Marginalized Learning The Role of Peritext in Ben Jonson's Hymenaei and The Masque of Queens

Date of Award

2007

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Myhill, Nova

Keywords

Jonson, Ben, Masque Entertainments, Annotation

Area of Concentration

Literature

Abstract

Only in the past fifty years has masque scholarship been recovered from centuries of literary and historical neglect. The masque had been dismissed as mere monarchial flattery, decidedly "unliterary", and was removed both from print and academic discussion until 1950 when Oxford publishers released the seventh volume of Herford and Simpson's bulwark elevenvolume collection Ben Jonson (1925-1952). This volume contained Jonson's masques from the first and second folio, but with a significant alteration from the last published 1692 folio: the extensive authorial annotations that so characterize the masques of the 1616 folio--the last edition supervised by Jonson before his death--had been restored. Despite this recovery, proceeding editions of masques have once again removed Jonson's annotations, marginalizing masque scholarship once more. This thesis examines the quarto and 1616 folio editions of two early Jonsonian masques, Hymenaei (1606) and Masque of Queens (1609), to investigate how the peritext--most specifically, the marginal annotations-- manages a specific symbolic and material reading of the masque, one that not only reflects authorial personality and desire, but foregrounds the sociopolitical context of courtly negotiations navigated between performance and print. The division between text and peritext is at best arbitrary in the Jonsonian masque, and an exclusion of the peritext, especially the annotative apparatus, is a dismissal of a literary device, an intregal part of the text that provides coherence. The repetition of this editorial decision, especially in current publications of the masque, has ultimately hampered an understanding of the masque as literary form.

Rights

This bibliographic record is available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication. The New College of Florida, as creator of this bibliographic record, has waived all rights to it worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.

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