Critic: Robert C. Evans

Source: CLA Journal, Vol. 30, No. 3, March, 1987, pp. 379-94

[In the following essay, Evans contends that the poetry Jonson wrote within the patronage system was as psychologically necessary as it was financially enabling.]

The impact of patronage on English Renaissance literature seems all the greater when one recognizes that literary patronage was only one aspect of a much larger, far more comprehensive system of patronage relationships. Patronage, broadly defined, was the central social system of the era. It dominated political life and permeated the structure of the church and universities. Its influence on the economy was enormous, and the assumptions behind it were reflected in religious thought, in cosmological speculation, and in the organization and daily detail of family life. Painting, architecture, music--in fact, all the arts and not just literature--were affected by a patronage culture so pervasive that no individual or sphere of life could entirely escape its effects. The connection between poetry and patronage, then, involved more than how writers were paid or how they made their livings. It involved, more fundamentally, how they lived their lives. The patronage system was more than simply a means of organizing the economy or of structuring politics, of arranging social life or of thinking about one's relationship with God. Because it was all these things, it was also a psychological system, in the sense that the assumptions behind a patronage culture inevitably affected how people thought about themselves, others, and their mutual interactions. Patronage, or one's place in the various interlocking patronage networks, went far towards defining not only one's social status, but also one's self-esteem. Making a secure and respected niche for oneself in the patronage system meant more than ensuring a healthy income. It meant winning an opportunity to participate most fully, most really, in the life of one's time.

In its broadest sense, the patronage system was simply the translation into practical social terms of the grand hierarchical "Elizabethan World Picture"--that set of assumptions, grounded in notions of subordination and degree, by which society was ostensibly ordered and its place in the universe conventionally explained. With God the Father at the head of an enormous chain of subordinate relationships, with the monarch as God's vice-regent on earth and as a father to his people, and with individual fathers as little sovereigns, minor masters of their own families and households, renaissance culture formed a webwork of patriarchal relationships. Authority was vested in powerful, mostly older male figures who exercised it over properly deferential inferiors. Gaining power meant propitiating those who held it, and at every level one's most important relations were less with one's equals or peers than with one's superiors and subordinates. "Horizontal" relations--friendships, for instance--were not insignificant; for one thing, they could provide some relief from, as well as some alternative to, the pressures or anxieties of participating in the patronage system. But the relief could never be total, the alternative never complete: no friendship, however satisfying, could in itself assure one a secure place in the social hierarchy. And one's friends, of course, were also themselves participants in the same system. Connections with them might in fact be useful in winning or maintaining patronage, but it was the relation with the patron that was of prime importance. Indeed, the very fact that friendships could provide a sense of refuge from the pressures of competition suggests how the patronage system could color the character of relationships seemingly separate from it. Even the link between man and wife was conceived less as a partnership of equals than as a subordination of the woman to the husband. In theology, politics, and domestic relations, patriarchy was the rule and patronage its reflection in practical life. It is precisely because literary patronage was not an isolated or peculiar arrangement, precisely because it reflected and replicate in one sphere the patterns of thinking and behavior dominant in society at large, that its effects on literature seem so potentially complex, important, and far-reaching. Paradoxically, it is only when one pulls back from a focus on literary patronage per se to a concern with the larger patronage system that the full implications of patronage for literature begin to become apparent.

Ideally patronage relationships were grounded in mutual reciprocity, but the translation from theory to practice was inevitably imperfect. While in theory the patronage system reflected the underlying hierarchical order of the universe, in practice it created numerous opportunities for tensions, contradictions, suspicions, and resentment. By its very nature the patronage system involved the accommodation of egos with different, sometimes contradictory interests. The actual operation of the "system," in fact, was neither simple nor rigidly systematic; relations among its participants were likely to be complex and dialectical rather than straightforwardly casual. The opportunities for irony, ambiguity, paradox, and equivocation existed not only in the literary works to which patronage relations gave birth, but in the relations themselves.

Over the course of a career that spanned four decades and the reigns of three very different monarchs, Ben Jonson became perhaps the most spectacularly successful patronage poet of his era. House-guest of well-connected nobles, perennial author of holiday masques, and recipient of royal grants of money and sack, Jonson by middle age had become a fixture at the Jacobean court. He had achieved the kind of fame and social influence that had always eluded Spenser; and although his fortunes diminished in his final years, at his death a parade of nobles escorted him to the grave. Many of his best poems were addressed to patrons, and many more deal explicitly with patronage as a theme. During the course of his long career he met many of the typical challenges and fulfilled most of the common functions of the patronage poet. His work represents, to an unsuspected extent, a repertoire of responses to patronage pressures and influences. Yet discussion of the impact of patronage on Jonson's poetry has rarely been as complicated or extensive as the impact itself.

