Jonson, Shakespeare, and Aristotle on Comedy

Jonson, Shakespeare, and Aristotle on Comedy presents an Aristotelian theory of comedy synthesized from recent discoveries in Poetics scholarship and applies it to comparative readings of four disparate comedies by Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Dr. Jonathan Goossen evaluatates seminal works of early modern English comedy and carefully employs Aristotle’s literary theory as theory, not merely a historical influence on or source for these dramatists; and to find remarkable consonance between Shakespeare’s and Jonson’s comedy by comparing elements of plot and their emotional effect, as described by Aristotle.

Jonson, Shakespeare, and Aristotle on Comedy relates new understandings of Aristotle’s dramatic theory to the comedy of Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare. Typically, scholars of Renaissance drama have treated Aristotle’s theory only as a possible historical influence on Jonson’s and Shakespeare’s drama, focusing primarily on their tragedies. Yet recent classical scholarship has undone important misconceptions about Aristotle’s Poetics held by early modern commentators and fleshed out the theory of comedy latent within it. By first synthesizing these developments and then treating them as an interpretive theory, rather than simply an historical influence, this book demonstrates a remarkable consonance between Aristotelian principles of plot and its emotional effect, on the one hand, and the comedy of Shakespeare and Jonson, on the other. In doing so, it also reveals surprising similarities between these seemingly divergent dramatists.