In this paper I argue that Celia’s throw of her handkerchief in Act 2 Scene 2 of Volpone constitutes a moment of confrontation between Ben Jonson and his audience. With this gesture of Celia’s, Jonson offers a perceptual and moral challenge to his spectators, a challenge that these latter are meant to lose. Celia’s throw of her handkerchief is her only expression in this play outside the sphere of imminent male violence. Yet, as in Chabris and Simons’s well-known “Invisible Gorilla” experiment, this gesture appears in such a way that the audience, while seeing it, is not led to give their attention to it or interpret it. Ben Jonson achieves this effect through the male discourses that construct Celia as a possession, an appearance, a sexual object, and a participant in deviant sexual acts, as well as through the dynamics of vision that attend upon these discourses. These discourses and dynamics, even while directing the audience’s attention to Celia, foreclose the possibility of questioning the purpose behind her throw of her handkerchief. Jonson gives to his spectators the briefest of opportunities to think more deeply about one of the play’s only two virtuous characters and to see the play from her point of view; and yet, simultaneously, Jonson seeks to prevent them from doing so. Like the dupes of the play, the spectators risk becoming morally responsible for the ways in which they are tricked.

This article examines the 1589–92 “Martin Marprelate” controversy—a battle of pamphlets, sermons, and plays which translated academic debates regarding the best way to govern the Church of England into a remarkably lowbrow register. I argue that the polemical centerpiece of this debate was the stock figure of a wicked prelate, drawn from a long history of popular religious performance reaching back to medieval passion plays depicting the persecution of Christ by the Jewish authorities. The pseudonymous presbyterian pamphleteer “Martin” and his anti-Puritan opponents like John Lyly and Thomas Nashe wrestled for control of this figure, seeking to cast each other’s clerical heroes as the tyrannical high priest Caiaphas of the gospels.

Is it better to defend against or assault fortune? By weaving together the adventures of two princes—one who is “risk on” and the other “risk off”—Shakespeare explores the mysteries of risk. While tragic protagonists frequently perish because they take questionable risks (Macbeth committing regicide, Caesar ignoring warnings, or Lear dividing Britain), Shakespeare explores in Hamlet whether caution is risk free. Caution is a source of systemic risk because opportunity is a sliding door and a window. By choosing caution instead of action, the window of opportunity may close. Although both Hamlet and Fortinbras start from similar circumstances and backgrounds, they end up in different places. Fortinbras, by maximizing risk, restores his ancestral prerogatives. Hamlet, by taking a more prudent course, paradoxically fails. Because risk has a time value, Hamlet dramatizes how the greatest risk may be taking insufficient risk. In tragedy, a world where the only thing that can be expected is the unexpected, there are always unexpected ways to fail (or succeed) that cannot be foreseen, but are patently obvious afterwards. When audiences analyze Hamlet with hindsight, they sometimes forget that it was with foresight they enjoyed the play: this is an artifact of Hamlet being too famous. To original audiences, it was unclear until the last whether Fortinbras or Hamlet would prove most royal. Only after the play ends does hindsight become twenty-twenty. Until then, the question of whether to defend against or assault fortune hangs in the balance, fueling drama’s engines.

In this article, I present an overview of the key positions and insights within the philosophical debate on the cognitive value of literary fiction. First, I discuss the various ways in which attempts have been made to align literature with the traditional philosophical and scientific concept of truth (propositional truth). Second, I consider a number of alternative concepts of knowledge and truth that have been put forward to understand the conceptual value of literature, such as ethical knowledge and self-knowledge. Then I address the ways in which empirical literary theory engages with these philosophical theories and attempts to support them through psychological experimentation. Fourth, I discuss the idea that literature provides us with a certain form of conceptual knowledge, followed by a discussion of the no-truth theory of literature, the idea that a work’s cognitive value is irrelevant to our valuation of a literary work as a work of art. Finally, I try to show an alternative to the problems that arise with the theories discussed and the lessons that can be learned from those theories, by focusing on Paul Ricoeur's ideas about the workings of fiction.

I will argue that the “middle comedies” of Ben Jonson, specifically The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair, address concerns that are not only social and economic but also political in nature. Or, to put it another way, the economic issues that these plays address are also political. As the economic landscape shapes social life in city comedy, so too do political concerns exert an important, if perhaps less apparent, influence over the plays that I will examine here. In The Alchemist, Sir Epicure Mammon fantasizes about relocating to a “free state” so that he may enjoy the pleasures that his newly acquired capital can afford him without drawing the ire and suspicion of the monarch (4.1.156). In Bartholomew Fair, Justice Overdo proclaims that he acts on behalf of king and commonwealth when trying to regulate the capitalistic chaos of the local fair. The prevalence of the language of politics (of commonwealth, monarchy, republicanism) in these plays suggests that their economic concerns have significant political implications. Each play offers a resolution to this conflict in accordance with dramatic propriety, what is appropriate given the circumstances. The justice that is done and the order that is achieved at the conclusion of each play is not carried out by politicians or magistrates but rather shaped by the market society in which the characters operate. The characters who try to regulate the market or expose its corruption fail miserably, while the characters who triumph at the end of each play work the system and manipulate the circumstances to their advantage.