Friday 16 March 2012

Every man in his humour

My first Ben Jonson play has been read.  I must admit that on my letter of intent to ISU I did say that I was studying Ben Jonson, and now I can truthfully say --yep.  Though I did spell his name "Johnson", hopefully no one notices.

So I have a book of five of his plays so I started with the first one, Every Man in His Humour and hopefully I can read them all before I am back in Yellowstone April 20.  It was a fairly good play, it would rank up there with Shakespeare, in that its jokes seemed conservative and not to bawdy.  I can say that its trickster character of Brainworm was fairly well-made and caused all sorts of trouble as he went further and further down a path of chaos.  I had no idea why he was doing all of these tricks until the end, when it seems that Jonson decided to give him a reason.  Until that point Brainworm seemed to be operating on his own volition for anarchy.  I guess not.  Otherwise another decent entry in Renaissance drama.

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