Matthew Steggle

Volpone : a critical guide

As perhaps the best-known and most-studied work in the canon of Shakespeares leading contemporary rival, Ben Jonsons Volpone (1606) is a particularly important play for thinking about early modern drama as a whole. This guide offers students an introduction to its critical and performance history, including recent versions on stage and screen. It includes a keynote chapter outlining major areas of current research on the play and four new critical essays presenting contrasting critical approaches focusing on literary intertextuality; performance studies; political history; and broader social history. Finally, a guide to critical, web-based and production-related resources and an annotated bibliography provide a basis for further individual research.

Introduction: Nothing Will Come of Nothing? Or, What can we Learn from Plays that Don’t Exist?

What, if anything, can we say about the Renaissance drama that does not survive? And how much of it is there?

Lost, or Rather Surviving as a Very Short Document

Defined, like the unconscious or UFOs, by the defeating fact of their unknowability, “lost plays” would seem to be inherently unpromising objects of study. Most engagements with them have tended to focus mainly on the mere fact of their incompleteness: either by lamenting the lacunae in our knowledge that they represent, or by thinking in terms of the possibility of recovering play manuscripts. Such manuscripts are sought both by conventional research methods, such as those described in other chapters in this book by William Proctor Williams and Martin Wiggins, and in the imaginative methodology of Shakespeare thrillers, where entire copies of “Cardenio” and/or “Love’s Labour’s Won”, preserved usually in some form of subterranean vault, are frequent objects of desire and pursuit. Indeed, the state of knowledge is incomplete; and indeed, archival finds would be wonderful; but scholars interested in early modern theatre must accept that to get the most out of the material they do have, they will frequently be working with plays which are, and remain, lost. How do we theorize this problem?

Urbane John Marston

The work of John Marston (1576–1634) has often been treated as if it possessed an almost solipsistic independence from and antagonism to, not just the dramatic establishment of his day, but the world at large. Marston is best known for a hostile attitude to an audience exemplified by the narrator’s declaration, in Certain Satires , that he will only write in the hope of causing offence: If thys displease the worlds wrong-iudging sight, It glads my soule, and in some better spright I’le write againe. But if that this doe please, Hence, hence, Satyrick Muse, take endlesse ease. This hostility is further exemplified by The Scourge of Villainy (1598), dedicated ‘To everlasting oblivion’, by the dedication of Antonio and Mellida (1602) to ‘the most honorably renowned No-body’, and by the contemporary description of Marston himself in The Parnassus Plays as ‘ Monsieur Kinsayder , lifting up [his] leg and pissing against the world’. Such comments have set the tone for much of Marston’s critical history. And yet, as writer, collaborator and theatrical shareholder, the ‘real’ Marston had complex constructive links to the theatrical culture of his day. Indeed, he also wrote for that most public, decorous and community-conscious of forms, the City of London civic entertainment. While aggressive hostility to all and sundry is undeniably part of the persona of what one might call the Marston brand, the factual reality is more complex, as this chapter will explore.

Doctor Faustus and the Devils of Empedocles

THIS note is about the Renaissance reception of a small and seemingly rather obscure fragment of classical Greek philosophical poetry: a passage from the largely lost work of Empedocles, surviving only through quotations of it by the late-classical writer Plutarch.

Who wrote The Christmas Ordinary

The Christmas Ordinary, printed in 1682, is a raucously lively Jonsonian comedy of uncertain date and authorship, which appears to have been performed by undergraduates at Trinity College, Oxford. This article combines three sources of information: ‘W. R.’s remarks about the identity of the author in the preface to the 1682 printing; G. E. Bentleys work establishing through internal evidence that the play appears to date from the mid-1630s; and a partial manuscript of the play in the British Library, unknown to Bentley, which attributes The Christmas Ordinary to ‘H. B.’. This article proposes that ‘H. B.’ is Dr Henry Birkhead (1617-96), a poet and dramatist best remembered today as Founder of the Oxford University Professorship of Poetry. Corroborating evidence for the attribution proposed here includes the fact that Birkheads own Latin poetry contains hitherto unnoted translation from The Christmas Ordinary. The article pursues the consequences of this proposed attribution, which locates The Christmas Ordinary more firmly in the aspirations, fears, and resentments of the culture from which it comes, the Oxford University of the 1630s.

Weighing Winged Words: An intertext in The Faerie Queene V.ii

This note concerns The Faerie Queene V.ii.44, 8–9, the image of winged words escaping from the Giant’s scales. While existing interpretations have tended to stress the biblical and epic affinities of this image, this note argues that Aristophanes’ Frogs in fact provides a much more exact source, and advances the argument that Spenser is using it as an intertext.