The social relations of Jonson's theatre

About this book

"Jonathan Haynes's The Social Relations of Jonson's Theater is about the Elizabethan playwright Ben Jonson as a realist, and as an astute observer of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Many of the forms and purposes of his realism spring from the social dynamics of the theaters in which he worked. Jonson's art arose in circumstances fraught with social pressures, and although his plays cannot be reduced to these pressures neither can his art be understood apart from them. This is a study of the social relations represented in Jonson's plays, but it is also about the social relations of the plays themselves, of what happened between Jonson and his audience in the theater."--BOOK JACKET. "Haynes makes a detailed literary historical argument about the sources and consequences of Jonson's realism. The book polemicizes against the moral and formal preoccupations of the last two generations of Jonson criticism; it is informed by the new social history and by the sociology of Pierre Bordieu and Norbert Elias."--BOOK JACKET.