, however, as I’m currently working on an examination of the relationship between bodies and words in Jonson’s theatre for the third, and final chapter of the thesis. I’m reading “The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation” in JD’s Writing and Difference, and, I confess, even if I’m out of practice, and amazingly frustrated with the piece, it’s brilliant, as I’m “shutting up [...] [my] circle” [vii] to find myself returning to my theoretical “root(lessnes)s” in the form of Jacques’s work.

End Notes:

[i] SEC. Limited Inc is a good text to begin reading Derrida, not only because of its relative shortness, but because it is also rather funny, including a running satire of Searle whom Derrida renames “Sarl,” and uses in all his examples throughout the second essay. Though Searle’s “Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida” is not included in Graff’s edition, Graff himself reminds us that it is almost unnecessary given “Derrida’s comprehensive quotation of Searle’s “Reply” (Forward, vii), which is an understated way of reminding us that Derrida republishes almost the entirety of Searle’s work in the form of “quotations.”

[ii] the reader. Saussure distinguishes between speech (which, because of tone, accent, and the complexity of muscle movements necessary to produce speech-sounds, cannot be easily systematised by visual code) and language (which can be systematised). For Derrida, speech and hearing are critical factors in language and (mis)communication.

[iii] the word operates. An example of this would be that in Latin, words are usually strung together in the order of Subject-Object-Verb.

[iv] and does not matter. It became a running joke in lit. theory, whenever we encountered a difficult problem, to pull the Derrida card: “it is, and it isn’t”. Oh, how we laughed. Right before we shook our heads at the sad little people we were.

[v] how it “differs”. The best concrete example of this theory is simply to open the dictionary: a single word is defined by multiple words, each of which are then defined by yet more words in an endless fragmenting process that never allows one to stop reading.

[vi] counter-hegemonic theories. For Derrida, as for most post-structuralists, physical conflict and persecution only occurs where dialogue between opposing parties ends. The possibility for endless deferral of words, then, suggests an alternative to violence. This theory has significant implications for political conflict as well as for feminist, marxist, post-colonial, and queer theorists.

[vii] [my] circle. The Magnetic Lady (Induction, 507)

Works Cited:

Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context” and “Limited Inc a b c…” Limited Inc. Ed. Gerald Graff. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1988.

Derrida, Jacques. “The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation.” Writing and Difference. Transl. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. 232-250.

Jonson, Ben. The Magnetic Lady. Ben Jonson: The Complete Plays. Vol. 2. Ed. Felix Schelling. London: JM Dent, 1973. 505-572.

20 June 2008 ~ St. Catharines

Glossary of Terms:

Edmund Husserl. n. nom. Early twentieth-century German philosopher and the father of “phenomenology,” a school which involves the examination of conscious/material experience as a means of reaching the metaphysical/non-material. I’m not too certain about Husserl (having only read about him, but Hegel, in the same school, proposes that words are a material form that allows the reader to approach that which is beyond materiality).

Ferdinand de Saussure. n. nom. A literary structuralist. His most famous work is the Course in General Linguistics, a text which was compiled by his colleagues from student notes after Saussure’s death in 1913. I draw from this text in order to summarise Saussure’s theories but, for brevity, do not cite it directly.

Jonathan Langshaw Austin. n. nom. A structuralist following Saussure. His How to Do Things with Words examines the social conventions that make certain utterances “performatives” (that is, affecting reality: these are phrases which “do” things, for example, marriage vows, or the christening of a boat).

Play. n. (lit.) In Philosophy and literary theory, “play” is usually referred to as jouissance, as in Barthes’s essay “From Work to Text.” The French feminist Hélène Cixous also uses it to discuss the experience/communion of the feminine.

Richard Brome. n. nom. One of the tribe of Ben, and Jonson’s former servant as well as his main dramatic “heir.”

Signifier. n. (lit.). The physical representation (the word) of a concept. Saussure’s famous example is the word “t-r-e-e”. The “signified,”then, would be the actual concept behind the word, that is, the tree itself.

