Posts Tagged ‘Ben Jonson’
“Thou art a monument without a tomb, / And art alive still while thy book doth live / And we have wits to read and praise to give”*…
400 years ago this month, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, his friends John Heminge and Henry Condell published The First Folio, containing 36 of Shakespeare’s plays, (an endeavor which they financed with a bequest that he had left them).
Although 19 of Shakespeare’s plays had been published in quarto before 1623, the First Folio is arguably the only reliable text for about 20 of the plays, and a valuable source text for many of those previously published. Eighteen of the plays in the First Folio, including The Tempest, Twelfth Night, and Measure for Measure among others, are not known to have been previously printed.
It is considered one of the most influential books ever published. Of perhaps 750 copies printed, 235 are known to remain, most of which are kept in either public archives or private collections. More than one third of the extant copies are housed at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., which is home to a total of 82 First Folios.
It is also, as Alicia Andrzejewski and Carole Levin explain, one of the most stolen…
Late at night on July 13th, 1972, an unknown person entered the University of Manchester’s Library and violently smashed the plate glass top of an exhibition case, stealing the contents. Inside was one of the most famous, most valuable books in existence: the library’s near-perfect edition of one of Shakespeare’s First Folios. This theft is the most mysterious of all the stolen First Folios. More than fifty years have passed, and this First Folio—one of the 750 printed in 1623 and of the estimated 232 known copies across the globe today—is still missing.
This year, 2023, marks the 400th year anniversary of the printing of Shakespeare’s First Folio, deemed one of the most significant books in the English language, “a coveted treasure,” to quote Eric Rasmussen, an expert on the First Folios and author of The Shakespeare Thefts: In Search of the First Folios. Without the First Folio, we would not have many of Shakespeare’s most famous plays, the half that were not printed in his lifetime, including The Taming of the Shrew, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, and The Tempest. In collecting and printing these plays, Shakespeare’s two close friends and fellow actors, John Heminge and Henry Condell, validated that plays are more than entertainment—they have literary value.
The First Folios still in existence are mainly housed in public institutions—their significance is underscored by their rarity, as copies are almost never available for sale, and the most recent one sold in 2020 for almost ten-million dollars. Even in the seventeenth century, when the First Folios were first printed, they were only available to elite members of society: earls, lords, knights, admirals, and the occasional lawyer. To this day, ownership is limited to, and a fetish among, the super wealthy. Because of their elite status, Rasmussen speculates that, of the copies that cannot be located, most “have probably been stolen.”
For some, as Rasmussen suggests, the First Folio is coveted because of its monetary value, an object to steal and eventually attempt to sell. Three First Folios were stolen in the 20th century alone, including the Manchester Library’s copy, and the thieves in the latter two cases are characters as strange as some of those in Shakespeare’s plays, the heists as thrilling as some of his plots. The thefts we describe, and the desires that inspire them, speak to Shakespeare’s foothold in Western civilization—the reverence and awe so many people have for him, that imbue the First Folio with an almost religious power…
Some of the most brazen heists of a historic volume: “Shakespeare’s First Folio has been Stolen Many, Many Times,” in @CrimeReads.
* Ben Jonson, “To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare” (in the First Folio)
###
As we linger on literary larceny, we might recall that it was on this date fifty years ago that then-President Richard Nixon made his famous declaration of character:
On Nov. 17, 1973, President Richard M. Nixon held a news conference before Associated Press managing editors in Orlando, Fla., in which he defended himself against a number of allegations. Most of the questions related to the Watergate break-in, which had become even more of a scandal a month earlier with the “Saturday Night Massacre.” Other questions focused on reports that he had cheated on his tax returns.
The Nov. 18 New York Times outlined President Nixon’s many assertions, concluding that the president had acquitted himself well: “The president seemed composed and on top of the subject throughout the session, faltering perceptibly only during the discussion of his taxes. In contrast with some of his recent appearances he did not berate his critics or his political enemies.”
The best-remembered part of the news conference came as the president defended himself against claims that he had illicitly profited from his years in public service. “I made my mistakes, but in all of my years of public life, I have never profited, never profited from public service — I earned every cent,” he said. “And in all of my years of public life, I have never obstructed justice. And I think, too, that I could say that in my years of public life, that I welcome this kind of examination, because people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I am not a crook. I have earned everything I have got.”
The news conference did little to end questions over Mr. Nixon’s honesty. His declaration “I’m not a crook” was used against him — and the line would forever be associated with the Watergate era.
