The many masks of the patronage poet: Ben Jonson and the 'Under-wood' volume

In publishing the 1616 Workes, Ben Jonson triggered a debate regarding authorship, authority, and patronage within his literary community. Because of critical assumptions regarding the monumentality of the Workes, and regarding a text known as the Drummond Conversations, Jonson's career as a whole has been misunderstood. Jonson was a powerful literary figure, attracting a circle of patrons and literary scholars who maintained him until his death. Jonson's posthumously-published Under-wood poems, and particularly the volume's Cary-Morison ode, reveal that Jonson continued to explore the relationship of poetry and patronage throughout his career and created in it an ideal based on individual merit.; By studying the poems in Under-wood and by identifying the tensions created by their collection in this volume, we recognize Jonson's versatility in working within varied patronage-promoting contexts. Jonson was keenly aware of the nature of the patronage system and of the ways in which to use it to promote himself and his art. Jonson published his Workes as one attempt to define authorship; then Jonson continued his work. Jonson maintained patrons who supported him in his explorations of the nature of poetry, politics, and patronage, as is demonstrated in Under-wood as well as in other works by and on Jonson.; Chapter 1 studies the complex textual history of the Drummond Conversations to free Jonson from the singular image that text presents. Chapter 2 demonstrates Jonson's role as an authority on authorship and literature by studying Jonson's self-representation in his 1623 poem on Shakespeare and in memorial poems written about him. Chapter 3 differentiates Under-wood from Jonson's other two poetry volumes in order to demonstrate Jonson's career-long work as self-defining laureate and his efforts to influence the nature of the poet-patron relationship. Chapter 4 is a reading of the Under-wood volume's poems which demonstrates both Jonson's work within numerous patronage contexts and his ideal of that system. Chapter 5 is a study of Jonson's Cary-Morison ode, within which Jonson clearly articulates that ideal, an image of the poet not only as an appendage of court and patron, but also as discerner of individual merit and shaper of literary community.