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Chapter 10 - Ben Jonson’s Roman Soliloquies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 July 2018

A. D. Cousins
Affiliation:
Macquarie University, Sydney
Daniel Derrin
Affiliation:
Durham University
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Summary

This chapter considers the soliloquy in Jonson’s writing, with particular reference to his Roman plays, Poetaster and Sejanus, and the Augustan and Tiberian Romes they evoke. Jonson’s soliloquies demonstrate his insistence on what may be called ‘infradrama’, the deictic insistence on the spatiotemporal moment of performance. Jonson is rightly known for his extensive use of what is usually termed metadrama, the self-conscious staging of the frames within which drama is generated. To some extent, Jonson’s use of metadramatic effects has been understood as a component part in a strategy of ‘disillusionment’, pointing up the extent to which dramatic performance is just the confection of illusions. Yet to read such moments as infradramatic is to suggest instead an emphasis on the solidity of what is presented in performance, that it is manifest before us. This is not an invitation to see through the show but to acknowledge, through its deictic self-insistence, its happening in the here and now. Jonson’s Roman soliloquies can be read in this way confronting us with the haecceity, as it were, of the actor-character in front of us – that he, in and of himself, is here before us.
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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