dc.description.abstract | The idea of carnival is explored in Rabelais and His World, in which Bakhtin
shows that the carnival was an officially sanctioned period in which all dogmas and
doctrines, as well as the fonns and ideologies of the dominant culture could
temporaiily be overturned. This resulted in activities that could be seen as profane
and heretical, such as the paiodies of religious rituals, or treasonous and socially
subversive, such as the parodies of kingship, inversions of master-seiwant roles, and
the like. Moreover, the phenomenon of carnival allowed the merging of categories
that are kept separate by the ideologies of a certain culture; the serious and the
ridiculous, the sacred and the profane, life and death, rulers and the mled, and so on.
According to Bakhtin, the advantage of carnival was that it reminded of the
athibutes of the dominant culture, the characteristics of the people at large, the
divisions in the culture, of class distinctions, and of value judgments and differences.
Bakhtin considers carnival as an actual socio-cultural phenomenon. In Bakhtin's
analysis of carnival, symbolic polarities of high and low, official and unofficial,
grotesque and classical are deformed and reconstructed.
Ben Jonson's comedies deal with the symbolic extremities of the exalted and
the base. In his comedies Jonson plumbs the depths of social classification, taking
his characters from the lower strata of the underworld, as well as from the higher stiatum of the body politic; the advocates, masters, doctors, etc. Thus, Jonson
comments on the political and the social changes in the first half of the seventeenth
centuiy. In his plays the 'licensed release' of carnival is experienced, which is a kind
of protest against the established order. Yet, the carnival Jonson depicts in his
comedies is also intended to preserve and stiengthen the established order. It is a
foim of social control of the low by the high. Although the world seems to be turned
upside down and the roles change during the carnival, in fact the rulers who were
chosen and crowned reaffinn the status quo. Therefore, the carnival spirit in Ben
Jonson's comedies is a vehicle for social protest, but at the same time the method for
disciplining that protest.
Bakhtin's concept of camivalesque is highly significant in discussing the sociocultural
and political content of Ben Jonson's comedies. His theoiy helps one see
Jonson's comedies in an especially wide perspective. This dissertation aims to link
Bakhtin's discovery of the importance of camivalesque with Ben Jonson's three best
known comedies: Volpone, The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair. | en_US |