Ben Jonson and the Four Emotions

This dissertation offers a revisionary reading of Ben Jonson's corpus and a challenge to current approaches to the study of the history of emotions. Focusing on the traditional four fundamental emotions–desire, fear, grief, and happiness–,I show that Jonson's corpus presents a wider range of emotional expression and evaluation than scholars have recognized. In place of the familiar portrait of Jonson as a neo-Stoic skeptical of emotional experience, I argue that Jonson's corpus frequently embraces emotional experience–and even finds room for positive evaluations of such typically negative emotions as fear and grief.I further observe that Jonson's stylistic principles call into question typical methodological procedures in the study of the history of emotions. Consonant with his belief in the expressive adequacy of words, Jonson writes of the various emotions without elaboration: the word "happiness," say, is intended to convey the full force of the notion of happiness, without Jonson describing or defining this happiness. Without these elaborations, it becomes difficult to scholars to identify which of the various seventeenth-century discourses on the emotions–medical, philosophical, rhetorical, or theological–are relevant to Jonson's understanding of the emotions. Jonson's mention of the various fundamental emotions thereby forces readers to rely on their own experience of these emotions to make sense of Jonson's works. Instead of immediately historizing Jonson's work by appealing to contemporary medical, philosophical, rhetorical, and theological contexts, I suggest that Jonson's works require us to recognize the similarity between the emotions as Jonson presents them and our own understanding of thoseemotions. This recognition in turn implies the periodization which separates seventeenth-century emotional experience from our own is faulty.

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Alabama Libraries

Year dc:date.issued

2022

Author dc:creator

• Ramsay, Will

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Dowd, Michelle M.

Contributors dc:contributor

• Ainsworth, David
• Goethals, Jessica
• McElroy, Tricia
• Riches, Daniel

Statement dc:rights

• All rights reserved by the author unless otherwise indicated.

Language dc:language.iso

en_US, English

Dc Identifier Other

http://purl.lib.ua.edu/186789
u0015_0000001_0004613
Ramsay_alatus_0004D_15037

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:ir.ua.edu:123456789/9901