For this, Jonson's success is partly responsible. If any Jacobean poet benefited from patronage, he did. Compared to others--Donne, for instance--his rise was meteoric and his status secure. Year after year he won lucrative commissions to write masques for James's court, so that in time his prosperity became almost its own best guarantee. Aspiring courtiers who noted Jonson's favor with the King employed him to help win or maintain similar status for themselves. And if Jonson's poetry could enhance the prestige of one aristocrat, he was likely to win the attention and encouragement of others. The more he became known and regarded at court, the more likely he was to continue flourishing there. Jonson's experience with patronage can thus seem at first glance unproblematic--hence uninteresting and comparatively unimportant.

But this account of Jonson's career is defectively simple. It substitutes the long view of literary history for Jonson's day-to-day lived experience. Looking back on his life from a distance of several centuries, it is much easier for us than it ever was for him to take his literary and social success for granted. Historical hindsight imposes a shape and thus a seeming inevitability on his career--an inevitability of which he was inevitably ignorant. His early years seem to have impressed upon him how uncertain and unpredictable life could be--the extent to which good fortune and status could depend upon chancy contingencies or luck. And his later experience as a competitor for patronage only reinforced that lesson. He sought patronage for the same reasons others did--to enhance his financial and social security--but he had the extra motive of winning back some of the status and concomitant self-esteem that his father's untimely death and mother's remarriage to a bricklayer had denied him.

Jonson's struggle for social acceptance was thus more than pragmatically important: it was psychologically imperative. It was waged, moreover, in the face of recurrent, sometimes rancorous competition. Even a short list of Jonson's competitors--men he seems to have threatened or felt threatened by--reads like a Who's Who of Jacobean letters: Alexander, Brome, Chapman, Daniel, Day, Dekker, Jones, Marston, Overbury, and (most controversial of all) Shakespeare. Not all these men directly competed with Jonson for patronage, but his relations with none of them can entirely be separated from patronage concerns. Nor were all his challengers themselves historically important: some rate footnotes only for having quarrelled with Jonson, while the names of others--some of those he attacks in his Epigrammes, for instance--cannot be recovered. Yet the impact of such competition was immense, and no assessment of Jonson as a patronage poet can afford to ignore it. His patronage poems include not only those addressed to patrons, but those directed at the rivals who competed with him for their attention.

Even if Jonson had had no competitors to worry about, his position as a patronage poet would still not have been entirely secure. Patronage dependency, though more profitable and respectable than writing for the stage, was dependency nontheless and carried its own hazards. Indeed in certain respects the transition from the stage to the court could leave a poet more exposed to uncertainties and anxieties than before. A play might fail in the theatre because it did not please, but a poet might fail at court if his personality were unpleasant. Because the patronage system during this period was tied so intimately to the predilections and characteristics of individual patrons, it lacked many of the checks and balances, the institutional safeguards typical of the more impersonal patronage practiced, for instance, by private foundations and government endowments in twentieth-century democracies. At any time, for any reason, a patron could take offense, lose interest, lose influence, or die. A poet could win the favor of a noble lady along with the jealousy of her husband. He could anger a patron by angering the patron's friend, while words innocently meant could easily be misinterpreted and held against him. He could be used by an aristocrat while the aristocrat lived, then abused by the man's enemies when the patron passed away. These are not fanciful suppositions--all happened to Jonson at one time or another, and in most cases more than once. Poetry was never as important a concern to patrons as it was to the poets themselves, nor was the poet's actual social position ever as exalted as the poets wished. Unlike suitors with political or economic benefits to confer, the poet had relatively less to offer a patron and was thus relatively less secure. Even success, if it came, could breed anxieties of its own. The more acceptance Jonson found from patrons, for instance, the more his dependence on them grew and thus the more their possible rejection of him would have meant, financially and psychologically. By the closing years of James' reign, no one was more aware than Jonson himself how unusual his social position was: reason enough both to doubt its security and to fight to maintain it.

These twin sources of anxiety--the inherently unstable nature of the relationship between poet and patron, and the inevitable fact of continuous competition for patronage support--arguably had a profound, even determining influence on Jonson's life and art. Coupled with the uncertainties he experienced in his early years, such anxieties must have affected in minute fashion the ways in which he thought about, executed, and presented each of his poems. Of course, almost all writers will, with different degrees of self-consciousness, need to anticipate the possible reactions of their audiences. And such anticipation will affect not only what they write, but how. For the patronage poet, however--and for Jonson in particular--such considerations must have been more important than we can probably today appreciate. For him, each poem was quite literally a calculated risk; he could never confidently predict how his patrons or competitors might react to it, and yet he knew that their reactions would determine his future in fundamental ways. As such, the poem was invested with an immense amount of psychic energy and life; a patronage perspective on Jonson's works would be valuable if it did nothing other than return to use some sense of that kind of energy.

