The Real and the Preferable: Perelman's Structures of Reality in Jonson's Bartholomew Fair

Abstract

I argue that the debate between the Elizabethan theater and the Puritans was more than a simple argument about public morals. Drawing on Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's concepts of arguments that structure reality, I examine this debate as a rhetorical struggle over the way reality itself would be conceptualized by a culture. This historically situated debate can, in turn, shed light on the political implications of arguments that structure reality.