Helen Ostovich

This edition is the first complete modern critical edition of the play, based on Q1 (1600) with full commentary on genre (comical satire), the play's debt to Aristophanes, the inns of court milieu, its first performance at the Globe in 1599, its on-stage scripted audience, and its ton of aggression, which influenced the development of city comedy for the next 100 years.

This  latest modern critical edition of the play examines Jonson's late play (1632)  with an emphasis on his customary complexity of composition, a frame of jeering audience members, who find it hard to unravel the plot's audacious gamble in the face of unscrupulous competition, and an unusual focus on two girls representing Pleasure and the magnetic lady they live with, Lady Lodestone. the play appears in volume 6 of the Cambridge Edtion of the Works of Ben Jonson, eds David Bevington, Martin Butler, and Ian Donaldson.

RICHARD BROME ONLINE: Researchers bring historical work into the digital age

Today, March 1st 2010, marks the launch of a unique online edition of the collected plays of dramatist, Richard  Brome, which marks the culmination of a four-year project directed by researchers at Royal Holloway, University of London and the University of Sheffield.
The project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, was devised by Richard Cave, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Drama and Theatre at Royal Holloway and completed under his General Editorship by an international team of nine editors.

The aim behind the project was to provide wide-spread access to Brome’s work for scholars, theatre practitioners, and members of the public alike. Brome’s plays, which have not appeared in a complete edition since 1873, are now made available through the fully-searchable website which was the creation of HRI Digital at the Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield.

Brome, one-time secretary and assistant to Ben Jonson, wrote numerous comedies in a range of styles that were popular from the late 1620s until the closing of the theatres in 1642. Sixteen of these (fifteen exclusively by him, and one written in collaboration with Thomas Heywood) saw print in the seventeenth century. Till now they have not been reissued in a scholarly collected edition, though several plays have been individually edited. Each play is offered in Richard Brome Online as a period text and in an annotated, modernised version and is accompanied by both a critical and a textual introduction; there is a full glossary, bibliography, stage history and search engine. Most of the material contained in the site is printable; and access is free.

Two highly innovatory features of the edition are a result of the online format. Both period and modernised texts can be viewed independently or summoned on screen side-by-side for comparative reading/viewing. Uniquely, the annotations to the plays give access to a wealth of extracts explored in workshop by 22 professional actors, drawn chiefly from the alumni lists of the Royal Shakespeare Company and Shakespeare’s Globe. More than 30 hours of such performance work is included on the site, divided into 640 episodes illustrating the theatricality and stageability of the plays.

Professor Cave observed: “Working with actors in the editing process was, for the editorial panel, one of the most exciting aspects of the collaboration. In our discussions together around meanings, tone, actor-audience relations or characterisation, the actors’ contributions were fresh, informed, exploratory, and full of the insights that come only from their particular kinds of experience.”

“Editors and actors developed a profound respect for Brome’s artistry as they examined the plays together in workshops that were designed to give the texts a theatrical life and dynamic. Repeatedly the actors questioned why Brome’s comedies are not seen more regularly on our stages. Richard Brome Online is designed to make Brome’s work better known in the hope of restoring the plays to our current repertory,” he added.


To view the online edition visit: http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/brome

Jonson's choices: a playwright's life. "Volpone, or the fox": models for satire three questions of interpretation. "Epicoene, or the silent woman": why Dauphine wins why morose loses the new women and the boy-players. "The Alchemist": puritanism and business enterprise altruism and narcissism theatre and witchcraft - performative magic. "Bartholomew Fair": the anarchy of the fair authority, licence and warrant the daughters of Eve - wives and whores.

Locating the Queen's Men presents new and groundbreaking essays on early modern England's most prominent acting company, from their establishment in 1583 into the 1590s. Offering a far more detailed critical engagement with the plays than is available elsewhere, this volume ...

This paper argues that Q1 is a distinct and good version of Shakespeare's play, not necessarily written for a garter ceremony, and not unpopular with audiences and readers, as it was reprinted in 1619. The fact that it is shorter and different from the 1623 folio simply suggests that the play developed through performance during its 20+ years on stage.

