Word: jonson
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Thus Poet Ben Jonson, with as much irony as admiration, honored the costly pageants known as masques and performed at the courts of Britain's James I and Charles I. The happenings of their day, masques were part allegorical or pastoral drama, and part dance; the participants were actors, mimes, musicians, lords and ladies of the court, and some times even the reigning monarch himself. Jonson wrote some two dozen such verse spectacles, but his sprightly dialogues and ballads were all too often lost amid the splendor of costumes, sets and elaborate stage effects dreamed up by the Florenz...
Banished Burly. In 1631, in the granddaddy of all showbiz altercations, Jones and Jonson split (the argument, naturally, concerned who should get top billing). But so popular was Jones with Connoisseur King Charles that Jonson was forced to retire from court. Jones continued to rule as the arbiter of taste-until, with the Puritan revolution, he probably landed in prison and eventually an obscure grave. Plentiful evidence of his flamboyant wit and stagecraft can be seen in an exhibit of 119 drawings of stage sets, props and costumes from the Duke of Devon shire's collection at Chatsworth, currently...
...techniques, importing the Italian proscenium arch and exiling the simple "wooden O" of Shakespeare's stage for three centuries. From Florence, he adapted stage sets that consisted of serried ranks of flats painted in perspective, with a distant vista on the backdrop, "the whole worke shooting downewards," as Jonson said, "which caught the eye afarre off with a wandring beauty...
...Jonson's proposal of a tax surcharge, however, is an encouraging sign, if he means to use the additional $45 billion in yearly revenue to ensure that domestic programs will not be cannibalized to feed the war. But more revenue will not be enough to pacify economy-minded Republicans; as Everett Dirksen said after the Johnson speech, the GOP congressmen will still be looking for ways to reduce the budget...
...monarch, but some feel that too much learning is dangerous for a ruler whose job, after all, is not to rule. Recalling that Elizabeth II was poorly educated when she came to the throne, Journalist Iain Hamilton observes: "She was good on a horse, though; and we have Ben Jonson's word for it that princes learn no art truly but the art of horsemanship." As for Charles, it would be wrong to encourage him to be "an 'ordinary' upper-class young man and enjoy life among property speculators, advertising agents, public relations artists, fashion photographers...