“of A thing done, and who did it”

After the nigh-polemic on Cynthia’s Revels, I’m feeling a wee bit guilty. As recompense (and, because I love to write, but am finding myself nigh-exhausted with thesearch lately), I thought I would attempt to revive one of the word games in Act 4 of the play.

First, the rules of the game:

[Phantaste]. Well, I imagine a thing done; Hedon thinks, who did it; Moria, with what it was done; Anaides, where it was done; Argurion, when it was done; Amorphus, for what cause was it done; you, Philautia, what followed upon the doing of it; and this gentleman, who would have done it better. What? is it conceived about?

All. Yes, yes.

Pha. Then speak you, sir, Who would have done it better?

[Asotus]. How! does it begin at me?

Pha. Yes, sir: this play is called the Crab, it goes backward. (191)

Well, then, I asked some of my accomplices to play along[i]. Here then, is the plot we devised. “Rehearse”.

An essay was written

By a German philosopher,

With collective exasperation,

In Dublin,

At eight o’clock in the morning,

To delight and instruct its readers.

Laughter and scorn followed:

The Academics would have done it better.

Well, it’s not “Shakespeare: The Bard Game“, but it is amusing, and surprisingly transferable to contemporary day. I know I’ll be playing it at the next dinner party.

End Notes:

[i] to play along. Oddly, some of you were not available to answer my questions at 1.30 in the morning. To fill the missing responses, I borrowed phrases from recent emails you’ve sent me (or, Paul’s case, his “blog”).

[ii] the next dinner party. Hopefully I won’t be playing it alone.

Works Cited:

Jonson, Ben. Cynthia’s Revels. Ben Jonson: The Complete Plays. Vol.1. Ed Felix Schelling. London: JM Dent, 1915. 149-232.

18 June 2008 ~ St. Catharines

To delight and instruct (and instruct, and instruct).

You, dear reader, may have deduced by now that I like Ben Jonson, the early modern dramatist, somewhat. The following article may come, then, as a bit of a shock.

Working on my argument for Chapter Three, I spent the weekend re-reading Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels (1600), one of Ben’s four Elizabethan plays (the others being Every Man In His Humour [1598], Every Man Out of His Humour [1599], and Poetaster [1601]). Trying to develop any lengthy argument concerning the play, however, has left me tired and more than a little frustrated. [i]

Cynthia’s Revels is, like Jonson’s other Elizabethan plays, a humours comedy, a genre which is related to both early morality dramas in which vices and virtues (for example, Pleasure, Iniquity, or Temperance) strolled the stage for edifying purposes, and the court masque, in which more complex allegorical/emblematic* figures (for example, Fortune, or Love, or gods like Britannia, or Janus) again strolled the stage for edifying purposes (or so Ben hoped).[ii] The Jonsonian humours play is often discussed as portraying more “realistic” allegories: that is, it portrays ordinary courtiers and citizens, characters who are vice-filled or virtuous depending on the mixture of bodily humours which composes their body: blood (a combination of hot and moist fluids, and producing a “sanguine” personality), black bile (cold and dry fluids, producing melancholy), yellow bile (hot and dry fluids, producing choler), and phlegm (cold and moist fluids, producing, well, phlegm).

As early modern comedy develops, conventional socio-dramatic roles become associated with certain humours: an active lover, or a (respectable) soldier, for example, is usually a “sanguine” character; ranters and (low-quality) soldiers are “choleric,” while passive lovers and scholars are often melancholic[iii].

Cynthia’s Revels is a mixture of early Jonsonian humours comedy and the Jonsonian masque. The play offers the melancholic scholar-poet, Crites (the critic, and the only moderate male courtier in the play), the choleric Amorphus (the changeable, one whose ambition leads him to alter his manners to fit with the other courtiers), and the sanguine Hedon (hedonism, an irresponsible and extreme indulgence in the excesses of court). The play also includes more complex emblematic figures (for example, the goddess Cynthia, herself, signifying chastity and moderation) which one would find in a court masque.

