Jonson’s “Italian riddle”: Epicene and the Translation of Aretino’s Female Speech

Keener, Andrew S.

doi:10.1353/shq.2014.0013

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 46 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…One of the texts Jonson marked with "tamquam explorator" was a copy of Pietro Aretino's Ragionamenti (Keener 2014). Widely censored and listed on the Catholic Church's Index Librorum Prohibitorum, index of forbidden books (Woodfield 1973), this was a sexually graphic satire of Petrarchan love poetry and Neoplatonic love treatises, with some calling it pornography avant la lettre.…”

Section: Difficilia Quae Pulchra: Humanistic and Courtly Contextsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“I Do Love / To Note and to Observe”: The Pleasures of Surveillance and Resistance in the Work of Ben Jonson

Miele

2023

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Poet, playwright, religious dissident, and collaborator with the state surveillance apparatus: Ben Jonson experienced a long and tortuous relationship with surveilling in late-Tudor/early-Stuart England. The cultures of surveillance he encountered extended beyond espionage to social and religious surveillance, which in early modern England often bled into and facilitated the workings of the state’s network of informants. His literary output and unusually detailed (for the time) biographical information combine to give us a complex picture of his engagement with surveilling, secrecy, and resistance. Jonson’s experience of surveillance involved incarceration and the threat of corporal punishment, but in his writings, he associates surveilling and being surveilled with pleasure in the context of his Humanist education, his conversion to Catholicism at a time when the Protestant English state had outlawed such worship, and his work as a satirist, playwright, and poet. Using Freud’s notion of unheimlich, or the uncanny, I argue that Jonson demystifies surveilling, but approaches his critique from two directions simultaneously: he interrogates and encourages resistance to state violence and coercion while highlighting his own acquiescence to the pleasures of voyeurism and exhibitionism, suggesting that surveilling is seemingly irresistible, as in both overpowering and appealing. Because he centers the uncanny in his writings, Jonson may be a useful guide for those theorizing and navigating the complexities of surveillance. He exemplifies how resistance to asymmetries of power persists through time and despite outward conformity to a regime of surveillance, which itself may be unheimlich.

show abstract

Section: Difficilia Quae Pulchra: Humanistic and Courtly Contextsmentioning

confidence: 99%