‘Satyres, That Girde and Fart at the Time’: Poetaster and the Essex Rebellion

Abstract

There has developed in recent years something approaching a consensus that Jonson’s work celebrates an absolutist political ideology. He has been seen as a fairly straightforward spokesman for absolutism in the masques and the poetry of praise, and a more oblique one in such matters as the exultation of monarchy of mind over appetite in many of his plays and poems. In his prescriptive attitudes to language and art, and even in the patriarchal marshalling of his followers as ‘Sons’, or as a ‘Tribe’ with him at its head, he seems actively to embrace absolutist attitudes, rather than to be drawn unwillingly into the dominant discourse of power.¹