Body-focused Anxiety In Ben Jonson's Civic Comedies

Ben Jonson(1572-1637)is a well-known English Renaissance dramatist,poet and actor,especially receiving an excellent reputation for his comedies,masques and other literary genres with Jonsonian artistry abounding with heavy irony and humor.Among his comedies,civic comedy(also called London comedy)stands out as the representative works created at the peak time of Jonson's career,such as Every Man In His Humor(1598),Volpone(1605),Epicoene,or The Silent Woman(1609),The Alchemist(1610)and Bartholomew Fair(1614).Generally speaking,it is found that previous studies on Jonson's London comedies mainly concentrate on its theatrical space,London setting,political culture,trickster figures,along with marriage and ethical issues,so on and so forth.However,little contribution has done for combining these topics all together with the motif of body and analyzing the connection among them as well as the social and philosophical representation underlying those issues.Through close-reading of the text of the chosen four civic comedies and with analyses of the historical and cultural background in the early modern period,anxiety of Londoners can be seen underlying a series of social problems posed in his comedies,which is projected onto their body.Accordingly,this dissertation is aimed to explore manifestation of body-focused anxiety and will also be intended to figure out some possible reasons behind such issue.First thing goes first,Londoners' anxiety of the relationship between opposite genders and even within the same gender party would be explored in the very first chapter.To begin with,it is observed that there lies an unusual phenomenon of gender transition between men and women mainly by changing their attires,body language along with other trifles,for which Epicoene,or The Silent Woman,could provide some supportive examples.To go further,female group's anxiety is exemplified through physiological aging,spatial constraint toward their body as well as their materializedbody by men.Apart from the female,likewise,male group are going through some certain body-focused anxiety,which presents itself as metaphorical castration,or ritually bodily castration.Such castration of the male group may sometimes be received from the gender counterpart,but it could also be operated by some other men.To be followed is chapter two,with a major focusing on the impact towards London city and its people,mostly brought by a continuous population rise and the frequent broke of diverse diseases,especially plague.Certainly,this part will be replenished with some background information concerning about demography,morality and death rate during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in Jacobean London.Major disease like plague gives rise to people's anxiety toward death,driving them to build up an individual body-defensive mechanism.Apart from pathological disease,it also provides some inspiration for Ben Jonson's observation from the perspective of body politic,by which it is found out that there are some maladies and decay with the administration of English court.The last part of exploration is aimed to dig out some anxiety derived from religion issues towards Londoners' body.The early modern period is a time full of constant religion conflicts and disputes,especially the contradictions between Catholic and Protestant,as well as the divergence within the Protestant.However,at the turning point of social transformation,English Puritans were put unto a dilemma: one side is sacredly puritanical doctrine with bodily appetency being strangled,and the other side is the capitalized society abounding with the temptation of material,power and lust.Likewise,under a world wherein material is attached with great attention,people in Renaissance period,who put their body into the paradise of material,are still exposed to be trapped by a significant concern whether they could get a salvation.To ease their body-focused anxiety,the methods Londoners take are to get their carnal body loosen in carnival and bizarre.However,these carnival and bizarre cannot fix the body-focused anxiety from the source.The Londoners take a pessimistic attitude toward this problem by let their body indulged and stimulated sensually in physical activities while neglecting their inside world,which should be attached great importance.Londoners' body-focused anxiety is partly a result of the process of social transformations.And the Englishmen as the objects living in the city indirectly reflectsuch state,and the body as the visible container of mind and soul becomes the direct target.