Pedagogical enormities and the fairing of a wasp and a bee in Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair

2019 ◽  
pp. 204-228
Keyword(s):  
Bartholomew Fair

“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.

A Parliament of Monsters: Romantic Nonhumans and Victorian Erasure

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ted Geier
Keyword(s):  
Mary Shelley ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
Bartholomew Fair

Shows the robust nonhuman concern in Romantic works through new readings of Mary Shelley, Burns, Wordsworth, Clare, and Coleridge. The chapter traces these themes and forms of threatened, abject life as an expansive multispecies community of suffering. These works interrogate the weakness of expressive forms, performing the very captivity they lament. Wordsworth’s poem on the Bartholomew Fair is a fulcrum to the London studies in the book. These forms of expression are then examined in Dickens’s narratology and the narrator-object Esther in Bleak House.

Form in Bartholomew Fair

1972 ◽  
Vol 21 (109) ◽  
pp. 8-11
Author(s):  
J. E. M. Latham
Keyword(s):  
Bartholomew Fair

scholarly journals ‘Look What Market She Hath Made’: Women, Commerce, and Power in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and Bartholomew Fair

Early Theatre ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Keri Sanburn Behre
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Women's Roles ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Complete Understanding ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Women’S Roles ◽  
Food Economy ◽  
Bartholomew Fair

This essay examines the effects of women’s roles in early modern English food marketplaces, highlighting ways that ordinary women could use their participation in food transactions to destabilize (and even subvert) power structures and garner authority. In Thomas Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1613) and Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614), food informs a complete understanding of early modern attitudes toward shifting gender roles in the ever-evolving and expanding food economy. 

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