The Power of Appearance in Ben Johnsons Plays Essay -- Physical Appea

The Power of Appearance in Ben Johnsons PlaysThe very notion of drama depends in part upon the idea that when people dress up in unalike clothes, it is easier to imagine them as different people. Jonson commonly utilizes this device within his plays for, when a character pretends to be someone else, he or she merely puts on the other persons clothes. In Volpone, when Volpone puts on the garb of a commendatore, Mosca, a clarissimo, they ar treated as such. When Volpone asks, Am I thusly like him? Mosca replies O, sir, you are he no man gutter decompose you (Jonson, Volpone, 5.5, l. 1-2). By putting on the other mans garment, Volpone basically becomes the commendatore whose cloak he has put on. Jonson is not suggesting that the audience actually believes that the actors swallow become their characters. However, he is making fun of this idea that because actors dress up in someone elses clothing, the audience can accept the illusion of a group of lower-class men contend w omen and kings. In The Devil Is an Ass, and The New Inn Jonson takes the power of appearances one rate further. These plays accept as self-evident the idea that social class is delimit by appearance. However, men like Fitzdottrel and Ambler who do not decent attentiveness their rights to aristocratic dress, prove themselves less than aristocratic. Women like Prudence, who understand and respect the power of dress to mold appearances, are allowed to assume the role for which they start been costumed. Jonson seems to be suggesting that those characters who know that social class can actually be manipulated by appearance, and thus place the proper value on their appearances, are the true aristocrats whether they are born to the rank or not.... ... This reading of Jonsons exploration of the conditions upon nobility leads to an interesting conclusion concerning Jonsons own life. speckle Jonson sought to rise within the courtly reality, he never achieved nobility. chthonic this interpretation, Jonsons failure would have been more satisfying to him than a tokenish title bestowed as a favor by King throng or King Charles, for Jonson appears to have considered preserving the worth of nobility to be uttermost more important than his own social station. If actually entering the world of aristocracy meant cheapening it in any way (and one can just now fail to acknowledge that Jonsons character left something to be desire by way of a noble heart), then one could cope that Jonson would have preferred to stay always one step external from the aristocracy -- preserving its value both with his desire and with his failure.