The Figurative Language of the Tragedies of Shakespeare's Chief Seventeenth-Century Contemporaries: George Chapman, Thomas Heywood, Ben Jonson, John Marston, John Webster, Cyril Tourneur, Thomas Middleton: An Index

1982 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 110
Author(s):  
Helen S. Thomas ◽  
Louise Charles Stagg
Author(s):  
James M. Bromley

This book examines ‘queer style’ or forms of masculinity grounded in superficiality, inauthenticity, affectation, and the display of the extravagantly clothed body in early modern English city comedies. Queer style destabilizes distinctions between able-bodied and disabled, human and nonhuman, and the past and the present—distinctions that have structured normative ways of thinking about sexuality. Glimpsing the worldmaking potential of queer style, plays by Ben Jonson, George Chapman, Thomas Middleton, and Thomas Dekker imagine alternatives to the prevailing modes of subjectivity, sociability, and eroticism in early modern London. While the characters associated with queer style are situated in a hostile generic and historical context, this book draws on recent work on disability, materiality, and queer temporality to rethink their relationship to those contexts so as to access the utopian possibilities of early modern queer style. These theoretical frameworks also help bring into relief how the attachments and pleasures of early modern sartorial extravagance can estrange us from the epistemologies of sexuality that narrow current thinking about sexuality and its relationship to authenticity, pedagogy, interiority, and privacy.


Author(s):  
Rajabali Askarzadeh Torghabeh

Tragedy has its roots in man’s life. Tragedies appeared all around the world in the stories of all nations. In western drama, it is written that tragedy first appeared in the literature of ancient Greek drama and later in Roman drama. This literary genre later moved into the sixteenth century and Elizabethan period that was called the golden age of drama. In this period, we can clearly see that this literary genre is divided into different kinds. This genre is later moved into seventeenth century. The writer of the article has benefited from a historical approach to study tragedy, tragedy writers and its different kinds in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries. The author has also presented the chief features and characteristics of tragedies. The novelty of the article is the study of Spanish tragedy and its influences on revenge tragedies written by Shakespeare and other tragedy writers. Throughout the article, the author has also included some of the most important dramatists and tragedy writers of these periods including Thomas Kyd, William Shakespeare, John Marston, George Chapman, Tourneur and John Webster.


2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-186
Author(s):  
R. V. Young

Although T.S. Eliot's phrase “dissociation of sensibility,” applied to the changes in poetry during the seventeenth century, made a stir when he introduced it in the review essay “The Metaphysical Poets” in 1921, it draws less attention now, and seems never to have been adequately explained. Since Eliot's claims are, in part, historical, it makes sense to consider the most historically significant changes occurring during the seventeenth century. It is during this period that the Reformation culminates and its effects become permanently established. Several recent studies of the Reformation by Charles Taylor, Brad Gregory, and Carlos M.N. Eire provide clues about how the religious and social cataclysm of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may have affected the poetic imagination. James Smith's classic essay, “The Metaphysical Poets,” offers a way of analyzing the figurative language of seventeenth-century poetry in order to grasp the impact of the religious change. The investigations by Taylor, Gregory, and Eire into the dynamic of the reforming tendency, beginning in the late Middle Ages, as well as the Scotist and nominalist intellectual underpinnings of the Reformation, prove to be pertinent to Eliot's insight regarding seventeenth-century poetry. The growth of individualism, personal anxiety about religious choice, and materialism portend a general movement towards secularization and influence the way poets see the world. Dissociation of sensibility can thus be understood as a result of the effect of the religious and social dislocations of the Reformation in the realm of poetry.


Rural History ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
JULIE SANDERS

Abstract:In this article I ask what it means for cartographical, social, economic and political understandings of poverty and mobility when the ‘geography of vagrancy’, as A. L. Beier termed it, is re-staged and reconfigured in specific acts of writing and even specific acts of walking. Invoking a range of public performances as well as print and manuscript publications by recognised literary figures of the day, including work by Ben Jonson and John Taylor, I concentrate on one particular literary remaking of the everyday experiences of the mobile poor in Taylor's 1618 published pamphletThe Pennyles Pilgrimage or The Money-lesse perambulation, of Iohn Taylor, Alias the Kings Majesties Water-Poet. What Taylor understood when engaging with the ‘geography of vagrancy’ in his challenging text was that the act of mapping the spatial world of the itinerant poor required considerable thought not only about the spaces inhabited, albeit temporarily, or travelled through, but also the ways in which the mobile poor performed such spaces. In turn, Taylor's own performance can be understood as a contradictory act of commercial enterprise and self-promotion as well as one that gives literary historians significant access to contemporary imaginings of the specific socioeconomic and spatial conditions of poverty and mobility.


Author(s):  
Warren Boutcher

Chapter 2.3 analyses the English school of Montaigne in the context of the relationship between Renaissance education and the early modern nobility. The Englished Montaigne––translated by John Florio and dramatized by Samuel Daniel, Ben Jonson, John Marston, and others––was introduced as a critic of the tyranny of custom and as a participant in the aristocratic culture of private learning in the late Elizabethan, early Jacobean noble household. Documents discussed range from the paratexts to Florio’s translation and the English text of ‘Of the institution and education of children’ to James Cleland’s work on the same subject and the famous portrait of Lady Anne Clifford. The chapter ends by offering a new perspective on Shakespeare’s use of Florio’s translation in The Tempest: that we should understand it in relation to Samuel Daniel’s use of similar passages in a play staged for the 1605 royal progress to the University of Oxford: The Queenes Arcadia.


1965 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-123
Author(s):  
Joseph W. Houppert

Modern biographers of Thomas Lodge have presented a remarkably clear record of his activities, both as writer and physician. However, the period of Lodge's second exile still remains obscure. Although Lodge's biographers agree that because of his Catholicism he fled to the continent during the first decade of the seventeenth century, none has been able accurately to record these years abroad. For example, Lodge's recent scholarly biographer, Charles Sisson, says that this second exile may have begun as early as May 8, 1604. But this statement is inaccurate, for on January 9, 1605/06 Lodge was indicted in London for recusancy, along with Ben Jonson and Edmund Boulton. Professor Sisson also argues that ‘Lodge was allowed to return [to England] early in 1611, as appears from an Act of the Privy Council of 28 January 1611, protecting him from indictment for recusancy, and from the letter dated 17 January 1611 in which he expressed his thanks to Sir Thomas Edmondes for help in bringing about his repatriation.’ But Lodge had returned to London as early as September 21, 1609 as will appear below.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document