Series Introduction Notes on Contributors Timeline Introduction 1 The Critical Backstory DAVID BEVINGTON 2 The Alchemist on the Stage: Performance, Collaboration and Deviation ELIZABETH SCHAFER and EMMA COX 3 The State of the Art MATTHEW STEGGLE 4 New Directions: Space, Plague and Satire in Ben Jonson's The Alchemist MATHEW MARTIN 5 New Directions: Staging Gender IAN MCADAM AND JULIE SANDERS 6 New Directions: The Alchemist and the Lower Bodily Stratum BRUCE BOEHRER 7 New Directions: Waiting for the End? Alchemy and Apocalypse in The Alchemist MARK HOULAHAN 8 Pedagogical Strategies and Web Resources ERIN JULIAN and HELEN OSTOVICH Notes Selected Bibliography Index

Site-specificity and the romance genre are conceptually poles apart in setting the scene of a play. Romance environments in English drama tend to be hazy never-never lands, often imaginary pastoral places like Arcadia or Arden, and, if recognizably named, usually exotic and beyond the ken of local audiences who have never travelled to France, Spain, Portugal, Italy or Scandinavia. Even if the places are English, a large city like London, a town like Oxford or small Suffolk villages like Fressingfield and Harleston might seem as remote as Copenhagen or Constantinople in an age when most people did not move outside of their own community. The factor that renders such places site-specific in the Queen’s Men’s repertory is the Queen’s Men themselves: roving knights of the road, touring servants of the queen, bringing her presence into the farthest reaches of England, north, south, east and west, themselves exotic figures who recreate in their dialogue and flexible staging practices the volatile spaces of sea, forest, town, court, foreign country and customs from Europe through to the middle east. The Queen’s Men inject the excitement of unfamiliar people, places and times into the locales they visit, and they do so with the unique authority of royal representatives and celebrities. Figuratively, they create a kind of palimpsest by imposing the imaginary time and space specific to the play over the native performance site, whether town hall, inn and sometimes inn-yard, or great hall, manufacturing metonymically, with their hand-held props and token sets, the idea of place as situation, rank, status and identity, including gender, like the miniature palimpsest of a boy actor playing a female role, or a master-swordsman, master-actor, master-clown like Tarlton playing a medieval knight.

What is true pleasure, and who is allowed to have it? Or rather, who is allowed to have her? In The Magnetic Lady, Ben Jonson reduces these questions to matters of gender and class, allegorizing pleasure as two nubile fourteen-year-old girls, one the heiress Placentia, the other her foster-sister and waiting-woman Pleasance. Both names suggest delights ranging from sweet amiability to sexual gratification, although neither girl offers much beyond her own ignorance in the way of personality. But then Jonson does not offer them as anything other than figures of male fantasy, to be contemplated and competed for in the presence of other men, ratifying and ranking male victories or losses. The girls are conventional objects of desire, tokens of economic and social exchange, female bodies whose reproductive power men appropriate as vehicles for transmitting and securing property. These blanket binaries inhibit more complicated characterizations that might otherwise mitigate the satirical context. But they do allow Jonson to establish the rightness of this system of feminine "nature" in the service of masculine "culture" by showing what happens when a household of women reappropriates maternity and motherhood in the course of their own pursuit of independent pleasure or profit. The very idea of women taking control of their own sexuality and procreativity threatens the dominant male order with illegitimate heirs that might topple the established rule. Though The Magnetic Lady develops the most explicit matriarchal takeover

This special issue on John Marston's The Dutch Courtesan illustrates the various tensions in London at the start of James I's reign. This city comedy deploys satire to urge its audience to see the anxiety and fears caused by misogyny, xenophobia, religious dissent, and contact with European foreigners, all of which create an alien environment infecting those who live in it. Each of the ten essays that make up the issue touches on these anxieties, or at least elements of strangeness that need arguing away or accepting as unresolvable in Marston's view of human nature.    

This offhand view of Jews as a naturally rebellious people was a commonplace of the time. Robert Burton, for example, describes them as wilful, obstinate, and peevish (iii.361) citing Josephus on the contentiousness of Jews even among themselves (i.53) and Luther on their pride and churlishness (iii.350).2But Carlo's eccentric argument gives the tradition of casual antisemitism an absurd skew by claiming that their pugnacity was restrained only by their diet, which sapped their bodies of size and strength. The neologisms of his last sentence expand conventional prejudice into fantastic hyperbole swollen by odd sounds and etymological motley. "Strummell-patcht" is an ambiguous compound. "Strummell" is thieves' cant for "straw"; "patcht" means "botched", a depreciatory epithet suggesting something made up in a hasty, clumsy, or imperfect fashion. Herford and Simpson (ix. 476) follow Gifford, defining "strummel-patcht" as "patched with straw" or "patched up of straw", without suggesting how this interpretation might fit the context. The term may apply to a Jack-a-Lent, a small stuffed puppet at which things were thrown during Lent. Such an image is not inappropriate in this play's Shrovetide setting, and the emphasis on smallness aptly contrasts with "Gigantomachiz'd", but nothing in the context directly supports the image of Jews as butts. The reference to straw may constitute an indirect association with scolds and complainers, on whom "a wisp, or small twist, of straw or hay, was often applied as a mark of opprobrium".3 Possibly Jonson's coinage is a variant of "patch-panell", an abusive epithet for someone shabbily dressed.' According to Criezenach, "traffic in old clothes" was a common occupation among Jews,5 and

