1,99 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Case is Altered," Ben Jonson masterfully weaves a comedic tapestry that explores themes of identity, deception, and the complexities of social interactions. Written during the early 17th century, this play reflects the literary style of the period with its sharp wit and clever dialogue. Jonson employs a blend of classical and contemporary comedic elements, drawing inspiration from the commedia dell'arte tradition while also subverting expectations through his intricate plot twists and character development. The play reveals the tensions of an increasingly commercial society, mirroring the conflicts of love and ambition among its characters in a rich, engaging narrative. Ben Jonson, an influential playwright and contemporary of Shakespeare, was known for his keen observation of human nature and societal norms. His experiences in London's theatrical scene and connections with various social classes undoubtedly influenced the thematic concerns of "The Case is Altered." Jonson's background as a poet and his commitment to drama as a craft positioned him uniquely to comment on the moral ambiguities and foibles of his society, marking him as a forerunner in the evolution of English comedy. This play is highly recommended for readers interested in early modern drama, as it encapsulates the era's societal struggles with humor and insight. Jonson's sharp commentary and vibrant characterizations offer a timeless reflection on the human condition, making "The Case is Altered" not only a significant work of literature but also a captivating experience for contemporary audiences. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
Ähnliche
The Case is Altered
Table of Contents
Introduction
A sudden shift of fortune turns motives inside out, revealing how identity, justice, and desire change when the case is altered.
Ben Jonson’s The Case is Altered is an early comedy from the late Elizabethan period, generally dated to the late 1590s and first printed in 1609. It offers a lively web of intrigue in an Italianate milieu, where love, money, and mistaken identities entangle citizens, soldiers, and servants. Without disclosing its surprises, the play sets competing claims of affection and property against the pressures of law, ransom, and social ambition. Jonson’s purpose is both to entertain and to test how classical comic design can illuminate the ethical confusions of modern urban life.
The play is a classic because it showcases Jonson approaching the form he would later master, blending Roman models with English topicality. It helped shape the satire and structure of later city comedy by demonstrating how everyday commerce, legal forms, and theatrical wit can share a stage. Its themes of fortune’s mutability, the ambiguities of justice, and the social negotiations of love and wealth have endured. Authors after Jonson absorbed its lesson that comedy could be at once architectonic and bustling with contemporary manners, laying groundwork for Jonson’s own mature triumphs and for successors across the seventeenth century.
Jonson’s classical allegiance is central to the play’s design. He draws on Plautus, particularly Captivi and Aulularia, adapting Roman patterns of captivity, recognition, and the anxieties of hidden wealth into a brisk English idiom. Rather than a simple translation, Jonson recomposes motifs—mistaken identities, clever servants, a watchful miser—within a fresh social satire. The result is a hybrid: the symmetry and moral testing of New Comedy threaded through the marketplace rhythms of the late Elizabethan stage. The classical inheritance secures the plot’s bones; the local color and professional theatercraft supply its living muscle and voice.
At its outset, the play sets several strands in motion: lovers parted by circumstance, a cache of treasure guarded by caution and fear, and the fates of captives whose value is weighed in coin as much as in kinship. Disguises complicate intentions; formal claims clash with felt obligations. Jonson orchestrates encounters in streets, houses, and thresholds where public rules meet private needs. The premise invites us to consider how a person’s worth is assessed when papers, stories, or garments shift, and whether equity can be found when law and luck pull in different directions. These are the play’s tensions, not its secrets.
Jonson populates this world with vivid types familiar yet freshly sharpened: the wary hoarder whose caution curdles into isolation, the spirited gallant balancing pride and passion, the nimble servant whose wit offsets rank, the soldier who knows the price of honor, and citizens who recite statutes as if they were charms. He ridicules pretension, pedantry, and the brute arithmetic of gain, but he also recognizes the human cravings beneath them. The satire does not merely scold; it measures folly, then asks what understanding might make it yield. In this balance, laughter becomes a tool for moral discrimination.
The play’s language mixes the sinewy phrasing Jonson prized with the bustle of streetwise repartee. Learned turns coexist with puns, colloquial barbs, and crisp exchanges that keep the action mobile. Prose carries much of the social traffic, while verse sharpens moments of heightened intention, allowing tonal shifts without breaking momentum. Jonson’s clarity is not dryness: the style sparkles with rhetorical antithesis, sly asides, and comic understatements that reward attentive reading or performance. The verbal texture demonstrates how a playwright can yoke exact moral inquiry to quick theatrical delight, letting wit reveal character even as it delights the ear.