In April 1974, the Internal Revenue Service ordered that the president pay more than $400,000 in back taxes for making improper deductions. And the Watergate investigation continued to uncover misconduct. In August 1974, with the House Judiciary Committee having recommended impeachment and the release of a “smoking gun” tape showing that he had approved a cover-up, the president resigned…
“Nixon Declares ‘I Am Not a Crook’”
“Comedy too can sometimes discern what is right”*…
What’s old is new again…
When Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion released ‘WAP’ in August 2020, ‘conservative’ commentators such as Tucker Carlson expressed outrage that the song might corrupt ‘your granddaughters’; Alyssa Rosenberg in the Washington Post celebrated it as an ‘ode to female sexual pleasure’. The video featured the two long-lashed goddesses twerking their way through a gilded McMansion in fabulous candy-coloured outfits, like bethonged Disney princesses. The lyrics create a cluster of ambiguities: are the speakers supposed to be sex workers struggling to pay their college tuition and running in fear from ‘the cops’, or wealthy A-list celebrities? Or are they, as Black women in a white man’s world, both? Do they really want anyone but each other? Do they own the house through which they strut? The song mocks its listeners and viewers for yearning for these superior beings in their state of limitless desire. At the same time, its sly laughter invites us to feel, for a couple of minutes, part of their glittering, multicoloured world.
The song’s genius lies in its inventiveness: its mastery of rhythm, and its innovative abundance of metaphors for the ‘wet-ass pussy’ of its title. You come for the nasty, but you stay for the poetry. The two artists celebrate the power of their bodies to express desire and joy, but more fundamentally, they celebrate their gushing waterfalls of linguistic ‘flow’. The joke of the title hinges on the fact that language is both literal and metaphorical: one body part is used as a linguistic modifier for another. The most memorable lines contain no words that would be unsuitable for a nursery school sing-along, but provide brilliantly funny images: ‘Swipe your nose like a credit card’, ‘Get a bucket and a mop’, or – climactically – ‘Macaroni in a pot’. It’s wild and down to earth at the same time, and for ever changes the way you think about cooking spaghetti.
Ancient Athenian comedy of the fifth century BCE – mostly known to us through the work of Aristophanes – can be usefully compared to a number of different modern genres. Like traditional TV sitcoms, it featured typical or stereotypical characters, and showcased their ridiculous lust, avarice, stupidity and ambition. Like modern stand-up comedians or late-night TV hosts, comic poets included speeches in their plays in which they railed at the audience about the state of society and their personal grievances. Like Saturday Night Live, comedy in fifth-century Athens included caricatures of people who might well have been in the audience – such as Socrates, Euripides or the politician Cleon. Like The Simpsons or 30 Rock, the dialogue had a high rate of jokes per minute, and catered to multiple different audience sensibilities, including a taste for lavatory humour. As in Broadway musicals or on the Disney Channel, characters in lavish costumes were liable to burst into song and dance at any moment – although, unlike on Hannah Montana, the male characters wore large strap-on phalluses. Old Comedy anticipated modern sci-fi, and shows like The Good Place, in its willingness to carry out fantastical thought experiments (talking frogs, a city of birds, a singing chorus of metaphysically inclined clouds, or, weirdest of all, women with real political power), and considered their social and political repercussions. Like pantomime or Punch and Judy, it included formulaic riffs on falling over, violence and cross-dressing.
But the lush comic hip-hop of Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B is one of the most useful modern analogues, because it illustrates the core element of Old Comedy that is most often obscured in contemporary Anglophone translations – the flow. Aristophanes, like the creators of ‘WAP’, was a musician, songwriter, choreographer and poet, and his linguistic effects depend, like theirs, on the artful manipulation of rhythm and sound in words and imagery. The poetic affinity between rap and Old Comedy is explored in Spike Lee’s film Chi-Raq, a hip-hop adaptation of Lysistrata set on the South Side of Chicago…
Aristophanes and rap: “Punishment By Radish,” from Emily Wilson (@EmilyRCWilson), the translator of a wonderful edition of The Odyssey.
* Aristophanes
###
As we LOL, we might we might send dramatic birthday greetings to Nathan Field; he was born on this date in 1587. A contemporary and colleague of Shakespeare, Field was– like the Bard– both a dramatist and an actor.
As an author, Field wrote alone (e.g., the comedy A Woman Is a Weathercock), and in collaboration with John Fletcher and Philip Massinger (e.g., the tragicomedy The Knight of Malta). As an actor he ended his career in the Kings Men, working alongside Shakespeare, where he appeared in Shakespeare’s plays and in Ben Jonson‘s Volpone and The Alchemist, among other productions.
“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool”*…
Naeem Hayat as Hamlet, with the Shakespeare’s Globe company, performs to migrants in the Jungle refugee camp on 3 February 2016 in Calais, France
William Shakespeare lived in an age of uncertainty. His society was traversing a number of unpredictable challenges that spun from the succession of the heirless queen Elizabeth to the ascent of a new class of merchants. But the biggest issue had to do with religious conflicts. In the premodern world, religion provided absolute certainty: whatever we knew was implanted in our mind by God. We didn’t have to look any further. Once that system of beliefs started to collapse, Europe was left with a yawning gap. Religion no longer seemed capable to explain the world. René Descartes and Shakespeare, who were contemporaries, gave opposite answers to the sceptical challenge: Descartes believed that our quest for knowledge could be rebuilt and founded on indubitable certainties. Shakespeare, on the other hand, made uncertainty a leitmotiv of all his works, and harnessed its creative power…
Lorenzo Zucca considers the poet as a philosopher: “Much ado about uncertainty: how Shakespeare navigates doubt.”
