Refashioning Ben Jonson 1998 : gender, politics, and the Jonsonian canon

This collection of multi-authored essays not only refashions and revises critical understandings of the early modern dramatist Ben Jonson and his canon of work, but is also self-reflexive about the process. It includes original essays by both established and emergent Jonson scholars, and employs materialist, feminist, and queer theory in the production of its readings of Jonsonian playtexts and masques, familiar and otherwise. It is intended to encourage new approaches by students to this central figure from the Renaissance. Front Matter....Pages i-viii Introduction: Refashioning Ben Jonson....Pages 1-27 Jonson’s ‘Comical Satires’ and the Art of Courtly Compliment....Pages 28-47 ‘Satyres, That Girde and Fart at the Time’: Poetaster and the Essex Rebellion....Pages 48-70 Sejanus: Ethics and Politics in the Early Reign of James....Pages 71-92 ‘Defacing the Carcass’: Anne of Denmark and Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness....Pages 93-113 The Lone Wolf: Jonson’s Epistle to Volpone....Pages 114-133 Making and Buying: Ben Jonson and the Commercial Theatre Audience....Pages 134-154 Hell for Lovers: Shades of Adultery in The Devil is an Ass....Pages 155-182 Print, Popular Culture, Consumption and Commodification in The Staple of News....Pages 183-207 ‘The Eccho of Uncertaintie’: Jonson, Classical Drama and the English Civil War....Pages 208-229 Back Matter....Pages 230-237 Refashioning Ben Jonson casts new light on the canonical Renaissance dramatist and contemporary of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson. This collection of essays by both established and up-and-coming scholars of the early modern period adopts a diverse range of approaches in order to revise, review, and reshape readings of Jonson's dramatic writings, both those for the elite space of the Jacobean and Caroline courts and those for the public theatres of seventeenth-century London.