KING LEAR FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF BEN JONSON'S SATIRE.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

SAVANI, JACQUELYN.

Contributor:

University of Pennsylvania.

Subjects (All):

English literature.

Irish literature.

British literature.

0593.

Local Subjects:

0593.

Physical Description:

181 pages

Contained In:

Dissertation Abstracts International 48-08A.

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

text file

Summary:

Certain characteristics of King Lear can be accounted for in terms of the dramatic satire Jonson pioneered. Shakespeare certainly knew two of those satiric works. His company performed the play that launched Jonson's experiment with satire, Every Man out of His Humour, in 1599 and his satiric tragedy, Sejanus, in 1603. Shakespeare's name is included among those who acted in Sejanus in the 1616 Folio edition Jonson made of his plays. Shakespeare seems to have used the dramatic satire Jonson pioneered not as an overall genre shaping his play, but as a source for elements transformed in startling and unpredictable ways.

Chapter one of this dissertation analyzes Every Man out and identifies five characteristics of dramatic satire whose application in King Lear is the subject of chapter five. Those characteristics are (1) the satyrist, (2) the satiric vision, (3) judgmental perspective, (4) purgation or curative strategy of intensification, and (5) medical metaphor. The intervening chapters look at how the experiment with satire evolved in Jonson's Cynthia's Revels and Poetaster, Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, and Sejanus, which employs a sixth characteristic found in Lear, the disturbing conclusion.

Lear represents the tragic apotheosis of the satyrist character Jonson introduced in Every Man out. Progressively, throughout the play, Lear escalates the rhetoric of defiance. Lear also harkens back to Jonson's introduction of satire to the stage through use of the satiric vision, a loosely structured speech in which a character decries the state of his world. Key to both Jonson's and Shakespeare's amalgam of satire with tragedy is a denigrating perspective on the tragic protagonist; Lear and Gloucester, like Sejanus, are subjected to belittling perspectives. Jonson repeatedly presents intensification as a curative strategy; intensification of a character's folly or vice leads to exposure and purgation. Lear too grows worse that he may become better. The characterization of his daughters depends on medical metaphor, the language of the body Jonson used to describe states of being. Sejanus ends thwarting the audience's sense of justice. So does Lear. Both plays prompt the audience to protest --at evil unchecked, on the one hand, and at goodness wasted, on the other.

Notes:

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 48-08, Section: A, page: 2069.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 1987.

Local Notes:

School code: 0175.

Access Restriction:

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