Renaissance dramatist Ben Jonson is lauded as a comedy writer extraordinaire. One of his most satirical farces, Poetaster, includes a scene involving a character's vomiting. Beyond the obvious humor, Jonson uses this scene regarding Crispinus to assert sophisticated notions of language use, intellect, and oratory-observations for which the playwright is given too little credit in critical scholarship of the era. This essay fills this gap by examining the scene from a theoretical framework

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... d loosely from structural linguistics and classical rhetoric. Deans' Distinguished Essay Award graduate recipient