The Social Relations of Jonson's Theater

by Jonathan Haynes

Overview

The author considers the Elizabethan playwright Ben Jonson a realist and an acute observer of the transformation from feudalism to capitalism with many of the forms and purposes of Jonson's realism resulting from the social dynamics of the London theater audience. Haynes presents a detailed literary historical argument about the sources and consequences of Jonson's realism and examines the entanglements of life and art in Jonson's time both through a look at the life of that period and through insightful readings of Jonson's plays. The book is informed by the new social history and polemicizes against the moral and formal preoccupations of the past two generations of Jonson criticism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521419185
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	08/28/1992
Pages:	158
Product dimensions:	6.22(w) x 9.33(h) x 0.67(d)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements; 1. Introduction: Jonson's realism; 2. The origins of Jonson's realism; 3. 'Thus neere, and familiarly allied to the time'; 4. Representing the Underworld: The Alchemist; 5. Festivity and the dramatic economy of Bartholomew Fair; Index.