EN360 Ben Jonson in Context: Week-By-Week Readings

EN360 Ben Jonson in Context: Week-by-Week Readings

The coursebooks will be Oxford World's Classics Ben Jonson: Five Plays (ed. G. A. Wilkes; Oxford 1981; reissued 2009) and the Delphi Kindle edition of The Complete Works of Ben Jonson. Students may also wish to purchase the New Mermaid Epicoene (ed. Holdsworth), used from £0.16, and the New Mermaid or Revels Eastward Ho!. You can also get a Carcanet Epigrams and The Forest (ed. Dutton).

Each week there will be short additional readings to help you understand the primary material in its context. It is my expectation that you will come to class having read at least one, and usually two of them. Consistent failure to do so will prejudice your ability to answer the assessment questions and will incur my (just) wrath.

WUL: ebook in or journal available through Warwick University Library

CoEx: Course extract on the course extracts page http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/library/electronicresources/extracts/en/.

Week 1, The Forest (1616) and Horace's Art of Poetry, translated by Jonson (1640) (in the Delphi Kindle edition)

Victoria Moul, ‘Translating Horace, Translating Jonson’, chapter 5 of her Jonson, Horace and the Classical Tradition (CUP, 2010), 173-210. (Ebook via WUL)

Sara Van Den Berg, ‘True relation: the life and career of Ben Jonson’ in The Cambridge Companion to Ben Jonson, ed. Richard Harp and Stanley Stewart, pp. 1-14. (Ebook via WUL)

Week 2, Every Man in His Humour (1598)

Richard Allen Cave, “Ben Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour: a Case Study” in The Cambridge History of British Theatre, Volume 1: Origins to 1660, ed. Jane Milling and Peter Thomson, (CUP, 2004), pp. 282-297. (Ebook via WUL)

‘Every Man In His Humour: Comment 1667-1950’, pp. 63-76 in Every Man in His Humour and The Alchemist: A Casebook, ed. R.V. Holdsworth (Macmillan, 1978). (CoEx)

Week 3, Cynthia's Revels (1600)

Hester Lees-Jeffries, ‘The Public Fountain: Elizabethan Politics and the Humanist Tradition’ in her England’s Helicon: Fountains in Early Modern Literature and Culture (OUP, 2007), p. 197ff. (Ebook via WUL)

Matthew Steggle, ‘Cynthia Waning: Cynthia’s Revels Imagines the Death of the Queen’ in Annaliese Connolly and Lisa Hopkins (eds), Goddesses and Queens: The Iconography of Elizabeth I (MUP, 2007; repr. pbk., 2013) (CoEx).

Week 4, Sejanus (1603)

Blair Worden, ‘Ben Jonson among the Historians’ in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 67-90. (CoEx)

James Loxley, ‘Words as Deeds: Sejanus and Cataline’ in The Complete Critical Guide to Ben Jonson (Routledge, 2002), pp. 57-65. (Ebook via WUL) Week 5, Eastward Ho! (1605) and/or Volpone (1606)

Gregory Chaplin, ""Divided Amongst Themselves": Collaboration and Anxiety in Jonson's Volpone", English Literary History 69.1 (2002): 57-81. (WUL)

For Eastward Ho!: Kate Aughterson, The English Renaissance: An Anthology, excerpts from Section 8, esp. 8.8 to 8.18. (WUL)

For Volpone: Richard Dutton, Ben Jonson, Volpone and the Gunpowder Plot (CUP, 2008), esp. chapters 4 (‘Volpone and Beast Fable’, pp. 73-93) and 5 (‘Volpone and Venice’, pp. 94-108). (one chapter on CoEx)

Week 6, Reading Week

Week 7, Masques: Prince Henry's Barriers (1610); Masque of Oberon (1611); Christmas, His Masque (1616); The Gypsies Metamorphosed (1621).

Martin Butler, ‘Courtly Negotiations’, pp. 20-40 in David Bevington and Peter Holbrook (eds.), The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque (Cambridge, 1998). (CoEx)

Francois Laroque, extracts from Shakespeare’s Festive World (tr. Janet Lloyd; CUP, 1991), esp. 148-154 and any other sections you find in the index on Christmas.

Leah S. Marcus, The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes, (University of Chicago Press, 1989), Chapter 3, ‘The Court Restored to the Country’, esp. pp. 76-85. (CoEx)

Martin Butler, “‘We are one mans all’: Jonson’s ‘The Gipsies Metamorphosed’”, The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 21: Politics, Patronage and Literature in England 1558-1658, Special Number (1991), pp. 253- 273. (WUL)

Week 8, Epicoene (1609)

Bruce Thomas Boehrer, ‘Epicoene, charivari, Skimmington’, English Studies, 75:1 (1994), pp. 17-33. (WUL)

Karen Newman, ‘City Talk: Women and Commodification in Jonson’s Epicoene’, English Literary History, 56.3 (Autumn, 1989), pp. 503-518. (WUL)

Week 9, The Alchemist (1610)

Derek B. Alwes, ‘Service as Mastery in The Alchemist’, Ben Jonson Journal. Vol. 17 (May 2010), pp. 38-59. (WUL)

Andrew Moran, ‘The Apotropaic and Sanctified Marriage of Sulfur and Mercury in The Alchemist’, Ben Jonson Journal, Vol. 20 (2013), pp. 1-19. (WUL)

Week 10, Bartholomew Faire (1614)

Richard Levin, ‘The Structure of Bartholmew Fair’, PMLA 80:3 (1965), 172-9. (WUL)

Eugene M. Waith, ‘The Staging of Bartholmew Fair’, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 2:2 (1962), 181- 95. (WUL) Some Further Reading (asterisks denote WUL e-books)

Barton, Anne, Ben Jonson, Dramatist. CUP, 1984

Bevington, David, Martin Butler, Ian Donaldson (gen. eds), The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson. CUP, 2012.

Butler, Martin (ed.), Re-presenting Ben Jonson : Text, Performance, History. Palgrave, 1999.*

Cave, Richard Allen, Elizabeth Schafer and Brian Woolland (eds), Ben Jonson and Theatre : Performance, Practice, and Theory. Routledge, 1999.

Craig, D. H. (ed), Ben Jonson : the Critical Heritage 1599-1798. Routledge, 1990.

Donaldson, Ian, Ben Jonson : a Life. OUP, 2011.

Dutton, Richard. Ben Jonson, Volpone and the Gunpowder Plot. CUP, 2008.

Giddens, Eugene (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Ben Jonson. OUP, forthcoming. But some items are already online on the Oxford Handbooks Online platform (via the Library catalogue), including my own fantastically exciting essay on early eighteenth-century editions of Jonson (read it and weep – for so many reasons...!).*

Harp, Richard and Stanley Stewart (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Ben Jonson. CUP, 2000.*

Loxley, James, The Complete Critical Guide to Ben Jonson. Routledge, 2002.*

Sanders, Julie (ed.), Ben Jonson in Context. CUP, 2010.