If I’ve spent considerable space describing the characters of the play this is because in many ways, the characters are the play: outside these characters, there’s not much plot. 1.1 opens with Cupid informing Mercury that Cynthia, in order to appease the slander visited on her since her harsh judgment of Acteon, has declared a revels in the region of Gargaphie, “in which time it shall be lawful for all sorts of ingenious persons to visit her palace, to court her nymphs, to excercise all variety of gracious and ignoble pasttimes” (156). Shortly following Cupid’s announcement, Mercury, at Jove’s behest, raises Echo from the earth, giving her voice long enough to make one final lament for her beloved Narcissus — and to curse his “murdering spring,” so that “who but taste / A drop thereof, may, with the instant touch, / Grow dotingly enamour’d on themselves” (159). The remainder of the play (until 5.3, the final scene) depicts the ignoble courtiers who have come to take part in the revels aimlessly passing the time as they wait for the delivery of the waters from Narcissus’s spring (of which they have heard a rumour). In the final scene of the play, the courtiers hold two masques for the entertainment of the newly-returned Cynthia, in which they pretend to be virtues exactly the opposite of the vices/humours that they really are (Philautia, or self-love, plays Storgé, or “the love of a friend”; Hedon plays Eupathes, or moderation); the masques end with these pretended virtues being unmasked and the true vices of the characters revealed.

In an 80-page play[iv], then, nearly 60 pages are devoted to depicting courtiers wooing and fighting with their loves, engaging in nonsense word games to pass the time, gossiping about other courtiers, commenting on each other’s clothing, and generally idling about. According to their humours, of course.

The play is, to put it kindly, a bit dull. Perhaps this is the point: Cynthia’s Revels was meant to both reflect and critique the superficiality of court [v]. This critique is certainly valid (and how better to affect the critique than by staging, as fully as possible, the emptiness of court?) What irritates me about Cynthia’s Revels, however, is the sheer repetitiveness with which it makes its critique. Unlike the prologues to The Staple of News and The New Inn (and most of Jonson’s plays), Cynthia’s Revels does not simply demand (even several times) that its audience pay attention [vi], but devolves almost immediately into demonstrating its utter lack of faith in the audience’s ability to understand even the basics of the alphabet.

In his other humours plays (both the earlier Every Man productions, and the later Magnetic Lady), Jonson indicates his characters’ humours or vices a bit more indirectly: he names them through their occupation (the Lawyer, Practice, in The Magnetic Lady), by telling physical descriptions (Biancha in Every Man In), or by adjectives sometimes opaquely, sometimes obviously indicative of their personalities (Knowell and Asper in Every Man In and Out, respectively). In Cynthia’s Revels, the characters’ names (especially to an audience more familiar with Latin, or with stock Roman humours characters, as Jonson’s Court audience likely was) are fairly indicative of the humours they embody: Crites, Amorphus, Hedon, Argurion, Philautia, Phantaste. Once the reader knows what these names stand for (the critic, the changeable, hedonism, money, self-love, fantasy), the vice for which they are critiqued also becomes obvious.

When these self-involved superficial courtiers actually drink the waters of Narcissus’s spring, and become convinced they are each the best and most virtuous figure at court, I don’t think we are meant to be (or can be) taken in by their immodest assertions: their failings, which have been exposed since their first entrance on stage, outweigh any self-described good. The final scene of the play, then, in which the courtiers are forced to unmask in front of Cynthia, thus exposing how performed their supposed virtues are, is, to me, an unneccessary emphasis of the play’s critique. I can, however, tolerate the scene to an extent: a masque, however redundant, would at least have been interesting to watch, and a change from the monotony of four and a half acts of nothing but courtiers lolling about.

Jonson, however, provides us with two masques. He also provides, immediately following the unmasking, commentary (by Cynthia) on how shocking and ironic the juxtaposition of each vice to its complete opposite virtue (Who would have thought that Philautia durst / Or have usurped noble Storgé’s name?” 229). Then, to ensure we “get” the moral commentary of the situation, Crites runs through each of the eight masquers and the virtue they played in Cynthia’s masque. As final assurance that we comprehend the scene, the courtiers are forced to make pilgrimage to the Well of Knowledge, to wash off “Midas [...] gold” and gain the virtues they “fain would seem” (231).

