This edition offers a modernized text based on a fresh collation of the 1631-1640 folio, together with an account of the play's printing history, a full commentary which sets Jonson's art in its intellectual and social context, and an introduction which seeks to do justice to the play's braod scope and to suggest something of its theatrical potential.
The Staple of News is an early Caroline era play, a satire by Ben Jonson. The play was first performed in late 1625 by the King's Men at the Blackfriars Theatre, and first published in 1631. Among the late comedies that some critics have dismissed as Jonson's "dotages," The Staple of News has often been regarded as "the most admirable of Jonson's later works." It has attracted scholarly attention for its satire on the newspaper and news agency business that was a recent and rapidly evolving innovation in Jonson's era. The first semi-regular news serials in English (then called "corantos"), printed in the Netherlands, had appeared in 1620 in response to the start of the Thirty Years' War; over the next year London publication of English translations of foreign-news pamphlets increased; and in 1622 Nathaniel Butter formed syndicate for supplying and printing news serials in English. In Jonson's play, the News Staple is a parody of these developments. Jonson may have had a political motive for his satire: the new business in news concentrated on war news from Europe, which fed the popular urge for England's involvement on the Protestant side of the conflict. Jonson is thought to have sympathised with King James's strong reluctance to become involved in a European war. The play begins with the entrance of the actor who speaks the Prologue - quickly followed by four audience members seeking seating on the stage. (The practice of selling seats on the periphery of the stages in the private theatres of the era is exploited for commentary and comedy in a variety of plays, from Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607) to Jonson's Magnetic Lady.) In this case the four are the Gossips Mirth, Tattle, Expectation, and Censure. They interrupt the Prologue with their comments, and continue this through the four entr'actes that Jonson calls "Intermeans" - a structure he would employ again in The Magnetic Lady. The gossips have a number of criticisms of the play as it proceeds (mainly that it contains neither a devil nor a fool).
News in Early Modern Europe presents new research on the nature, production, and dissemination of a variety of forms of news writing from across Europe during the early modern period.
