Abstract
Vice in all its forms dominates Ben Jonson’s late comedy, The Devil is an Ass. The play opens with a minor devil, Pug, begging Satan for permission to travel to London with the morality Vice Iniquity, whom Satan quickly dismisses as unfit for the times. Fifty years ago, Satan allows, “When every great man had his Vice stand by him / In his long coat, shaking his wooden dagger” (1.1.84-85), this might have worked.1 But today a theatrical Vice of this sort will no longer serve the metropolitan taste:
This is not that will do; they are other things That are received now upon earth for Vices, Stranger, and newer: and changed every hour. They ride ’em like their horses off their legs, And here they come to Hell, whole legions of ’em, Every week, tired. We still strive to breed And rear ’em up new ones; but they do not stand When they come there: they turn ’em on our hands. And it is feared they have a stud o’ their own Will put down ours. Both our breed and trade Will suddenly decay, if we prevent not. (100–10)
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Notes
Ben Jonson, The Devil is an Ass, ed. Peter Happé (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996).
Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 472.
Stephen Greenblatt, “Loudun and London,” Critical Inquiry 12.2 (Winter 1986): 326–46
See Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992)
Frank Krutnik, In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity (New York: Routledge, 1991).
Edward Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
On the duel as an “overdetermined sign of masculine identity,” see Jennifer Low, Manhood and the Duel: Masculinity in Early Modern Drama and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 3.
On this point, cf. Ian Munro, The Figure of the Crowd in Eurly Modern London: The City und Its Double (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 49.
On this topic, see Samuel Weber’s Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004)
See in particular Peter Stallybrass and Ann Rosalind Jones, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)
On London’s increasing complexity, see (among others) Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988)
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© 2010 Amanda Bailey and Roze Hentschell
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Munro, I. (2010). City Of Angels: Theatrical Vice and The Devil is an Ass. In: Bailey, A., Hentschell, R. (eds) Masculinity and the Metropolis of Vice, 1550–1650. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106147_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106147_9
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