... The Shandy males' attempts to contain and restrict meaning, whether in Wal-ter's intellectual systems, Toby's bowling-green replications, or Tristram's story-telling, push us to recognize their disjunctiveness, their repressiveness, their impotence, sex-ual and otherwise—in a ...

... Page 6. Contents Introduction 9 Helen Ostovich, Mary V. Silcox, and Graham Roebuck Part I: The Foreign Journey “An Habitation of Devils, a Domicill for Unclean Spirits, and a Den of Goblings”: The Marvelous North in Early Modern English Literature 27 Colleen Franklin ...

This paper argues that Q1 is a distinct and good version of Shakespeare's play, not necessarily written for a garter ceremony, and not unpopular with audiences and readers, as it was reprinted in 1619. The fact that it is shorter and different from the 1623 folio simply suggests that the play developed through performance during its 20+ years on stage.

Since 2005, the Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men project has been exploring the repertory of this prominent early company, 1583-1603. We have examined comedy and history in detail, and are focusing now on romance, a literary and folkloric genre transferred to the stage whether as history exoticized in Selimus and nationalized in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, or as comedy, in The Old Wives Tale and Clyomon and Clamydes. The latter plays are unusual in showing the popular influence of medieval accounts of wandering knights in Malory and others, and the complex revision of  medieval models in Spenser’s The Faery Queen and Sydney’s Arcadia. My goal is to demonstrate the reconception of Elizabethan knighthood in comic but politically astute terms in the Queen’s Men’s late comedies, and to demonstrate the impact of such re-imagining in Jacobean and Caroline romances that pick up and run with the idea of how changing values of knighthood also change the idea of being English and being honourable under (early) modern conditions apparently antithetical to medieval concepts, particularly in the rejection of warfare when diplomacy provides better options in a changing world, and in the acceptance of women’s strengths as the proper completion of knightly principles.
Like the bemused and bewildered wandering knights in The Old Wives Tale, Clyomon and Clamydes aspire to knightly honour, but neither is able to test himself in combat against a worthy opponent. The plays establish through various romantic allusions – defeating a dragon ravisher of virgins, destroying a magician’s power, freeing other knights from unjust imprisonment, travelling widely to prove desert as heir to a throne – that the real knightly aim should be international peace and prosperity, without regard to gender or arms. Other goals simply befuddle or baffle. The tongue, normally regarded as the woman’s weapon, is – not surprisingly perhaps in the Queen’s Men – the weapon of choice, even for so supreme a heroic ‘Worthy’ as Alexander the Great.

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NEW SERIES  Publisher: MIP University Press at Kalamazoo (https://mip-archumanitiespress.org/series/mip/)

This series provides a forum for monographs and essay collections that investigate the material culture, broadly conceived, of theatre and performance in England from the late Tudor to the pre-Restoration Stuart periods (c. 1550–1650).  The editors invite proposals for book-length studies engaging in the material vitality of the dramatic text, political culture, theatre and performance history, theatrical design, performance spaces, gendering court entertainments, child- and adult-actors, music, dance, and audiences in London and on tour. We are also interested in the discursive production of gender, sex, and race in early modern England in relation to material historical, social, cultural, and political structures; changes to and effects of law; monarchy and the republic in dramatic texts; theatre and performance, including performance spaces that are not in theatres.  Further topics might include the production and consumption of things and ideas; costumes, props, theatre records and accounts, gendering of spaces and geographies (court, tavern, street, and household, rural or urban), cross-dressing, military or naval excursions, gendered pastimes, games, behaviours, rituals, fashions, and encounters with the exotic, the non-European, the disabled, and the demonic and their reflection in text and performance.

To submit a proposal, please contact Erika Gaffney, Senior Acquisitions Editor, at Erika.Gaffney@arc-humanities.org.