Clothing and Queer Style in Early Modern English Drama

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.

Ben Jonson’s Imitation Games

This chapter considers why sartorial affectation holds exemplary status as a “humor” to be purged through humiliating exposure in humors comedies. This exemplarity carries over to city comedy’s depiction of masculinity when Ben Jonson creates a bridge between the genres in his Every Man in His Humour. The play has been traditionally understood as drawing on humoral theory to reaffirm class hierarchies and align masculinity with competitive individualism. However, this chapter demonstrates that when this play is situated in relation to other humors comedies by George Chapman as well as Jonson’s other non-dramatic writings, the distinction between the authentic masculinity of the city gallant, true poet, and trickster servant and its inauthentic imitation in the gull, plagiarist, and braggart soldier falls apart. The chapter draws on the overlap of accounts of nonnormative embodiment within disability and queer theory to help reveal that Jonson’s play encourages a broader range of acceptable variations in masculine embodiment than modern post-Cartesian forms of selfhood permit. These nonstandard forms of embodiment, in turn, are the basis for attachments between men and attachments to the objects of material culture, especially clothing.

Villainy in France (1463-1610)

This is a book about the outward manifestation of inner malice—that is to say, villainy—in French culture (1463–1610). In pre-modern France, villainous offences were countered, if never fully contained, by intersecting legal and literary responses. Combining insights from legal anthropology with literary and historical analysis, this study examines villainy across juridical documents, criminal records, and literary texts (broadly conceived). While few people obtained justice through the law, many pursued out-of-court settlements of one kind or another. Literary texts commemorated villainies both fictitious and historical; literature sometimes instantiated the process of redress, and enabled the transmission of conflicts from one context to another. Villainy in France follows this overflowing current of pre-modern French culture, examining its impact within France and across the English Channel. Scholars and cultural critics of the Anglophone world have long been fascinated by villainy and villains. This book reveals the subject’s significant ‘Frenchness’ and establishes a transcultural approach to it in law and literature. Villainy’s particular significance emerges through its representation in authors remembered for their less-than respectable, even criminal, activities: François Villon, Clément Marot, François Rabelais, Pierre de L’Estoile, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Marston, and George Chapman. Villainy in France affords comparison of these authors alongside many of their lesser-known contemporaries; in so doing, it reinterprets French conflicts within a wider European context, from the mid-fifteenth century to the early seventeenth century.

Transcultural Debasement

L’Estoile’s journals are a major confluence of legal and tragic discourses on villainy, including high-brow tragedy. Chapter 18 focuses on a tragic problem coursing throughout this book: why the nobility, especially prominent military leaders, found it so difficult to shake off villainy even at the point of death. This chapter covers two notorious examples: Louis Bussy d’Amboise and Charles de Gontaut, Duc de Biron. L’Estoile was among the first of many observers to reflect on the high drama of their deaths. Between law and literature, L’Estoile records the lineaments of an ambivalent discourse on valour and villainy that would develop more fully as the ‘discursive space’ expanded into England. The debasement of Bussy and Biron was revisited in stage tragedies by George Chapman, whose work afforded a transcultural meditation on two haughty malcontents who thought they were above common and criminal law.

Plays 1598–1603

The chapter begins by marking out the boundaries of ‘early Jonson’ with reference to theatre history and bibliography, before providing recorded responses to Jonson in the contemporary theatre. It identifies 1597 as a key year in his dramatic development, particularly pointing to the influence of George Chapman on Jonson’s playwriting and on popular London theatre more generally. The Case Is Altered, Jonson’s first extant performed play, is analysed in detail, with special attention paid to his presentation of households on the stage (the carefully delineated status of the steward, his lord, and other servants), and integral use of properties, costume and objects in stage business. The conclusion points to Jonson’s skill in crafting little worlds within the theatre, and in bringing London onto the stage.

The Study of Revenge Tragedies and Their Roots

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.