^
Births
which occurred on an 11 June:
1947
Henry G Cisneros (Mayor-D-San Antonio, Secretary of HUD)
1937 David
Bryant Mumford, English mathematician.
1932
Francisco Alberto Caamaño Deño, militar y político dominicano.
^
1925 William Styron, in Newport News,
Virginia.
He would be the author
of Sophie's Choice and other critically acclaimed novels.
Growing up in the segregated south troubled
Styron, whose father's family had once owned slaves. An only child,
Styron became a voracious reader and skipped ahead in school. He went
to Davidson College in North Carolina but nearly flunked out before
he joined the Marines. He was sent to the Pacific for the invasion
of Japan. When he returned, he finished his education at Duke University
in North Carolina, where he studied writing. He moved to New York,
hoping to become a writer.
He
finished his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness, about a woman
struggling against insanity and suicidal urges, but was called back
to the Marines to serve in the Korean War before the book's publication
in 1951. His next book, The Long March (1956), about a brutal
march forced on Marine recruits in training, became a critical and
financial success. He won a major award, the Prix de Rome, that allowed
him to travel abroad and write.
In Rome, he met his future wife, Rose Burgunder, and in Paris he helped
found the Paris Review. He made friends with Truman Capote, Norman
Mailer, James Baldwin, and other writers. His novel Set This House
on Fire (1960) was attacked by US critics but praised abroad.
In 1967, he explored his interest in race issues with The Confessions
of Nat Turner (1967), written in the voice of Nat Turner, leader
of a failed slave uprising. Some black writers attacked Styron, claiming
a white writer could not accurately portray the psychology of a black
slave. The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1968. His bestselling novel
Sophie's Choice, dealing with the devastating aftermath of
the Holocaust, was made into an award-winning movie in 1982. Styron
struggled with severe clinical depression and suicidal urges, which
he described in his memoir Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness
(1990). |
1920 Mahendra Bir Bikram Shah Deva,
who became king of Nepal in 1955 upon the death of his father, King Tribhuvan.
King Mahendra came into conflict with his Cabinet, which was dominated by
a coalition of the Nepali Congress Party and the Ranas (a line of hereditary
prime ministers). In order to assert his control, Mahendra staged a coup
in 1960, dissolving the National Assembly, abrogating the constitution,
and imprisoning political leaders. He had a new constitution promulgated
in 1962 that in effect instituted an absolute monarchy. Mahendra died on
31 January 1972 and was succeeded by his son Birendra [28 Dec 1945 –
01 Jun 2001] who was forced to restaure parliamentary
democracy with the constitution of 09 November 1990.
1918 Nelson
Mandela civil right activist in South Africa, first president of
South Africa elected under universal suffrage.
1914 Henry
G Cisneros (Mayor-San Antonio, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development,
CEO of Univision Communications)
1914 Gregorio López Raimundo,
dirigente comunista español.
1912 William Baziotes,
US Abstract
Expressionist painter in a biomorphic style influenced by Surrealism.
He died on 04 June 1963. — MORE
ON BAZIOTES AT ART “4” JUNE
with links to images.
1911 Manuel Ballesteros Gaibrois,
historiador y antropólogo español.
1910 Jacques-Yves Cousteau
France, (marine explorer aboard Calypso: PBS-TV producer; coinventor of
Aqua-Lung). He died on 25 June 1997.
1907 Paul Mellon
philanthropist/horse breeder (1964 Gold Baton)
1902 (11 July?)
Ernst Wilhelm Nay, German artist who died in 1968.—
MEHR
ÜBER NAY AN ART “4” JUNE
mit links zu bilder.
1899 Yasunari Kawabata, Japanese
1968-Nobel-Prize winning novelist who died on 16 April 1972.
1895 Nikolai A Bulganin Gorki Russia, premier of USSR (1955-8)
1894 Ricardo Rendon Bravo, caricaturista colombiano.
1880 Jeannette Rankin, first woman elected to US Congress
(from Montana). She died on 18 May 1973.
1867 Charles Fabry
found ozone layer in upper atmosphere
1864 Richard Strauss,
München, Germany, Romantic composer: Also Sprach Zarathustra,
Don Quixote, Till Eulenspiegel... He died on 08 September 1949.
