Ben Jonson's Theatrical Republics FROM THE PUBLISHER
This timely book challenges conventional critical wisdom about the work of Ben Jonson. Looking in particular at his Jacobean and Caroline plays, it explores his engagement with concepts of republicanism. Julie Sanders investigates notions of community in Jonson's stage worlds--his "theatrical republics"--and reveals a Jonson to contrast with the traditional image of the writer as conservative, absolutist, misogynist, and essentially "anti-theatrical." The Jonson presented here is a positive celebrant of the social and political possibilities of theatre.
FROM THE CRITICS
Booknews
The co-editor of Refashioning Ben Johnson (1998) challenges the conventional characterization of Elizabethan dramatist and King's poet Ben Johnson as stodgily conservative. For her analysis of his pro-republican sympathies especially in the later plays, Sanders (English, Keele U.) draws mainly upon the Cambridge U. Press edition of the Selected Plays of Ben Johnson (ed. by Butler and Proctor, 1989). The author focuses on the playwright's public rather than court productions where she discerns a microcosm of the social currents for extending subjects' rights in his themes: e.g. "Something About Venice" (republics fake and genuine), "The Staple of News" (the commonwealth of print media), The New Inn (alternative societies), and A Tale of a Tub (local government and personal rule). Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
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