|
''A Tale of a Tub'' is a Caroline era stage play, a comedy written by Ben Jonson. The last of his plays to be staged during his lifetime, ''A Tale of a Tub'' was performed in 1633 and published in 1640 in the second folio of Jonson's works. ==History== The play was licensed for publication by Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, on 7 May 1633, and acted by Queen Henrietta's Men at the Cockpit Theatre; it was the only one of Jonson's post-1614 plays not premiered by the King's Men. The play was also performed at Court on 14 January 1634, before King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria – though it was not well received. Scholars are divided on the date of authorship of the play. Some judge it to be an early work, first composed perhaps around 1596, that Jonson later revised not long before its 1633 production. Recent opinion holds that the Jonson wrote the play in the era when it premiered, the early 1630s, and that its apparently archaic aspects are deliberate artistic choices on the author's part.〔Butler, in McMullen and Hope.〕 For modern critics and scholars, a primary focus of interest in the play is Jonson's ridicule of Inigo Jones as "In-and-In Medlay."〔"In-and-in" was a popular dice game of the era; Jonson mentions it in ''The New Inn'', Act III, scene i.〕 (The 1633 license for the play states that passages ridiculing Jones as "Vitruvius Hoop" were to be struck out. Jonson seems to have complied...merely to replace the Hoop material with the Medlay material.) Jonson had nourished a long-standing grudge against Jones, feeling that the architect had always received too much credit for the success of the Court masques that were written by Jonson but had their scenery, costumes, and stage effects designed by Jones. His ridicule of Jones runs from ''Bartholomew Fair,'' where Jones in Lanthorn Leatherhead (1614), through ''Neptune's Triumph for the Return of Albion'' (1624) and ''The Staple of News'' (1626). Jonson further satirised Jones as "Colonel Iniquo Vitruvius" in his 1634 masque ''Love's Welcome at Bolsover.'' In addition to the Medlay character, the play features Diogenes Scriben, a bad poet and a pretended descendant of the Classical Diogenes. Commentators have speculated on intended real-life identities for this satirical figure, though no consensus has been achieved. The play is largely written in dialect; scholars have disputed the accuracy of Jonson's efforts in this regard. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「A Tale of a Tub (play)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|