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Compared to Jonson's earlier comic masterpieces, Volpone and The Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair seems unfocused and diffuse.1 The playEliot claimed that the play has "hardly a plot at all." See his "Ben Jonson" in Selected Essays New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950, p. 134. See also Richard Levin, The Multiple Plot in English Renaissance Drama Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971, p. 202. In his Introduction to English Renaissance Comedy Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1999, Alexander just seems to exfoliate, with more and more characters introduced in scene after scene and more plots and counterplots hatched as the action unfolds. Bartholomew Fair lacks a pair of central characters around whom the play is organized and who appear to direct its action, such as Volpone and Mosca in Volpone or Face and Subtle in The Alchemist. See Levin, Multiple Plot, p. 208 and Eugene M. Waith, ed., Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963, p. 2. With a verbal exuberance unmatched outside of Shakespeare, the play is constantly threatening to veer off into irrelevance, incoherence, and even absurdity, as the characters get wrapped up in word games that fly in the face of normal dramatic logic. As Jonson's stage directions read at one point: "Here they continue their game of vapours, which is nonsense; every man to oppose the last man that spoke, whether it concerned him or no." Act IV, scene tiffany rings iv, 11. 24ff. All quotations from Bartholomew Fair are taken from the edition of Gordon Campbell in Ben Jonson, The Alchemist and Other Plays Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Just as in Seinfeld, the characters often appear to be talking merely to fill the time and not because they have anything in particular to say.But Bartholomew Fair only appears to tiffany outlet be about nothing. Again like Seinfeld, the play tells us something about its characters by showing them engaged tiffany bracelets in so much meaningless dialogue. And tiffany pendants its apparent formlessness and lack of a center tiffany cuff link reflect a deeper order and sense of form. By liberating the dialogue from the normal constraints of dramatic action, Jonson freed himself to put an unparalleled slice of Renaissance life on the stage. The play may be difficult to follow tiffany necklaces for the reader, but given a decent performance, it can be a brilliant theatrical success,e Campbell, Alchemist, p. xx. as figure after figure comes to life on the stage, each characterized by a distinctive mode of speech and each given his or her momen

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