1838 Mariano Fortuny y Marsal (or: y Carbo?), Spanish painter
who died on 21 November 1874. — MORE
ON FORTUNY AT ART “4” JUNE
with links to images.
1830 Miguel Iglesias, militar
y hacendado que destacó en la guerra de Perú con Chile.
1818
Alexander Bain, filósofo británico.
1812 Wouter Verschuur,
Dutch artist who died on 04 July 1874. — An
Inn
1787 Manuel Dorrego, militar y político
argentino.
1776 John Constable, English Romantic
painter specialized in Landscapes,
who died on 31 March 1837. — MORE
ON CONSTABLE AT ART “4” JUNE
with links to images.
1588 George Wither, English
poet and Puritan pamphleteer who died on 02 May 1667.
^
1572 Benjamin
Jonson, English dramatist, lyric poet, and literary
critic, who died on 06 August 1637. He is regarded as the second most
important English dramatist (after Shakespeare [26 Apr 1564 –
23 Apr 1616]) of the 1558-1603-1625 reigns of Elizabeth I [07 Sep
1533 – 24 Mar 1603] and James I [19
Jun 1566 – 27 Mar 1625]. Among his major plays are the comedies
Every Man in His Humour (1598), Volpone (1606),
The Alchemist (1610), and Bartholomew Fair (1614).
— Jonson was born two months after his father died. His
stepfather was a bricklayer, but by good fortune the boy was able
to attend Westminster School. His formal education, however, ended
early, and he at first followed his stepfather's trade, then fought
with some success with the English forces in the Netherlands. On returning
to England, he became an actor and playwright, experiencing the life
of a strolling player. He apparently played the leading role of Hieronimo
in The Spanish Tragedy of Thomas Kyd. By 1597 Jonson was
writing plays for Philip Henslowe [1550 – 06 Jan 1616], the
leading impresario for the public theater. With one exception (The
Case Is Altered), these early plays are known, if at all, only
by their titles. Jonson apparently wrote tragedies as well as comedies
in these years, but his extant writings include only two tragedies,
Sejanus (1603) and Catiline (1611).
In 1598 there was an abrupt change in Jonson's status, when Every
Man in His Humour was successfully presented by the Lord Chamberlain's
theatrical company (a legend has it that Shakespeare himself recommended
it to them), and his reputation was established. In this play Jonson
tried to bring the spirit and manner of Latin comedy to the English
popular stage by presenting the story of a young man with an eye for
a girl, who has difficulty with a phlegmatic father, is dependent
on a clever servant, and is ultimately successful—in fact, the standard
plot of the Latin dramatist Plautus. But at the same time Jonson sought
to embody in four of the main characters the four “humors” of medieval
and Renaissance medicine (choler, melancholy, phlegm, and blood) which
were thought to determine human physical and mental makeup.
That same year Jonson killed a fellow actor in a duel, and, though
he escaped capital punishment by pleading “benefit of clergy” (the
ability to read from the Latin Bible), he could not escape branding.
During his brief imprisonment over the affair he became a Roman Catholic.
Following the success of Every
Man in His Humour, the same theatrical company acted Jonson's
Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), which was even more ambitious.
It was the longest play ever written for the Elizabethan public theater,
and it strove to provide an equivalent of the Greek comedy of Aristophanes;
“induction,” or “prelude,” and regular between-act comment explicated
the author's views on what the drama should be. The play, however,
proved a disaster, and Jonson had to look elsewhere for a theater
to present his work. The obvious place was the “private” theaters,
in which only young boys acted (see children's company). The high
price of admission they charged meant a select audience, and they
were willing to try strong satire and formal experiment; for them
Jonson wrote Cynthia's Revels (1600) and Poetaster
(1601). Even in these, however, there is the paradox of contempt for
human behavior hand in hand with a longing for human order.