Structurally, The Case is Altered displays Jonson’s early sense of architectural comedy. Interlaced subplots advance in counterpoint, converging toward recognitions that feel both surprising and earned. The stage business favors entrances that change the stakes and exits that set new terms, while props and tokens—papers, money, and clothing—move meaning around the scene. Jonson’s dramaturgy turns practical: he builds suspense from the lawful and the likely, not the merely spectacular. In performance, this produces an agile ensemble piece: servants animate the machinery, citizens police the borders of respectability, and would-be lovers learn how little mastery they hold over contingency.
Historically, the play belongs to Jonson’s formative years, foreshadowing the rigorous comic morality he would press further in later works. It was first published in quarto in 1609, and Jonson did not include it in his 1616 folio of Works, a decision that has prompted long-standing scholarly interest in its place within his career. Whatever its author’s later reservations, the play reveals a writer testing methods he would refine: classical imitation made topical, satire tethered to plausible action, and laughter employed as correction. Its survival and continued reading indicate how even Jonson’s experiments carry durable theatrical intelligence.
The Case is Altered influenced the evolving English comic tradition by modeling how Plautine intrigue could be adapted to the ethical and economic textures of London life. Later playwrights absorbed its lessons about the comic uses of contracts, credit, and social performance, while Jonson himself would develop these materials into the more concentrated designs of his middle comedies. Its frank engagement with money, mobility, and municipal authority anticipates the city comedy’s fascination with the moral hazards of trade. The play thus serves as both an exhibit of Jonson’s emerging principles and a seedbed for subsequent theatrical ingenuity.
For contemporary readers and audiences, the play invites an active, inquisitive approach. Recognizing its classical echoes clarifies the mechanics of recognition and reversal, while attention to its social textures exposes questions that still matter: what can the law guarantee, what does fortune undo, and how do stories shape entitlement? The humor sharpens rather than softens these inquiries, allowing us to enjoy the stratagems even as we weigh their costs. Reading alongside Jonson’s later comedies illuminates continuities of method and conscience, and seeing the play in performance restores its designed pace, its ensemble vitality, and its ethical playfulness.
In sum, The Case is Altered endures because it marries brisk entertainment to serious inquiry: wealth and worth, law and equity, name and self, luck and desert. Its comic engine runs on the recognition that perspective often governs judgment, and that when circumstances change, the moral calculus must be tested anew. Jonson offers no easy consolations, but he does affirm the restorative powers of wit, patience, and measured justice. For modern audiences, the play’s blend of classical craft and civic immediacy feels both elegant and bracing, a reminder that comedy can still recalibrate how we see—and what we owe—one another.
Synopsis
The Case is Altered is a comedy set in an Italian city where public life and private households intersect. The play opens by establishing two threads that will interweave: a military conflict that produces prisoners whose fate must be negotiated, and a domestic world driven by money, suspicion, and courtship. Jonson introduces noble figures who manage matters of state and honor alongside citizens whose concerns revolve around livelihood and reputation. The mood is brisk and situational, preparing for reversals and recognitions. Early scenes frame themes of appearance versus reality, the risks of judgment made on scant information, and the unpredictable ways fortune reshapes plans.
On the public stage, Count Ferneze oversees the city’s defense and the handling of captives taken in recent hostilities. A young foreign gentleman, Chamont, arrives to plead for the liberty of a loved one held within the city’s power. Negotiations unfold under the pressures of pride, ransom, and diplomatic calculation. The Count’s decisions balance policy with personal impressions formed from tokens, tales, and character. Meanwhile, soldiers, attendants, and intermediaries circulate rumors that blur facts and motives. This strand introduces the prospect of exchange, the ethics of captivity, and the possibility that identity, as well as allegiance, may not be what it first appears.
Running in parallel, a citizen named Jaques embodies the anxious, secretive miser. Guarding a hidden hoard, he suspects neighbors and kin, reads every knock as threat, and treats generosity as a trap. Marriageable prospects orbit his household, as suitors and go-betweens weigh dowries and standing. His fear of loss creates a chain of misunderstandings, with domestic gossip heightening the stakes of small incidents. This plotline mirrors the public negotiations of the noble court in miniature: contracts, promises, and reputations must be managed, while a single misstep can alter everyone’s expectations about wealth, obligation, and eligibility.