Of possible parallel interest: an informative review of Scott Newstok’s How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education.
* Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 5, Scene 1
###
As we back the Bard, we might recall that it was on this date in 1600 that four plays, three by Shakespeare– Much Ago About Nothing, Henry V, and the source of today’s title quote, As You Like It— plus Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour were officially entered into the Stationers’ Registry. Readers will recall that the copyright regimen was strict in Elizabeth’s time, as is now. But back then, copyright was literally that, the right to make a (first) copy: the Queen, concerned with sedition and determined to keep a tight rein on any and all published material in her realm, had decreed that no work could be printed in England without a license from the Stationer. In this particular instance all four plays were “stayed”–meaning that they were specifically noted in the registry as works not to be printed. The stay didn’t hold for long; within a few years, three of the four were published. Only one held out: for reasons scholars still debate, As You Like It didn’t appear in print until the famed First Folio edition of 1623.
“A town isn’t a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it’s got a bookstore, it knows it’s not foolin’ a soul.”*…
It was in Athens in the 4th Century BC that a man named Zeno walked into a bookshop. He had been a successful merchant, but suffered a terrible shipwreck on a journey out of Phoenicia, losing a priceless cargo of the world’s finest dye. He was 30 years old and facing financial ruin, but this catastrophe stirred his soul to find something new, though he didn’t quite know what.
One day, immersed in browsing a bookstore collection, many volumes of which have been lost to history forever, Zeno heard the bookseller reading out loud a passage from a book by Xenophon about Socrates. It was like nothing he had ever heard before. With some trepidation, he approached the owner and asked, “Where can I find a man like that?” and in so doing, began a philosophical journey that would literally change the history of the world. That book recommendation led to the founding of Stoicism and then, to the brilliant works of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius — which, not lost to history, are beginning to find a new life on bookshelves today. From those heirs to Zeno’s bookshop conversion, there is a straight line to many of the world’s greatest thinkers, and even to the Founding Fathers of America.
All from a chance encounter in a bookshop.
It would be an understatement to say that great things begin in bookstores, and that countless lives have been changed inside them…
Why spend time amongst the shelves? “Good Things Happen in Book Stores.”
* Neil Gaiman, American Gods
###
As we browse in bliss, we might spare a thought for Benjamin Jonson; he died on this date in 1637. A poet, actor, literary critic, and playwright (he popularized the comedy of humours), he is best remembered for his satirical plays Every Man in His Humour (1598), Volpone, or The Fox (c. 1606), The Alchemist (1610), and Bartholomew Fair (1614), and for his lyric and epigrammatic poetry.
Eclipsing Christopher Marlowe, Jonson is generally regarded as the second most important English playwright during the reigns of Elizabeth I of James VI and I (after Shakespeare, with whom Jonson had a professional rivalry, but on whose death Jonson wrote “He was not of an age, but for all time”). Indeed, while Shakespeare’s impact continues apace to this day, Jonson’s impact was arguably even bigger in the relatively-more immediate timeframe: he had broad and deep influence on the playwrights and the poets of the Jacobean era (1603–1625) and of the Caroline era (1625–1642).
Eh… What’s up, Doc?…
The inimitable Chuck Jones— animator, and director of well over 200 Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts (plus TV specials and feature films) starring Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, Sylvester, Pepé Le Pew and others from the Warner Bros. menagerie– on “how to draw Bugs Bunny”:
From the terrific film Chuck Amuck.
***
As we keep an eye out for Elmer, we might send rhyming birthday wishes to Ben Jonson; he was born on this date in 1572. While Jonson is probably best remembered these days as the author of hysterically-funny satirical plays like Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, he was also an accomplished poet, whose work (especially his lyric poetry) was tremendously influential and his Jacobean contemporaries and on the Carolines.
Jonson was a contemporary of Shakespeare, and is often remembered as a rival– probably, given the competitive atmosphere of the theater in those days, accurately. But it was Jonson who provided the prefatory verse that opens Shakespeare’s First Folio (which Jonson may, some scholars believe, have helped to edit). Indeed, it was Jonson who animated the view of Shakespeare as a “natural,” an author who, despite “small Latine, and lesse Greeke,” wrote works of genius. But lest one take that as back-handed praise (Jonson was himself classically educated), Jonson concludes:
Yet must I not give Nature all: Thy Art,
My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part.
You must be logged in to post a comment.