This satirical drama from one of the only playwrights regarded as a contemporary equal of Shakespeare may have originally been performed in the early 1600s, but it feels remarkably fresh centuries later. Beginning with a prologue which devolves into a slapstick comedy that presages postmodern irony, the play recounts a solemn religious observance that is much more than it appears to be.
A scholarly edition of works by Ben Jonson. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.
"Cynthia's Revels; Or, The Fountain of Self-Love" by Ben Jonson In the play, the goddess, Cynthia, has ordained a "solemn revels" in the valley of Gargaphie in Greece. The gods Cupid and Mercury appear, and they too start to argue. Mercury has awakened Echo, who weeps for Narcissus, and states that a drink from Narcissus's spring causes the drinkers to "Grow dotingly enamored of themselves." Asotus, a foolish spendthrift who longs to become a courtier and a master of fashion and manners, also drinks from the spring; emboldened by vanity and self-love, he challenges all comers to a competition of "court compliment." The competition is held, in four phases, and the courtiers are beaten.
In a remarkable piece of detective work, Shakespeare scholar James Bednarz traces the Bard's legendary wit-combats with Ben Jonson to their source during the Poets' War. Bednarz offers the most thorough reevaluation of this "War of the Theaters" since Harbage's Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions, revealing a new vision of Shakespeare as a playwright intimately concerned with the production of his plays, the opinions of his rivals, and the impact his works had on their original audiences. Rather than viewing Shakespeare as an anonymous creator, Shakespeare and the Poets' War re-creates the contentious entertainment industry that fostered his genius when he first began to write at the Globe in 1599. Bednarz redraws the Poets' War as a debate on the social function of drama and the status of the dramatist that involved not only Shakespeare and Jonson but also the lesser known John Marston and Thomas Dekker. He shows how this controversy, triggered by Jonson's bold new dramatic experiments, directly influenced the writing of As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida, and Hamlet, gave rise to the first modern drama criticism in English, and shaped the way we still perceive Shakespeare today.
Ben Jonson was an English Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor. A contemporary of William Shakespeare, he is best known for his satirical plays, particularly 'Volpone', 'The Alchemist', and 'Bartholomew Fair'. This is the first volume of his complete plays.
'Compelling... Riggs's approach to the man-as-artist is to see him as a paradox, a man of reckless defiance who boasted openly about his womanizing and criminal record, and who nonetheless represented himself in Renaissance England as the great model of a self-restrained and chastely austere classical style of writing... David Riggs's eminently readable and generously illustrated study not only fully justifies our curiosity, but handles with admirable tact what might be lurid and sensational if our only interest were the gossip.'New York Times Book Review
This book is dedicated to the dreamers, their dreams, and their perseverance in research work. This volume brings together the selected and peer–reviewed contributions of the p- ticipants at the COST 2102 International Conference on Verbal and Nonverbal F- tures of Human–Human and Human–Machine Interaction, held in Patras, Greece, October 29–31, 2007, hosted by the 19th IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI 2008). The conference was sponsored by COST (European Cooperation in the Field of Scientific and Technical Research, www.cost.esf.org ) in the domain of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for disseminating the advances of the - search activity developed within COST Action 2102: “Cross-Modal Analysis of V- bal and Nonverbal Communication”(www.cost2102.eu). COST Action 2102 is a network of about 60 European and 6 overseas laboratories whose aim is to develop “an advanced acoustical, perceptual and psychological analysis of verbal and non-verbal communication signals originating in spontaneous face-to-face interaction, in order to identify algorithms and automatic procedures capable of identifying the human emotional states. Particular care is devoted to the recognition of emotional states, gestures, speech and facial expressions, in antici- tion of the implementation of intelligent avatars and interactive dialogue systems that could be exploited to improve user access to future telecommunication services”(see COST 2102 Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) www.cost2102.eu).
