The Staple of News
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The Staple of News is an early Caroline era play, a satire by Ben Jonson. The play was first performed in late 1625 by the King's Men at the Blackfriars Theatre, and first published in 1631.[1]
The Staple of News was entered into the Stationers' Register in Feb. 1626, but was not published till five years later. Like The Devil is an Ass, The Staple of News was intended to be part of the second folio collection of Jonson's works that was being readied for publication in 1630, as a follow-up to the first collection in 1616. The project was abandoned, apparently because Jonson grew dissatisfied with the quality of the printing (done by John Beale). The Staple of News, again like Devil is an Ass, was published separately in 1631 in folio format from the existing typesetting, by the bookseller Robert Allot – though it is unclear whether this was ever a commercial publication, or whether Jonson privately distributed copies of the play among friends, acquaintances, and admirers. The play next appeared in print in 1640, in the Volume 2 of the second folio of Jonson's works.[2]
Content
Among the late comedies that some critics have dismissed as Jonson's "dotages," The Staple of News has often been regarded as "the most admirable of Jonson's later works."[3] It has attracted scholarly attention for its satire on the newspaper and news agency business that was a recent and rapidly evolving innovation in Jonson's era. The first semi-regular news serials in English (then called "corantos"), printed in the Netherlands, had appeared in 1620 in response to the start of the Thirty Years' War; over the next year London publication of English translations of foreign-news pamphlets increased; and in 1622 Nathaniel Butter formed syndicate for supplying and printing news serials in English.[4] In Jonson's play, the News Staple is a parody of these developments. Jonson may have had a political motive for his satire: the new business in news concentrated on war news from Europe, which fed the popular urge for England's involvement on the Protestant side of the conflict. Jonson is thought to have sympathised with King James's strong reluctance to become involved in a European war.[5]
The play, however, is more than a simple and direct satire on the incipient newspaper business, a sort of 1620s anticipation of The Front Page. The News-Staple material comprises only a few scenes in the play as a whole. The main plot, about the Pennyboy family and Lady Pecunia, is a satire on the emerging ethic of capitalism; and the play features a complex threefold satire on abuses of language, in the News Staple, the society of jeerers, and the project for a Canting College. The play also provides an expression of the females-out-of-control theme that is so central and recurrent in Jonson's plays, from the Ladies Collegiate in Epicene (1609) to the three bad servants in The Magnetic Lady (1632).
Sources
As is usual for Jonson, The Staple of News is well-grounded in precedents from Classical literature. As The Case is Altered drew plot materials from two plays by Plautus, so The Staple of News borrows from no less than five plays by Aristophanes. The main plot, about Lady Pecunia and her suitors, derives from Plutus, while the language cabals draw upon The Clouds, Assemblywomen, and Thesmophoriazusae.[6] And when the mad Pennyboy Senior puts his dogs on trial, the debt is to The Wasps. Scholars have also noted borrowings from the dialogue Timon by Lucian, as well as links with earlier English plays, including The Contention Between Liberality and Prodigality (printed 1601) and The London Prodigal (1605).
Jonson also re-used some material from his unproduced 1624 masque Neptune's Triumph for the Return of Albion in the play. The anti-masque in that work contained a dialogue between a poet and a cook, which is one instance in the pattern of Jonsonian ridicule of his partner in creating masques, Inigo Jones. Jonson ridiculed Jones in works spanning two decades, from Bartholomew Fair (1614) to Love's Welcome at Bolsover (1634). This recycling of material from the poet-and-cook dialogue in Neptune's Triumph makes The Staple of News another instance in this pattern of mockery of Jones.[7]