Next to Shakespeare, Ben Jonson is perhaps the most widely studied Renaissance dramatist. Very few students of literature or drama would not encounter Volpone or Bartholomew Fair in the course of their studies, and there has been a recent resurgence of interest in Epicoene , or the Silent Women amo[...]
Do our writings and our utterances reflect or describe our world, or do they intervene in it? Do they, perhaps, help to make it? If so, how? Within what limits, and with what implications? Contemporary theorists have considered the ways in which the languages we speak might be 'performative' in just[...]
This book will constitute an original intervention into longstanding but insistently relevant debates around the significance of notions of a ~performativitya (TM) to the critical analysis of early modern drama. In particular, the book aims to: show how the investigation of performativity can ena[...]