Mammon in the Market; or, How Ben Jonson Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Capitalism

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-65
Author(s):  
Bernard Krumm
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Free State ◽  
Market Society ◽  
Economic Issues ◽  
City Comedy ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Economic Landscape ◽  
Apparent Influence ◽  
Bartholomew Fair

I will argue that the “middle comedies” of Ben Jonson, specifically The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair, address concerns that are not only social and economic but also political in nature. Or, to put it another way, the economic issues that these plays address are also political. As the economic landscape shapes social life in city comedy, so too do political concerns exert an important, if perhaps less apparent, influence over the plays that I will examine here. In The Alchemist, Sir Epicure Mammon fantasizes about relocating to a “free state” so that he may enjoy the pleasures that his newly acquired capital can afford him without drawing the ire and suspicion of the monarch (4.1.156). In Bartholomew Fair, Justice Overdo proclaims that he acts on behalf of king and commonwealth when trying to regulate the capitalistic chaos of the local fair. The prevalence of the language of politics (of commonwealth, monarchy, republicanism) in these plays suggests that their economic concerns have significant political implications. Each play offers a resolution to this conflict in accordance with dramatic propriety, what is appropriate given the circumstances. The justice that is done and the order that is achieved at the conclusion of each play is not carried out by politicians or magistrates but rather shaped by the market society in which the characters operate. The characters who try to regulate the market or expose its corruption fail miserably, while the characters who triumph at the end of each play work the system and manipulate the circumstances to their advantage.

Chaste Selfhood: Ben Jonson’s Critique of Urban Chastity Tropes

Chaste Value ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Gillen
Keyword(s):  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Commodity Markets ◽  
City Comedy ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Male Subjectivity ◽  
Bartholomew Fair ◽  
City Comedies

This chapter considers the bourgeois subjectivity articulated in city comedy. It begins by addressing the tendency of city comedies such as Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl, Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, and the anonymous The Fair Maid of the Exchange to juxtapose chaste women with desiring, fragmented male characters so as to critique an ineffectual masculinity that flounders in the urban marketplace. The chapter then turns to Ben Jonson, whose treatment of chastity—and the intersection of gender, sexuality, and commerce more generally—has been underexplored. Jonson satirizes conventional deployments of chastity in Epicoene, rendering chaste integrity impossible in early capitalist environments and rejecting the queer implications of a model of male subjectivity that defines itself through theatrical chastity. Bartholomew Fair, by contrast, invokes chastity’s commodity status in order to present—and largely embrace—a queer, contingent form of early capitalist subjectivity. Furthermore, Jonson applies this model of commoditised subjectivity to the condition of the commercial playwright, indicating that his own agency as an author lies in the ability to negotiate the strictures of the commodity markets to which he is subjected.

“To Corrupt a Man in the Midst of a Verse”: Ben Jonson and the Prose of the World

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-72
Author(s):  
Jacob Tootalian
Keyword(s):  
Mixed Mode ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Digital Analysis ◽  
Interactive Engagement ◽  
Sentence Level ◽  
Linguistic Patterns ◽  
The World ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
Bartholomew Fair

Ben Jonson's early plays show a marked interest in prose as a counterpoint to the blank verse norm of the Renaissance stage. This essay presents a digital analysis of Jonson's early mixed-mode plays and his two later full-prose comedies. It examines this selection of the Jonsonian corpus using DocuScope, a piece of software that catalogs sentence-level features of texts according to a series of rhetorical categories, highlighting the distinctive linguistic patterns associated with Jonson's verse and prose. Verse tends to employ abstract, morally and emotionally charged language, while prose is more often characterized by expressions that are socially explicit, interrogative, and interactive. In the satirical economy of these plays, Jonson's characters usually adopt verse when they articulate censorious judgements, descending into prose when they wade into the intractable banter of the vicious world. Surprisingly, the prosaic signature that Jonson fashioned in his earlier drama persisted in the two later full-prose comedies. The essay presents readings of Every Man Out of his Humour and Bartholomew Fair, illustrating how the tension between verse and prose that motivated the satirical dynamics of the mixed-mode plays was released in the full-prose comedies. Jonson's final experiments with theatrical prose dramatize the exhaustion of the satirical impulse by submerging his characters almost entirely in the prosaic world of interactive engagement.

scholarly journals What Is Spontaneous Order?