I think the courtiers might be superficial. [vii]

Apparently the play was not successful at Elizabeth’s court, a revealing piece of knowledge when one considers that (according to Orgel’s analysis of the court masque in The Illusion of Power, and Gurr’s account of the public stage in Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London) the entitled and well-to-do often attended theatrical productions in order to watch other courtiers dancing, flirting, and gossiping in fashionable clothes. That a play which dramatised these very features could not sustain the interests of its target demographic suggests an audience response similar to the one I had as I forced myself thorugh all five acts: that while the matter itself (a critique of court life) might be interesting, repetitions of the play’s “moral” annul the delight of the revels and drag the instruction out too too long.

End Notes:

[i] frustrated. Which explains why there have been no weekend articles here.

[ii] morality dramas [...] and the court masque. The humours comedy is also related to earlier Latin plays like those of Terrence and Plautus, who used the same allegorical-typifying naming structure.

[iii] often melancholic. While Jonson developed and perfected the humours comedy, the genre as it originally existed, rapidly went out of fashion: “humours” characters continued to exist in early modern comedy, but in more complex forms.

Drawing from Shakespearean characters might provide useful examples here: Falstaff (sanguine), Twelfth Night’s Malvolio (choleric) and Sir Andrew Aguecheek (phlegmatic), and, of course, the melancholic Hamlet. There are, of course, variations on humours types, and characters can embody more than one humour: Jonson’s The Magnetic Lady, for example, offers both a choleric and the sanguine soldier in the characters of Ironsides (whose anger scatters the other humours in the play) and Compass, (whose military calm draws the scattered humours up again). Compass, however, is also a “scholar,” and is thus a combination of sanguine and melancholy (thus embodying a balance of all the humours: no wonder he “wins” the play).

Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy is undoubtedly the most authoritative text on the subject of humours, and is quite entertaining. Unfortunately, it is more than 1300 pages long. If you ever make it through, be sure to notify me: I’ll buy you coffee while you help me with my notes. [End of ridiculously long footnote.]

[iv] an 80-page play. Cynthia’s Revels is about ten pages longer than all of Jonson’s Caroline plays, and only ten pages shorter than his average city comedies, that is, plays where events actually happen.

[v] superficiality of court. In some cases, the play mocks the superficiality and vices of real people: the affected “rimer,” Anaides, critics strongly suspect, was meant to be a caricature of either John Marston or Thomas Dekker, with whom Jonson was engaged in a critical argument (or name calling) at the time of the play’s writing; Cynthia’s Revels is one of the plays in the “poetomachia” or “theatre wars” of the early 17th century.

[vi] pay attention. Which he also does here, both in a prologue that asks us to place “Words, above action; matter, above words” (154), as well as an induction in which a boy actor reveals to us the action of the play scene by scene, that we are about to view/read.

[vii]. superficial. And also, perhaps, a little self-involved.

Works Cited

Jonson, Ben. Cynthia’s Revels. Ben Jonson: The Complete Plays. Vol. 1. London: JM Dent, 1915. 149-232.

17 June 2008 ~ St. Catharines.

Glossary of Terms:

Emblematic. adj. (obs.). Concerning “emblems” a form of poetry or text in which complex allegories or moral stories are synecdochically condensed into a single unified image whose many components symbolise the parts of the whole lesson.

Bookish Adventures with Bartholomew: Bartholomew’s Home.

Sometimes Bartholomew and I just don’t agree.

Recently, my vegetative roommate and I have been at odds on the issue of space. Bartholomew has lately suggested to me that perhaps I don’t need all those copies of Doctor Faustus and The Spanish Tragedy which litter “his” bookshelf. Considering, however, that I’m the one who rescued (and paid for) Bartholomew, and also that he owes his very name to the early moderns with whom he resides (we shall recall that his namesake is the clownish Bartholomew Cokes from Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair), I think this attitude is a bit ungrateful.

Let’s consider the situation carefully. Of major Elizabethan and Jacobean dramas, I have multiple versions of Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (five editions), Lyly’s Endymion, Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister, Peele’s The Old Wives Tale, Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (three editions each), Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness, Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling, Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan and The Malcontent, Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday , Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts, Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster, The Maid’s Tragedy, and The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (two copies of all of these).