It appears that Jonson won royal attention by his Entertainment
at Althorpe, performed before James I's queen as she journeyed
down from Scotland in 1603, and in 1605 The Masque of Blackness
was presented at court. The “masque” was a quasi-dramatic entertainment,
primarily providing a pretense for a group of strangers to dance and
sing before an audience of guests and attendants in a royal court
or nobleman's house. This elementary pattern was much elaborated during
the reign of James I, when the architect Inigo Jones [15 Jul 1573
– 21 Jun 1652] provided increasingly magnificent costumes and
scenic effects for masques at court. The few spoken words that the
masque had demanded in Elizabethan days expanded into a “text” of
a few hundred lines and a number of set songs. Thus the author became
important as well as the designer: he was to provide not only the
necessary words but also a special “allegorical” meaning underlying
the whole entertainment. It was Jonson, in collaboration with Jones,
who gave the Jacobean masque its characteristic shape and style. He
did this primarily by introducing the suggestion of a “dramatic” action.
It was thus the poet who provided the informing idea and dictated
the fashion of the whole night's assembly.
Jonson's early masques were clearly successful, for during the following
years he was repeatedly called upon to function as poet at court.
Among his masques were Hymenaei (1606), Hue and Cry After
Cupid (1608), The Masque of Beauty (1608), and The
Masque of Queens (1609). In his masques Jonson was fertile in
inventing new motives for the arrival of the strangers. But this was
not enough: he also invented the “antimasque,” which preceded the
masque proper and which featured grotesques or comics who were primarily
actors rather than dancers or musicians.
Important though Jonson was at the court in Whitehall, it was undoubtedly
Jones's contributions that caused the most stir. That tension should
arise between the two men was inevitable, and eventually friction
led to a complete break: Jonson wrote the Twelfth Night masque
for the court in 1625 but then had to wait five years before the court
again asked for his services.
In
1606 Jonson and his wife (whom he had married in 1594) were brought
before the consistory court in London to explain their lack of participation
in the Anglican church. He denied that his wife was guilty but admitted
that his own religious opinions held him aloof from attendance. The
matter was patched up through his agreement to confer with learned
men, who might persuade him if they could. Apparently it took six
years for him to decide to conform. For some time before this he and
his wife had lived apart, Jonson taking refuge in turn with his patrons
Sir Robert Townshend and Esmé Stuart, Lord Aubigny.
During this period, nevertheless, he made a mark second only to Shakespeare's
in the public theater. His comedies Volpone; or, the Foxe
(1606) and The Alchemist (1610) were among the most popular
and esteemed plays of the time. Each exhibited man's folly in his
pursuit of gold. Set respectively in Italy and London, they demonstrate
Jonson's enthusiasm both for the typical Renaissance setting and for
his own town on Europe's fringe. Both plays are eloquent and compact,
sharp-tongued and controlled. The comedies Epicoene (1609)
and Bartholomew Fair (1614) were also successful.
Jonson went on a walking tour in 1618–1819, which took him to Scotland.
During the visit the city of Edinburgh made him an honorary burgess
and guild brother. On his return to England he received an honorary
Master of Arts degree from Oxford University, a most signal honor
in his time. Jonson's life was a life of talk as well as of writing.
He engaged in “wit-combats” with Shakespeare, and, first at the Mermaid
Tavern and then at the Devil Tavern, Jonson reigned supreme. It was
a young man's ultimate honor to be regarded as a “son of Ben.”
In 1623 his personal library was destroyed
by fire. By this time his services were seldom called on for the entertainment
of Charles I's court, and his last plays failed to please. In 1628
he suffered what was apparently a stroke and, as a result, was confined
to his room and chair, ultimately to his bed. That same year he was
made city chronologer (thus theoretically responsible for the city's
pageants), though in 1634 his salary for the post was made into a
pension. Jonson died in 1637 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
The first folio edition of his works had appeared in 1616; posthumously,
in a second Jonson folio (1640), appeared Timber: or, Discoveries,
a series of observations on life and letters. Here Jonson held forth
on the nature of poetry and drama and paid his final tribute to Shakespeare:
in spite of acknowledging a belief that his great contemporary was,
on occasion, “full of wind” (sufflaminandus erat) he declared that
“I loved the man, and do honor his memory, on this side idolatry,
as much as any.”
Ben Jonson was
a man of contraries. For “twelve years a papist,” he was also, in
fact though not in title, Protestant England's first poet laureate.
