Book Description

Excerpt from Cynthia's Revels: Or, the Fountain of Self-Love Cynthia's Revels, because of its formlessness, complexity, and allegorical nature, probably yields less to the average reader than any other of Jonson's plays. This edition represents an effort to make the play more intelligible, partly by disentangling and analyzing its various elements, and partly by a detailed explanation of its obscurities and allusions. This has not been so dreary a task as one would imagine, to judge from the criticism which has for years been dealt out to this 'comicall satyre.' Swinburne's characterization, for example, of Jonson's 'cyclopean ponderosity of perseverance which hammers through scene after scene at the task of ridicule by anatomy of tedious and preposterous futilities, ' is hardly calculated to bias many toward the play. I have no wish to palliate its faults: its woeful lack of dramatic action, monotonous repetition of absurdities, and absence of artistic unity are all apparent enough. But no true impression of it is derived from a mere enumeration of its imperfections. With all its blemishes, one is yet constantly aware that it is a product of Jonson's maturing powers; and, aside from its literary qualities, it presents, especially to the student, questions of absorbing interest, most of which have hitherto received but little serious attention. What relation does it bear to the Stage-Quarrel, that fiery war fought out on the boards of the common stage? Who are the detractors of Cynthia, and who the culprits upon whom she has visited divine justice? Does the satire of manners, which forms the groundwork of the play, represent a conventional or an original and sincere attack on the foppery of the time? About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.