Notes on Ben Jonson, from a Seventeenth Century Common-Place Book

1912 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 296 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Quincy Adams
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Ben Jonson

ThePennyles Pilgrimageof John Taylor: Poverty, Mobility and Performance in Seventeenth-Century Literary Circles

Rural History ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
JULIE SANDERS
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Commercial Enterprise ◽  
Everyday Experiences ◽  
John Taylor ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Literary Circles

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.

Thomas Lodge's Letters to William Trumbull

1965 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-123
Author(s):  
Joseph W. Houppert
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Privy Council ◽  
Thomas Lodge

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.

Ben Jonson and the Illusion of Completeness

PMLA ◽  
1969 ◽  
Vol 84 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. A. Beaturline
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
External World ◽  
The Other ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Infinite Class ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Significant Distinction ◽  
Century Literature

IN Our Knowledge of the External World, Bertrand Russell makes a significant distinction between two kinds of infinity. One kind is illustrated by the progression from zero to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, on to infinity; Russell calls this an infinite progression, and it is unlimited. The other idea is illustrated by the division of an interval between, say, one and two; first divide it into halves, then divide each of those halves, and so on infinitely. This is a compact series or an infinite class, and it is limited. The infinite progression and the infinite class are quite different ideas, and they have different philosophical uses. I suggest that a similar distinction may be made concerning literary forms, and that this distinction helps us to understand what is new about Ben Jonson's dramatic method. The distinction reverberates through seventeenth-century literature, I believe, but Jonson is especially interesting because he is somewhat of a pioneer.

The Independent Masque 1700–1800: A Catalogue

1995 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 59-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Burden
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Between The Acts ◽  
Subsequent Regeneration ◽  
Do So

The masque—a long-established if only loosely defined form which had its origins in the Elizabethan revels—underwent striking changes in the course of the seventeenth century. Having reached a sophisticated and inevitably short-lived unity of all its possible dramatic elements during the first quarter of the century, this unity was first undermined by the departure of Ben Jonson in 1631 from the team at Court, and then all but extinguished by the Commonwealth. Although its performance during the Interregnum and its subsequent regeneration both at Court and in private are more vigorous than is usually believed, there was never the money to revive its earlier splendour, nor the political climate in which to do so. There was, of course, a revival of the pre-Commonwealth habit of inserting masques into spoken plays, and towards the end of the century, masques were also interpolated between the acts of spoken plays. Masques were also included in the ‘dramatick’ operas of the 1670s and 1690s, but although the masques here were more extravagant than those in plays, this use did not give the genre theatrical independence.

Medieval American Literature: Antebellum Narratives and the “Map of the Infinite”

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Giles
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
William Shakespeare ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
American Renaissance ◽  
Native Soil ◽  
The Subject

This chapter examines how the notion of medieval American literature not only makes a paradoxical kind of sense but might be seen as integral to the construction of the subject more generally. It argues that antebellum narratives situate native soil on a highly charged and fraught boundary between past and present, circumference and displacement. In itself, the idea of medieval American literature is hardly more peculiar than F. O. Matthiessen's conception of an “American Renaissance.” Matthiessen sought to justify his subject by aligning nineteenth-century American writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne with seventeenth-century English forerunners such as William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. The chapter considers resonances of medievalism within nineteenth-century American culture and how many antebellum writers consciously foreground within their texts the shifting, permeable boundaries of time and space, suggesting how fiction and cartography, the writing of history and the writing of geography, are commensurate with each other.

Musician and Poet

2021 ◽  
pp. 263-282
Author(s):  
Christine Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Leisure Activity ◽  
Sir Philip Sidney ◽  
John Donne ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Giambattista Marino ◽  
Rough Draft ◽  
Music Books ◽  
The Times

Music-making was a popular leisure activity in aristocratic households in the early seventeenth century and a growing number of courtier poets wrote and exchanged verse in aristocratic salons and literary coteries. Chapter 12 continues the exploration of Herbert’s intellectual achievements and reputation as a polymath. It traces his interest in playing the lute and singing, and the musical preferences and fashions demonstrated by the music books he owned and the preludes, fantasias, pavanes, galliards, courantes, voltes, sarabands, and airs assembled in his unique manuscript lute book. It probes his inclusion among the metaphysical poets, exploring the influence of John Donne and Giambattista Marino, but also that of Ben Jonson, Thomas Carew, and Sir Philip Sidney, and of Horace, Juvenal, and Ovid. It uses the themes of love, beauty, immortality, and death to examine examples of his sonnets, elegies, epitaphs, satires, and lyrical poems, some of which were published posthumously as The Occasional Verses of Lord Herbert of Cherbury in 1665, and looks briefly at his Latin philosophical poems and his rough draft for a masque. It explores his preference for deploying verbal ingenuity and erudition rather than feelings, his deployment of metaphysical conceits and concepts, his innovative experimentation with rhyme and the extent of his participation in the literary coterie culture of the times. It claims a place for him among the leading minor poets and suggests that this was an impressive achievement for a man heavily engaged in other intellectual fields as well as political and estate matters.

Courtier, Scholar, and Man of the Sword

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
John Donne ◽  
Country House ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
European Republic

Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1582–1648) was a flamboyant Stuart courtier, county governor, soldier, and diplomat who acquired a reputation for duelling and extravagant display but also numbered among the leading intellectuals of his generation. He travelled widely in the British Isles and Europe, enjoyed the patronage of princely rulers and their consorts, acquired celebrity as the embodiment of chivalric values, and defended European Protestantism on the battlefield and in diplomatic exchanges. As a scholar and author of De veritate and The Life and Raigne of King Henry the Eighth, he commanded respect in the European Republic of Letters and accumulated a substantial library. As a courtier, he penned poetry and exchanged verses with John Donne and Ben Jonson, compiled a famous lute-book, wrote an autobiography, commissioned portraits, and built a new country house. Herbert was a Janus figure who cherished the masculine values and martial lifestyle of his ancestors but embraced the Renaissance scholarship and civility of the early modern court and anticipated the intellectual and theological liberalism of the Enlightenment. His life and writings provide a unique window into the aristocratic world and cultural mindset of the early seventeenth century and into the outbreak and impact of the Thirty Years War and British Civil Wars. This book examines his career, lifestyle, political allegiances, religious beliefs, and scholarship within their contemporary European context, challenges the reputation he has acquired as a dilettante scholar, boastful autobiographer, royalist turncoat, and early deist, and offers a new assessment of his life and achievement.

"Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue": William Cavendish, Ben Jonson, and the Decorative Scheme of Bolsover Castle*

1999 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 402-439 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Raylor
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThe iconography of Bolsover Castle is much appreciated but little understood. This is because we have not recognized its dynamic, theatrical character, which centers on — indeed, implies the presence of its seventeenth-century owner, William Cavendish, duke of Newcastle. Read in terms of Cavendish's self-conception as a figure of patriachal authority and Herculean passions, the castle emerges as a witty apologia for its owner — and perhaps even as a site for the pursuit of his amours. This reading sheds new light upon the relationship between Cavendish, Bolsover, and Ben Jonson, who provided the text for a royal visit to Bolsover in 1634.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document