“Look No More”: Jonson’s Catiline and the Politics of Enargeia

Mansky, Joseph

“Look No More”: Jonson’s Catiline and the Politics of Enargeia

dc.contributor.author	Mansky, Joseph
dc.date.accessioned	2020-10-23T20:16:26Z
dc.date.available	2020-10-23T20:16:26Z
dc.date.issued	2019-03
dc.description.abstract	In his play Catiline His Conspiracy, Ben Jonson allegorizes Cicero’s fight to save the Roman Republic as a battle against the kind of spectacular drama that, Jonson claimed, his audiences so enjoyed. This metatheatrical polemic hinges on the rhetorical technique of enargeia: the power of language to conjure an image. For the early moderns, enargeia resolved the “paradox of representation”—the contradiction between “making present” and “standing for”—by subordinating visual presence to verbal illusionism. Jonson, aligning neoclassical poetics with humanist historiography, dramatizes this hierarchy of representation. In Catiline, Cicero’s rhetoric puts visions of violence before his audience’s eyes only to prevent their realization onstage. The play thus seeks to exorcise the specter of political violence that haunted early modern England and the Roman Republic alike. Yet the rhetoric of Jonson’s Cicero proves just as coercive as the spectacular violence that it has replaced. From Jonson’s time to ours, separating rhetoric from violence has remained the challenge of republicanism. (JM)	en_US
dc.description.peerreview	Yes	en_US
dc.identifier.citation	Mansky, Joseph.“‘Look no more’: Jonson’s Catiline and the Politics of Enargeia,” PMLA 134.2 (2019): pp .332–350.	en_US
dc.identifier.doi	10.1632/pmla.2019.134.2.332	en_US
dc.identifier.uri	https://hdl.handle.net/11244/325627
dc.language	en_US	en_US
dc.subject	Ben Jonson	en_US
dc.subject	Cicero	en_US
dc.subject	Elizabethan drama	en_US
dc.subject	Enargeia	en_US
dc.subject	Catiline His Conspiracy	en_US
dc.title	“Look No More”: Jonson’s Catiline and the Politics of Enargeia	en_US
dc.type	Article	en_US
ou.group	College of Arts and Sciences::Department of English	en_US