When considering two of the more-anthologised dramatists of the period, Marlowe and Jonson, things begin to get ridiculous:

By Christopher Marlowe:

Complete plays (London: Penguin, 2003).

Doctor Faustus (three single, five anthologised)

Edward the Second (one single edition, two anthologised) [i]

Tamburlaine, Part I (one single edition, one anthologised).

Tamburlaine, Part II. (single edition)

The Jew of Malta (two, anthologised).

By Ben Jonson:

The Complete Plays, Vol. 1 (London: Dent, 1915/53) [2 copies]

The Complete Plays, Vol. 2 (1963).

Volpone (two single editions, five anthologised).

Bartholomew Fair (single edition).

Epicoene (three, anthologised).

The Alchemist (three, anthologised).

Every Man In His Humour (two, anthologised).

Sejanus, His Fall (one, anthologised).

I’m not even going to attempt to fully catalogue my Shakespeare editions: I have two Oxford folios (the compact 1959 edition and Wells and Taylor’s 2005 Complete Works), as well as a cheap Wordsworth edition [ii], and a nigh-complete four-volume Norton set (minus the Histories), as well as my incongruous collection of Revels-New Mermaids-Methuen-Arden-Penguin-Norton Critical-Longman-Signet-Dover single editions of the plays (not to mention anthologised versions).

So many editions might seem to demand explanation; indeed (as you probably suspected) I can provide one. Actually, I can provide several.

My early modern collection (as with most who become interested in this period) began with Shakespeare. In high school, however, I didn’t much appreciate or even understand the differences between editions: simply owning the plays was enough, and, when one’s economic resources are scarce (as they are for most 16-year-olds), one tends to purchase the most inexpensive editions available: single Dovers [iii] and (because some of the plays are not so readily available in single editions) Wordsworth folios. Gradually, these were replaced with editions which included line numbers, introductions, and footnotes; then, as I became more involved in the university, I upgraded to editions with contextual essays, and introductions and notes by reliable Shakespeare scholars, whenever I could find them.

Then I started researching the other early moderns, who, because they are sometimes difficult to find, I bought in any edition (out of date, or in massive and entirely unpragmatic anthologies which included yet another version of Doctor Faustus [iv]. Again, whenever I found more recent, better (notes and editing), smaller, or sometimes just different editions of these plays (with different critical perspectives), I would add them to my collection.

The most uneven collection I have is, perhaps oddly, Jonson’s. This is mostly because there are only three widely-available complete folios of his works (if you don’t include the original 17th century prints or EEBO facsimiles thereof) available. Of these, the Oxford collection, by CH Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, is 11 volumes, each ranging from about $200-$450 (Canadian),[v] and the Cambridge online/print complete works which is not yet available (and bound to be out of the typical student’s price range). Felix Schelling’s two-volume set (originally printed in 1910) is both compact and generally available at used book stores, but contains no line numbers, and so is not suitable for citing in academic work. The easiest way to obtain scholarly editions is to order single or anthologised editions of the plays: doing so, however, results in owning several copies of “The Alchemist (& other plays).” Even then, there’s no guarantee in finding all the plays, and I’ve had dreadful luck locating any of the later works: readily affordable W. Gifford editions contain notes but, like the Schelling, have no line numbers (and so are like the Dover editions of Shakespeare). The more critical Revels editions of Anthony Parr’s The Staple of News, Michael Hattaway’s The New Inn, and Peter Happe’s The Magnetic Lady are anywhere from $70-$200 [vi].

I don’t mean to sound at all complaining about uneven publishing: such are the conditions of my field of study, and other scholars have their own peculiarities with which to work. I simply offer these facts as a justification for the several editions of early modern drama that I own, and which I promise I will continue to buy.

Not that any one has demanded I do justify my multiple books[vii]. I have, however, been wrestling with my conscience on this matter for the last week or so, and the problem came to a crisis today. Earlier (after a quick stop to my favourite used bookstore), Gaurav and I stopped by Chapters, to sample the books we don’t already own, and see if there was anything that could break our resolve not to spend money, especially on books that, admittedly, we would likely only read part of before new ones came along to distract us. Two in particular tempted me: Ernesto Laclau’s Emancipation(s), and Baudrillard’s The Perfect Crime. My resolve won out[ix], due to no real strength of my own, but because of the pressing knowledge that I’ll be fairly weighted down with critical/theoretical readings for the next month while I finish the thesis.