His major comedies express a strong distaste for the world in which
he lived and a delight in exposing its follies and vices. A gifted
lyric poet, he wrote two of his most successful plays entirely in
prose, an unusual mode of composition in his time. Though often an
angry and stubborn man, no one had more disciples than he. He was
easily the most learned dramatist of his time, and he was also a master
of theatrical plot, language, and characterization. It is a measure
of his reputation that his dramatic works were the first to be published
in folio (the term, in effect, means the “collected works”) and that
his plays held their place on the stage until the period of the Restoration.
Later they fell into neglect, though The Alchemist was revived
during the 18th century, and in the mid-20th century several came
back into favor: Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew
Fair especially have been staged with striking success.
Jonson's chief plays are still very
good theater. His insistence on putting classical theory into practice
in them has reinforced rather than weakened the effect of his gift
of lively dialogue, robust characterization, and intricate, controlled
plotting. In each of them he maneuvers a large cast of vital personages,
all consistently differentiated from one another. Jonson's plots are
skillfully put together; incident develops out of incident in a consistent
chain of cause and effect, taking into account the respective natures
of the personages involved and proceeding confidently through a twisting,
turning action that is full of surprises without relying on coincidence
or chance. Sometimes Jonson's comedy derives from the dialogue, especially
when it is based on his observation of contemporary tricks of speech.
Butthere are also superbly ludicrous situations, often hardly removed
from practical joke.
Jonson is
renowned for his method of concentrating on a selected side, or on
selected sides, of a character, showing how they dominate the personality.
This is to some extent a natural outcome of his classical conception
of art, but it also stems from his clear, shrewd observation of people.
In Jonson's plays both eccentricity and normal behavior are derived
from a dominating characteristic, so that the result is a live, truthfully
conceived personage in whom the ruling passion traces itself plainly.
The later plays, for example, have characters whose behavior is dominated
by one psychological idiosyncrasy. But Jonson did not deal exclusively
in “humors.” In some of his plays (notably Every Man in His Humour),
the stock types of Latin comedy contributed as much as the humors
theory did. What the theory provided for him and for his contemporaries
was a convenient mode of distinguishing among human beings. The distinctions
so made could be based on the “humors,” on Latin comic types, or,
as in Volpone, in the assimilation of humans to different
members of the animal kingdom. The characters Volpone, Mosca, Sir
Epicure Mammon, Face, Subtle, Dol Common, Overdo, and Ursula are not
simply “humors”; they are glorious type figures, so vitally rendered
as to take on a being that transcends the type. This method was one
of simplification, of typification, and yet also of vitalization.
The Restoration dramatists' use
of type names for their characters (Cockwood, Witwoud, Petulant, Pinchwife,
and so on) was a harking back to Jonson, and similarly in the 18th
century, with such characters as Peachum, Lumpkin, Candour, and Languish.
And though, as the 18th century proceeded, comic dramatists increasingly
used names quite arbitrarily, the idea of the Jonsonian “type” or
“humor” was always at the root of their imagining. Jonson thus exerted
a great influence on the playwrights who immediately followed him.
In the late Jacobean and Caroline years, it was he, Shakespeare, and
Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher who provided all the models. But
it was he, and he alone, who gave the essential impulse to dramatic
characterization in comedy of the Restoration and also in the 18th
and 19th centuries.
JONSON ONLINE: |
|
The Alchemist
Bartholomew
Fair
Catiline
Cynthia's Revels
Epicoene
|
Every Man in his Humour
The New Inn
Sejanus
Timber
|
Selected works and commentary
Volpone
Volpone
Volpone, or, The Foxe: A Comoedie Acted in the Yeere 1605 (page
images) |
1656 Charles
René Reyneau, French mathematician who died on 24 February
1728. Author of Analyse démontrée (1708).
|
2002
Eiman Joulani and Anan al-Ashab, Palestinians, are found shot dead
in Hebron, West Bank. They were suspected of providing information to the
Israelis about the movements of the militia leader Marwan Zalloum, who was
killed on 23 April 2002 by fire from an Israeli helicopter. Joulani was
shot dead in A-Salame Street, on the exact spot where Zalloum was killed.
Al-Ashab was shot outside Hebron University.
