Jonson's Folio and the Politics of Patronage

Abstract

The publication of Jonson's collected volume of Works has rightly come to be regarded as a momentous event, rich in symbolism for the cultural transformations beginning to crystallize in early modern Eng land. When the wits jibed in 1616 that Bens plays are works, when others works are plaies,1 they were not merely making a joke at the expense of someone who was their most dangerous literary competi tor. Rather, the flurry of outrage and amusement which this volume sparked off acknowledged that Jonson's ambitious packaging of his theatre scripts, poems and miscellaneous entertainments as if they were classically-grounded opera was testimony to pervasive changes in the environment within which the early modern writer was work ing. In the short term, the impact of THE WORKES OF Beniamin Jonson may have helped to encourage the publication of similar collections to follow, for Shakespeare, Donne and Milton.2 In the longer term, the writerly self-consciousness of Jonson's volume—its establishment of a canon of definitive texts, its employment of print ing-house technology to confer physical coherence and identity on the Folio, and its elevation of the poet from playhouse employee to autonomous creator—seems to signal the emergence of a new and distinctively modern idea of the author. Its packaging enunciates with remarkable prescience themes of authorial selfhood and control that were to become dominant in the ensuing century. Jonson's self-fashioning in the Folio is clearly seen in his careful exploitation of its textual features to project the author as a stable, self-determining and consistent persona. He ignored all his early hackwork and collaborations, and suppressed the information that Sejanus had been co-authored; he made extensive revisions to his early plays, particularly upgrading Every Man In so that it appeared to be the initiation of a new way in contemporary comedy; and he organized the volume as a whole so as to imply that it delineated an inexorable advance towards professional and social acclaim. Experi mental comical satires lead into fully achieved comedies and trage

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