Still, the Baudrillard was tempting, if only because his essays are concise (the longest in The Perfect Crime is 12 pages, and clearly written). My good sense won out in the end, though, especially as I remembered that I had already bought a little collection of Baudrillard essays less than two months ago, whose title I couldn’t remember, and out of which I have only yet read a pair of essays. I had to wonder though, which other Baudrillard could possibly have won out over The Perfect Crime, whose end cover describes the text as an investigation of “the murder of reality,” (and is thus an obvious follow-up to his Simulacra and Simulation, which I had been reading for most of last term for both my first chapter and my final paper in Lit. Theory redux).

None of the other books in the store seemed familiar, so I assumed that whatever book I had bought must now be out of stock. When I went home, then, I began to search for my Baudrillard text: I looked in the piles of “new” and “in use” books on the floor (since the Baudrillard was both new, and, because of chapter one, also potentially associated with the “in use” category), and on both my “general” and “favourite” theory shelves. The only Baudrillards I found were the much-abused Simulacra and Simulation and, oddly enough, The Perfect Crime.

Oddly enough, because I have absolutely no memory of having bought this text: try as I might to recall this experience, I cannot recollect standing in line and eventually paying for, this book; too, I still could not remember the name of the other text from which I remembered reading the pair of essays (”Holocaust” and “History”). Another twenty-minute search unearthed no other Baudrillard. Eventually, it occurred to me to check again whether those essays are not, in fact, included in The Perfect Crime. They aren’t.

They are, in fact, in Simulacra and Simulation.

This whole experience has confirmed for me, a few realities:

1. I am not aware of the books I own.

2. I am not aware of the books I buy (and may in fact, be spending vast fortunes on hundreds of books I already own). [x]

3. I am not aware of the books I read.

4. I am running out of space on my floor.

I fear I am fulfilling all sorts of stereotypes [xi]. I also fear I am encountering extremely early senility. Or perhaps I am a scholar wise beyond my years. Consider reality 3. in comparison to the following, for example:

To compensate a little for the treacheries and deficiencies of my memory, which are so extreme that more than once I have picked up, thinking it new and unknown to me, some book that I had carefully read some years before, and scribbled all over with my notes, I have adopted the habit for some time now of noting at the end of every book — I mean those that I do not intend to read again — the date when I finished it and the opinion I had formed of it as a whole, my purpose being at least to remind myself of the character and general impression of the author that I had conceived when reading it. (Montaigne, “On Books,” 171-172). [xi]

Except Montaigne never wrote for a plant. Also, I somehow think my note-taking skills are less uniform and disciplined as his were. Well, if in ten years or so I am still keeping this archive, and I happen to write a review of Orlando, or The New Inn, hopefully you will direct me to my notes on the same.

End Notes:

[i] Edward the Second. I will, of course, be adding Martin’s Broadview edition of this play to my collection when it comes out next year. (After all, I am transcribing/annotating sections of it.)

[ii] Wordsworth edition. The kind where the print comes off in your hands: I owned this one prior to receiving the better-edited Oxfords.

[iii] Dovers. Dover editions usually cost between $1 and $5, and are inexpensive because they are drawn from public domain sources and translations, and involve little editorial mediation (which is one of the more expensive aspects of re-publishing). This means, however, that you may be getting out of date notes (or none at all) or inaccurate or poor quality translations (these are not Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf, or Fagle’s Aeneid. On the other hand, some famous and lasting translations (for example, Longfellow’s Inferno, Smollett’s Quixote, or Chapman’s Iliad) are public domain.

[iv] Doctor Faustus. Not that I mind Doctor Faustus, I’m just puzzled why this play, of all of Marlowe’s appears in nearly every anthology of early modern, or British literature. Edward II and Tamburlaine are my personal favourites though, as a rule, nothing really goes amiss with Marlowe.

