PLAY FOR TODAY: REWRITING 'PERICLES'
(Adam Smyth's article appeared in The London Times, 10/24.) Ben Jonson's comedy The New Inn (1629) was, by all accounts, a theatrical disaster: 'negligently played' at the Blackfriars Theatre, according to its title page, 'and more squeamishly beheld'. The actors were hissed off stage, but Jonson, possessed of what the Renaissance scholar Joseph Loewenstein has called a […]