“Underwor(l)ds”, l'Ancien et le Nouveau : de Virgile à Ben Jonson

Abstract

This piece explores, first, the transition to modernity as this is marked by the emergence into the lexis of the word underworld and the elaboration of its semantic boundaries from the first decade of the XVIIth century to the last decade of the XXth; second, the anticipation of the modern sense of the word (to denote the urban criminal class) in the work of Ben Jonson. Associating the universe of the world-as-spectacle with the Virgilian place of the dead from the outset of his career as a playwright (in the 1590s) Jonson subsequently inflects this association in the direction of the modern sense of underworld (without using the word itself), as critics' use of the word to characterise the universe of Bartholomew Fair (1614) signals. By tracing the development of this association in his writing we thus trace the emergence of an ideologically loaded topography of the “new world” of modern, urban London