[v] Herford and Percy Simpson. This edition was originally released in 1925, and, while it has been updated several times, according to the people at Cambridge, no major changes have been made reflecting recent interrogations of the critical history surrounding Jonson’s work; I suppose we shall have to wait to judge the differences between the Oxford and Cambridge editions.

[vi] Revels editions. With The Magnetic Lady not being available in Canada. I’ve been relying on interlibrary loan for all of these works.

[vii] my multiple books. Outside of Bartholomew, and you may have realised by now I do a lot of, we shall say, “creative interpretation” for him.

[viii] resolve won out. At least temporarily for the Laclau. I have a feeling I’ll be looking at this text again in a month or so.

[ix] I already own. I may be acquiring these vast fortunes through bank thefts and other devious schemes: it stands to reason that if I am buying books unawares I may be involved in other unconscious crimes. For all I know, I have secret warehouse and overseas storage boxes of two or three hundred copies of Moby Dick and The English Patient.

[x] all sorts of stereotypes. If I ever buy a cat, it is the end of me.

[xi] “On Books”. For an interesting reading of this essay and the relationship between books and memory in general, see Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (Vancouver: Raincoast, 2007).

Works Cited:

Montaigne, Michel de. “On Books.” Essays. Transl. J.M. Cohen. London: Penguin, 1993. 159-173.

14 June 2008 ~ St. Catharines

Things for which Gaurav Is Useful: Edition 7.

The all-Ben related edition!

1. He found me that image of the New Inn in Gloucestershire.

2. He reminds me to save (for example, when I’m writing about Ben).

3. He reminds me to take breaks from reading Ben (sometimes all that misogyny can get a little overwhelming).

4. Ben Ben Ben Ben Ben Ben Ben (and he never complains about hearing that).[i]

Then again, his celebrations of Ben’s birthday were not entirely whole-hearted. Some effort was definitely lacking there. I suppose it all evens out in the end.

End Notes:

[i] hearing that. I will be fair, neither does Kari, and I almost never mention her in my archive (as she has pointed out to me on several occasions).

13 June 2008 ~ St. Catharines

Sources, sources, sources!

Here again, is my partial bibliography for chapter two. I note my commentary has extended somewhat compared to last time. I’ve tried to choose the more interesting articles and texts that are representative of both my interests, and the general critical debate around Jonson’s The New Inn. Interlibrary loan them, buy them, or cadge them from your friends!

Barber, C.L. Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom. Cleveland: World Publishing, 1967. [An older text, but Barber's extended definitions and reflections on Shakespearean festive comedy offers the canonised criteria of the genre with which contemporary critics continue to work.]

Boeher, Bruce. “Ovid and the Dilemma of the Cuckold.” Ovid and the Renaissance Body. Ed. Goran V. Stanivukovic. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2001. 171-188. [Along with Gary Kuchar's text on cuckoldry, Boeher's works which examines the extremes of the early modern cuckold's reactions in Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and Jonson's Volpone, directed me to examine the relationship between cuckoldry, theatricality, and knowledge at the end of chapter two, and (forthcoming in chapter three), the impossibility of a poet/performer to have both complete control over the audience and the recognition of the poet's genius.]

Bulman, James C. “Queering the Audience: All-Male Casts in Recent Productions of Shakespeare.” A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance. Eds. Barbara Hodgdon and WB Worthen Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 564-587. [An examination of the RSC's recent performance of Twelfth Night, and Cheek-by-Jowl's early '90's production of As You Like It. Bulman theorises that purported attempts to reclaim early modern performance conditions are only indicative of contemporary gender concerns.]

Dusinberre, Juliet. “Women and Boys Playing Shakespeare.” As You Like It: Essais Critiques. Eds. Jean-Paul Debax and Yves Peyre. Toulouse: PU du Mirail, 1998. 11-26. [An examination of how Shakespeare's play-text draws attention to the body of the boy actor beneath the females represented on stage.]

