"The Self-Centred Art is a study of the plays of Ben Jonson and the actors who first performed in them. Jakub Boguszak shows how the idiosyncrasies of Jonson's comic characters were thrown into relief in actors' part-scripts--scrolls containing a single actor's lines and cues--s…
Introduction: Jonson in the age of Juvenal -- Jonson and the comedy of humors -- The depths and heights of satire: Jacke Drum's entertainment and Cynthia's revels -- The scourge and the purge: satiromastix, poetaster, and satiric ethos -- "Thy wiser temper": Jonson's epigrams an…
"Does satire have the ability to effect social reform? If so, what satiric style is most effective in bringing about reform? This book explores how Renaissance poet and playwright Ben Jonson negotiated contemporary pressures to forge a satiric persona and style uniquely his own.…
My dissertation, "Staging Resistances: Discourses of Power and Metatheatricality in Soyinka, Jonson, and Euripides," argues that metatheatricality, or theatre's self-referential mode, is resistant by virtue of a homology between theatrical structures and social, philosophical, a…
This study reveals the relationship of the wager journey to early modern English literary, festive, and performance cultures, from the Elizabethan period to the Interregnum. The wager journey and the literature associated with it variously belonged to the worlds of the court, th…
This dissertation demonstrates the pervasive influence of classical and medieval climate theory and humoralism on early modern English conceptions of racial difference, as represented in natural philosophy, medical tracts, and travel literature, and in late sixteenth- and early …
My thesis examines the economic contexts of early modern colonization, discussing how domestic concerns of class and status influenced English colonial practice. The anxieties over cultural borders demonstrated by attempts to control travelers, mariners, vagrants, and residual C…
