Abstract
The traditionalist view of Ben Jonson has been that of a theatrical absolutist, of someone who struggled with the inherent heterogeneity of theatre audiences and to control the meanings of his texts. Those meanings have themselves frequently been read as absolutist in their sympathies.1 Jonson’s ‘late’ plays have, however, a particular investment in questions of community, from the fractious dinner-party guests at Lady Loadstone’s house in The Magnetic Lady (1632) to the Sherwood Forest groupings of the unfinished The Sad Shepherd (1637).2 The New Inn (1629) offers a number of theatrical alternatives as well as a vision of an alternative society amidst its alehouse gathering.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Essentially ‘absolutist’ readings of Jonson include Richard Helgersori’s Self-Crowned Laureates: Jonson, Spenser, Milton, and the Literary Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983)
and Richard Helgersori ‘Ben Jonson’, in Thomas N. Corns (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Poetry: Donne to Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 148–70.
See also Robert N. Watson, Ben Jonson’s Parodic Strategy: Literary Imperialism in the Comedies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
Richard Allen Cave looks at the communities of the late plays in Ben Jonson (London: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 144–71.
See Anne Barton, ‘The New Inn and the Problem of Jonson’s Late Style’, English Literary Renaissance, 9 (1979), 395–418.
See Peter Clark, The English Alehouse, 1200–1830 (London and New York: Longman, 1983);
and Peter Clark, ‘The Alehouse and the Alternative Society’, in Donald Pennington and Keith Thomas (eds), Puritans and Revolutionaries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 47–72;
S.K. Roberts, ‘Alehouses, Brewing and Government under the Early Stuarts’, Southern History, 2 (1980), 45–71;
and Keith Wrightson, ‘Alehouses, Order and Reformation in Rural England, 1590–1660’, in Eileen and Stephen Yeo (eds), Popular Culture and Class Conflict, 1590–1914 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981), pp. 1–27.
See Graham Parry, The Golden Age Restored: The Culture of the Stuart Court, 1603–42 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981).
See Richard Dutton, ‘Hamlet, An Apology for Actors and the Sign of the Globe’, Shakespeare Survey, 41 (1989), 35–43.
Charles Nicholl, in The Reckoning (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), his recent book of ruminations upon the death of Christopher Marlowe, records how similar prejudice and cultural stereotyping has led to the popular notion of the Deptford establishment where Marlowe died or was murdered as a sleazy pub, when in truth it was a highly reputable inn and lodgings house run by an eminent citizen’s widow.
See Marcus, The Politics of Mirth, pp. 106–39. See also David Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
See Richard S. Peterson, Imitation and Praise in the Poems of Ben Jonson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981).
Simon Hornblower, ‘Creation and Development of Democratic Institutions in Ancient Greece’, in John Dunn (ed.), Democracy: The Unfinished Journey, 508 BC to AD 1993 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 1–6 (p. 1).
See also Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
Thomas Hobbes would cite Sparta as a paradigm in his more absolutist political writings. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991; repr. 1994).
The proceedings of a court of love are set out in the locus classicus, the Aresta Amorum, sive Processus inter Amantes cum Decisionibus Parlamenti of Martial d’Auvergne, written circa 1455, and which went through more than 35 editions between 1500 and 1734. Actual assemblies as described here had been held in Europe, although there are no records of such proceedings in England: however, a number of the entertainments devised for Elizabeth I bore obvious resemblance (in that respect this particular choice of motif could be seen as another nostalgic strategy). Certainly a number of playtexts at this time recognized the stage potential of such events - Heywood’s Play of Love, Marston’s The Faun, and Massinger’s The Parliament of Love amongst them (unfortunately the latter survives only in mutilated form and we are unsure if it was ever performed). See Michael Hattawaÿ’s introductory essay to his Revels edition of The New Inn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).
See Parry, The Golden Age Restored and Erica Veevers, Images of Love and Religion: Queen Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Henrietta Maria herself took part in many of these productions and is credited with having presaged the advent of female actors on the stage at the time of her son’s 1660 restoration. See Sophie Tomlinson, ‘She that Plays the King: Henrietta Maria and the Threat of the Actress in Caroline Culture’, in McMullan and Hope (eds), The Politics of Tragicomedy, pp. 189–207. See also Elizabeth Howe, The First English Actresses: Women and Drama, 1660–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). I expand on these ideas in ‘“The Day’s Sports Devised in the Inn”: Jonson’s The New Inn and Theatrical Politics’, Modern Language Review, 91 (1996), 545–60, and in “’Twill Fit the Players Yet”: Women and Theatre in Jonson’s Late Plays’, forthcoming.
Conrad Russell, ‘Parliament and the King’s Finances’, in Russell (ed.), The Origins of the English Civil War, pp. 91–116 (p. 91). See also Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 1632–42 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 72–4.
I am aware in making this observation that I am producing an essentially ‘Whig’ version of seventeenth-century history which revisionist historians would challenge. See, for example, Russell (ed.), The Origins of the English Civil War. For more tempered accounts of the Ship Money debate, see Michael J. Braddick, The Nerves of State: Taxation and the Financing of the English State, 1558–1714 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), esp. pp. 83–6 and pp. 180–99;
Peter Lake, ‘The Collection of Ship Money in Cheshire during the 1630s: A Case Study of Relations between Central and Local Government’, Northern History, 17 (1981), 44–71;
K. Fincham, ‘The Judges’ Decision on Ship Money in February 1637: The Reaction of Kent’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 57 (1984), 230–7; and Cust and Hughes, ‘Introduction’, pp. 31–2.
On other prerogative taxes, see Richard Cust, The Forced Loan and English Politics, 1626–1628 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1998 Julie Sanders
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sanders, J. (1998). Alternative Societies: The New Inn and the Late Plays. In: Ben Jonson’s Theatrical Republics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230389441_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230389441_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-39951-2
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-38944-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)