Comic relief and commentary arrive through Juniper and Onion, quick-tongued lower-status men whose ambitions outrun their means. Pressed by circumstance, they try on roles—soldier, gentleman, poet, merchant—to see which mask will grant advantage. Their pranks, boasts, and inventions move them in and out of the noble and citizen spheres, linking the plots that otherwise would remain apart. In their hands, letters wander, parcels go astray, and formal messages are seasoned with bravado. The pair’s energetic improvisation illustrates how social performance can fool others and oneself, setting up later scenes where wit collides with official protocols and sober accounting.
Chamont’s petition for release encounters formality, delay, and bargaining. In a maneuver that recalls ancient tales of exchanged captives, talk turns to substitutes, pledges, and temporary liberty under oath. A small token—an old letter, a ring, a remembered name—casts doubt on fixed narratives about birth and allegiance. Officers, servants, and friends debate what honor requires when mercy and justice seem to pull in different directions. The Count, operating under public scrutiny, must weigh personal inclinations against precedent. This heightens tension without disclosing outcomes, suggesting that the fate of the captive and the standing of those who speak for him are both poised to change.
In the domestic sphere, Jaques’s treasure does not stay where he thinks it is. His secrecy invites accidental discovery, and his suspicion misdirects his vigilance. Objects are moved, borrowed, or misplaced, each transfer multiplying opportunities for confusion. Juniper and Onion, hovering at the edges of many errands, become entangled with valuables they barely understand. A chain of near-encounters follows: wrong doors knocked, wrong names invoked, wrong claims made with unexpected confidence. The comedy of misapprehension accelerates, but so does the risk that a minor deceit will have major consequences for courtships, contracts, and the fragile trust that knits households to their communities.
Social scenes at court and in the city draw suitors, friends, and rivals into the same rooms. The Count’s household hosts visits where compliments, petitions, and private aims intersect. Prospective matches are weighed in light of shifting fortunes and rumors from the conflict. Musicians, pages, and poets color the ambience while enforcing ceremony. Disguises and borrowed finery blur rank, allowing bravado to pass as breeding until tested. These gatherings surface character through speech and bearing, yet they also conceal as much as they reveal. The interplay of civility and self-interest prepares the ground for sharper tests of loyalty, kinship, and truth.
Recognition scenes emerge from small proofs: a mark, a memory, a precise account of long-ago events. Encounters among captors, captives, advocates, and householders bring buried connections to light. As identities clarify, the premises of earlier judgments give way, urging the Count toward decisions that balance clemency and order. Lost or disputed property finds direction toward rightful hands. Promises made under uncertainty are revisited under better knowledge. Without detailing final disclosures, the trajectory points toward reconciliation: wrongs mended by restitution, alliances ratified by honest acknowledgment, and errors corrected by a wider view of the facts than anyone held at the start.
The play resolves by aligning public authority with private settlement, showing how altered understanding reshapes duty, affection, and possession. The title’s premise—that a case can be radically changed by new information—governs both plots. Misers, suitors, soldiers, and magistrates adjust their stances as appearances fall away. Comic impostures yield to plain dealing; stubborn suspicion yields to measured trust. The conclusion underscores the value of mercy informed by truth and the instability of judgments grounded in fear or pride. Marriages, liberties, and estates are set in order not by force but by recognition, leaving a city steadied and households rebalanced.
Historical Context
The comedy is set in a stylized northern Italy whose civic texture echoes the duchies and republics of the late sixteenth century. Its streets, courts, and noble houses resemble those of Milan and its hinterland, where Spanish Habsburg authority had prevailed since 1535. Governors such as Juan Fernández de Velasco (in office 1592–1597) and, soon after, Pedro Enríquez de Acevedo, Count of Fuentes (c. 1600–1610), oversaw a militarized, Catholic polity intertwined with mercantile interests. The play’s households, dowry negotiations, and encounters with soldiers accord with that milieu: patrilineal power, guardianship over daughters, guild-regulated trades, and a marketplace in which honor, credit, and reputation were as negotiable as coin.
Italian cities then were hubs of commerce and law, with Roman-canon procedures shaping contracts, marriage settlements, and inheritance. Courtly display, seasonal pageantry, and the etiquette of patronage governed relations among counts, courtiers, and clients. The countryside nearby, dotted with villas and fortified posts, bore traces of earlier condottieri warfare while accommodating Spanish garrisons. Catholic festivals, confraternities, and clerical oversight structured public life. The setting’s blend of noble rank and citizen wealth, of foreign soldiers and native officers, provided a safe screen through which an English playwright could scrutinize arrangements of power, property, and marriage familiar to his London audience, even as the stage location remained ostensibly Italian.
The Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604) forms a crucial backdrop. After the Treaty of Nonsuch (1585), England aided the Dutch revolt, prompting open conflict with Spain. The Armada of 1588 failed, but renewed expeditions followed: the English sack of Cádiz (1596) and further Spanish fleets (1596–1597). Anti-Spanish sentiment seeped into London’s theaters, where swaggering captains and officious constables became stock figures. The play’s deployment of braggart soldiers and Mediterranean locales resonates with this war culture: Spanish rule in Milan and the presence of mixed Italian-Spanish forces furnished recognizable material for satire on military pretension, opportunistic service, and the traffic of ransom, booty, and political favor.
The Isle of Dogs affair (July–August 1597) profoundly shaped theatrical practice. A satirical play by Thomas Nashe and Ben Jonson provoked the Privy Council to close playhouses and imprison participants. Jonson was jailed and interrogated, an experience that sharpened his sense of the risks of topical reference. In the wake of this crackdown, dramatists increasingly displaced English controversies onto foreign settings. The play’s Italian frame, its oblique lampoons of living figures, and its stress on types rather than named contemporaries exemplify tactics forged under that pressure, allowing pointed social commentary while avoiding a second brush with state punishment.
The Bishops’ Ban of 1599, imposed by Archbishop John Whitgift and Bishop Richard Bancroft, censored printed verse satire and the more libelous strains of prose invective, ordering works by John Marston, Joseph Hall, and others to be seized and burned. Onstage, Edmund Tilney, Master of the Revels, tightened licensing. These measures did not end satire, but they reframed it. Italianate disguises, allegorical types, and legal or mercantile plots carried the bite. The play’s lampoons of hack writers and social climbers belong to this censored environment, using the distance of place and the cover of conventional comic situations to speak about London realities.
Indoor theaters and boy companies magnified the era’s satiric edge. James Burbage’s Blackfriars playhouse (built 1596) was swiftly leased to Henry Evans, who in 1597 organized a troupe of the Children of the Chapel. Alongside the Children of Paul’s (revived by 1599), these companies specialized in witty, topical, and sometimes scandalous comedies performed to elite audiences. The smaller venues rewarded intricate dialogue and caricature. Scholars often place the composition of the play around 1597–1598, precisely when such stages flourished. Its brisk citizen scenes, caricatured poet-figure, and nimble shifts between gentry and shop counters betray the boy-house idiom, though the exact original company remains a matter of debate.
This climate erupted in the so-called War of the Theatres (c. 1599–1601), a pamphlet-and-stage skirmish among Ben Jonson, John Marston, and Thomas Dekker. Jonson’s Poetaster (1601) at Blackfriars caricatured rivals; Dekker’s Satiromastix (1601) at Paul’s and the Globe retaliated. Personal allusion, guild satire, and mock-author portraits became routine. Within this context, the play’s Antonio Balladino—a transparent jab at the prolific pageant-writer and translator Anthony Munday (c. 1553–1633)—exemplifies Jonson’s method: he converts professional rivalry and civic pageantry into comic episodes within an Italian frame, allowing spectators to recognize London’s literary marketplace while ostensibly gazing abroad.
Censorship shaped every step from page to stage. Edmund Tilney’s office vetted scripts for seditious or personal matter; after 1597, managers avoided naming living grandees. In print, the Bishops’ Ban chilled overt satire; under James I, peace in 1604 eased tensions, but prudence persisted. The play, first printed in 1609, bears traces of revision and distancing common to texts passing from the risky 1590s repertory into Jacobean print. Its foreign names, generic soldierly boasts, and legal catchphrases provide a buffer that let Jonson test the limits of characterization—ridiculing faddish poets and nouveau-riche citizens—without transgressing the sharpened boundaries set by Church and state.
The subsistence crisis of the 1590s, driven by poor harvests in 1594–1597, depressed real wages and fueled urban unrest. London saw grain riots in 1595 and agitations by apprentices and journeymen, while justices enforced price controls and punished forestallers. Citizen comedy seized on shortages, petty fraud, and sharp household economies. The play’s attention to shopkeeping wit, the management of servants, and the comic elasticity of credit and reputation mirrors this atmosphere. Its fools and knaves exploit want and misprision, showcasing a city where food, fashion, and honor are scarce goods to be bartered, hoarded, or ostentatiously displayed—an economic theatre of daily negotiation.