2019 ◽  
Vol 114 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-80
Author(s):  
DANIEL LUBAN
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Order Theory ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Spontaneous Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Internal Logic ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Human Practices ◽  
Individual Actions ◽  
Analytical Weight

Due especially to the work of Friedrich Hayek, “spontaneous order” has become an influential concept in social theory. It seeks to explain how human practices and institutions emerge as unintended consequences of myriad individual actions, and points to the limits of rationalism and conscious design in social life. The political implications of spontaneous order theory explain both the enthusiasm and the skepticism it has elicited, but its basic mechanisms remain elusive and underexamined. This article teases out the internal logic of the concept, arguing that it can be taken to mean several different things. Some are forward-looking (defining it in terms of present-day functioning), whereas others are backward-looking (defining it in terms of historical origins). Yet none of these possibilities prove fully coherent or satisfactory, suggesting that spontaneous order cannot bear the analytical weight that has been placed on it.

scholarly journals எம்.வி. வெங்கட்ராம் கதைகளில் சமுதாய நோக்கு

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-162
Author(s):  
P Bama
Keyword(s):  
Social Purpose ◽  
Economic Issues ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Social ◽  
Government Education ◽  
Common Man ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Vast Area

A community is a group of people living in a vast area fulfilling all their needs. Its noble purpose is to make the crowd live happily and orderly. Every common man should be well aware of political implications, economic issues, and scientific advances.The society needs to acquire knowledge in the above fields to prosper. After the birth of man, the individual becomes one with the society only by being subjected to the constructive plans of the society while doing many actions by the power of innumerable individuals like him. Societal elements are divided into five categories: family, government, education, language, and religion. Only when all these work together unselfishly can the social purpose be fully successful.

scholarly journals Reciprocity and redistribution in an Economy of Solidarity (Reciprocidad y redistribución en una economía solidaria)

2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-98
Author(s):  
María Eugenia Santana E.
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Civil Society Organizations ◽  
World Social Forum ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
Market Society ◽  
Community Currencies ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Global Movement ◽  
Urban Rural

The ‘Economy of Solidarity’ is a proposal that appeared in Latin America in the last decade of the twentieth century as part of the global movement seeking alternatives to the market society model. The Economy of Solidarity suggests that society claims responsibility on the basis of solidarity in the production, distribution and consumption, and that the economic practice regenerates social life with models of reciprocity and redistribution outside the capitalist system. The first part of the text summarizes the historical circumstances of the emergence of civil society organizations in Latin America, whose various alternative initiatives came together in the so-called World Social Forum since the year 2000. The second part explains the proposal of the Economy of Solidarity as part of that movement by highlighting the role of the gift culture, and the concepts of reciprocity and redistribution, which are defined in detail due to their relevance in the alternatives to capitalism. The examples of both concepts are included; an example of reciprocity is the exchange of products at local markets, seeking a more balanced urban-rural relationship; a redistribution example is used in social or community currencies that facilitate the distribution of basic goods between local market's participants. Finally, we admit there is still some way ahead before the Economy of Solidarity becomes a reality, but its scope should be observed by social scientists.

Land Fictions and the Politics of Commodification in City and Country

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
D. Asher Ghertner ◽  
Robert W. Lake
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Economic Order ◽  
Market Society ◽  
Natural Systems ◽  
Property Relations ◽  
Continuous Work ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Classic Argument

This chapter explores the “land fictions” underpinning this variable land commodification recipe, without presuming that the cocktail of commodified outcomes it produces follows a single storyline or shares a fixed cast of characters. It emphasizes the continuous work of legal, regulatory, and narrative fictions that go into the making of land as a commodity and that enact and sustain the property relations that underpin linked value projects. This involves following the stories spun by land aggregators, developers, financiers, and marketers in all their guises. To open up the narratives, storylines, and discourses that govern the commodity world of land, the chapter introduces Karl Polanyi's classic argument about the commodity fiction underpinning what he termed market society, by which he meant a political-economic order in which social life is organized to meet the pecuniary, ideological, and administrative needs of a so-called self-regulating market. With the recognition of commodity fiction, this chapter unveils the constitutive fictions by which various nonmarket functions of land, labor, and money become imaginatively and practically stripped away, reducing complex social and natural systems to “elements of industry” or mere objects of exchange.

Ben Jonson and the Limits of Distributed Cognition

2019 ◽  
pp. 138-152
Author(s):  
Raphael Lyne
Keyword(s):  
Distributed Cognition ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Cognitive Ecology ◽  
Andy Clark ◽  
Bartholomew Fair

Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614) and The Alchemist (1610) depict characters attempting to establish and redefine themselves within and against the marketplace. In this chapter the network of goods for sale, and especially the street-sellers’ cries which were so characteristic of London life, and which are recorded in songs from the period, are seen as a cognitive ecology in which dramatic versions of distributed selfhood take particular shapes. Jonson’s plays anticipate and also comment on notions of extended, economic, and ‘soft’ selfhood like those explored by Andy Clark, Don Ross, and others.

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