Evans, Robert C. “’This Art Will Live’: Social and Literary Responses to Ben Jonson’s The New Inn.” Literary Circles and Cultural Communities in Renaissance England. Eds. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth. Columbia and London: U of Missouri P, 2000. 75-91. [After the failure of The New Inn on its opening night, Jonson wrote the infamous "Ode to Himself," in which he criticises his audience's poor taste in drama, and also promises to "leave the loathed stage." Evans examines the plethora of contemporary poetic responses to this poem (some reprimanding Jonson for his petty reaction to his failure, some supporting the dramatist), and argues that, based on the commentary of these poems, Jonson's play (contrary to the belief of many contemporary critics) was never valued/rejected for its political comments, but for its literary merit.]

Grace, Tiffany. “Experimental Androgynes: Falstaff, Ursula, and The New Inn.” Erotic Beasts and Social Monsters: Shakespeare, Jonson, and Comic Androgyny. Newark, London and Toronto: U of Delaware P, Associated UP, 1995. 136-169. [Tiffany's article represents the half of the critical debate which argues that Jonson's play is a (failed) attempt at serious Shakespearean romance. I find Tiffany's argument rather reductive (and not because I feel the need to automatically side with Jonson here): it fails to account for the "problem ending" of Jonson's Court of Love (an ending which, I think, in a Shakespearean comedy, would have gotten more attention from Tiffany, given that the text's primary interest seems to be Will's work), and suffers from a tendency to project biographical information into the play-text. This is a common problem in readings of the late plays: many critics have assumed that The New Inn, which was written after Jonson had suffered from stroke, must be of poorer quality than his earlier city comedies. Recent Jonson criticism has interrogated this assumption, which cannot explain how some of his most popular poetry (for example, his Cary-Morrison ode on friendship) and masques (Chloridia), were written simultaneously with The New Inn.]

Jameson, Frederick. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York, London: Norton, 2001. 1960-1974. [Reading The Political Unconscious (or sections thereof) was one of the more torturous collective experiences of literary theory last term. Yet Jameson (like good old J. Derrida) seems to grow on one with repeated readings. Too, he is, like Raymond Williams, Paul DeMan, and Ernesto Laclau, one of the more significant post-structuralist/Post-Marxian literary critics, and one to whom contemporary feminist/environmentalist/political theorists (including Butler) are yet responding.]

Lin, Ya-Huei. “The Women Who Disappear on the Shakespearean Stage: As You Like It, The Taming of the Shrew, and the Misogynic Poetics of Deduction. Mysogynism in Literature: Any Place, Any Time. Ed. Britta Zangen. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2004. 59-70. [Lin offers a neat comparative reading of Woolf's A Room of One's Own and As You Like It; her discussion of male narcissistic speech in Jacques's "All the world's a stage," monologue (along with the wonderful Anne Barton's comparison of this speech with Jonson's "All the world's a play" parody) provided an interesting departure point in examining Shakespeare's play as both supporting and subverting patriarchy.]

Sanders, Julie. “Alternative Societies: The New Inn and the Late Plays.” Ben Jonson’s Theatrical Republics, Basingstoke: Palgrove, 1998. 144-164. [Sanders has written a handful of articles on The New Inn, most of which offer a (naively optimistic) defense of Jonson as a quasi-proto-feminist. I tend to disagree with her on most accounts, but in this chapter she presents a well-researched analysis of the early modern inn as both a theatrical and a Bakhtinian carnivalesque space. (Now I just need to read more Bakhtin!)]

Stallybrass, Peter. “Transvestism and the ‘body beneath’: Speculating on the boy actor.” Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage. Ed. Susan Zimmerman. New York: Routledge, 1992. 64-83. [Speculations on what audiences "see" when encountered with moments of undressing "females" (boy actors) on (particularly the tragic) stage.]

Stewart, Andrew. “Some Uses for Romance: Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Jonson’s The New Inn.” Renaissance Forum: An Electronic Journal of Early Modern Literary and Historical Studies 3.1 (1998). [Stewart represents the other half of the critical debate commonly surrounding the play: that is, that The New Inn is not meant as a serious romance, but a parody of that genre, constructed to provide political commentary on the Neoplatonic court of Charles I and Henrietta-Maria.]

12 June 2008 ~ St. Catharines