Yet the idea of Jonson as a fundamentally anxious poet is not one that has received much emphasis in Jonson criticism. Even when it has been mentioned, it has usually been dealt with in such a way as to underplay its significance. To stress that the audience Jonson was necessarily most responsive to was comprised primarily of patrons and potential patrons, of competitors and potential competitors; to argue that when Jonson wrote, distributed, or printed a poem he had to take the possible reactions of these readers into account--such an emphasis might seem to compromise the image Jonson presents of himself as a poet fundamentally independent of the social pressures of his day. And to compromise that image might seem to undermine Jonson's importance as a poet. Some of Jonson's readers, perhaps influenced by Romantic assumptions of poetry as self-expression, react with mild contempt or disdain to any poem that suggests too clearly its concern with patronage; for these readers Jonson's "begging" poems, or the official verse he churned out under Charles, make an embarrassing coda to the apparent independence of his earlier career. At the same time, they tend to be embarrassed by Jonson's personal feuds with other known literary figures of his age. Both reactions implicitly acknowledge a fact which Jonson himself could hardly afford to ignore: that his acceptance as a poet depended (and still depends) very much upon the right kind of self-presentation.

Our standard concepts of poetry, however--whether we like to think of it as didactic instruction, personal expression, the congealed spirit of its culture or age, or the free play of signifiers--leave little room, and provide almost no vocabulary, for thinking of it in terms of the poet's self-promotion and individual advantage. The very idea seems a bit distasteful, for however "sophisticated" or "critical" or "distanced" our attitudes towards other conventional verities, the urge to enshrine the poet as a creative culture-hero, somehow set apart from and above ambition, remains strong. Nurtured over the centuries by poets themselves, it exercises an understandable appeal for critics as well. It helps account for the fact that recent discussion of poetic anxiety tends to focus less upon the poet's relations with contemporary competitors than on mental wrestlings with intellectual forebears. It partly explains why studies of poets and politics so frequently concentrated on their subjects' ideological commitments, or on major shifts of historical thought, rather than on the day-to-day power relations that consume so much of the energy and attention of so many ordinary people. In Jonson's case, it makes sense of the tendency to present his quarrel with Jones as primarily an aesthetic disagreement, and in almost every case it leads to an emphasis upon ideas in and of themselves, while neglecting their tactical serviceability--the ways people use them against or direct them towards each other, and why. None of these approaches is illegitimate; each is valuable and contributes to our understanding of the authors involved. Yet none is adequate in and of itself, and all are inadequate to the extent that they ignore the power dimension of individual activity. This is not to say that an emphasis on that dimension can itself provide anything like a total, adequate explanation: to reduce human actions merely to power relations would be to falsify them. But neither can this dimension be ignored. It must take its place as part of any total explanation.

To emphasize the psychological importance of patronage to the poet, however, is not to suggest that the poet was completely dominated by the patron, or in any way incapacitated by his dependency. For although the poet depended upon the patron to a great degree for his sense of self-validation and self-esteem (especially in the face of competition from other poets), the patron to a lesser extent depended upon the poet to enhance his reputation in the face of competition among the patrons themselves. A skillful poet could take advantage of this fact and use the patron's interest in maintaining a healthy public reputation to advance his own interests. Jonson's inclusion of the Countess of Bedford in his important epistle to the Countess of Rutland (The Forrest, XII), for instance, allows him to set up a kind of quiet, understated competition between the two women to see which will prove the more deserving patron. He uses a variation of this same tactic in a less well-known poem to the Countess of Bedford herself. The work is brief enough to permit full discussion of it, not only in order to show the impact that the patronage situation could have on the aesthetic design of individual poems, but also in order to suggest how a patronage perspective can broaden and deepen our appreciation of the skill and accomplishment of even relatively minor examples of Jonson's writing:

Madame, I told you late how I repented,

I ask'd a lord a buck and he denyed me;

And, ere I could aske you, I was preuented:

For your most noble offer had supply'd me.

Straight went I home; and there most like a Poet,

I fancied to my selfe, what wine, what wit

I would haue spent: how euery Muse should know it,

And Phoebvs-selfe should be at eating it.

O Madame, if your grant did thus transferre mee,

Make it your gift. See whither that will beare mee.

This is, of course, a much slighter poem than the "Epistle" to the Countess of Rutland, and the objective it seeks to obtain is much more immediate and practical, and much less important, than that sought in the longer poem. Yet Jonson himself seems to have fancied the work: Drummond of Hawthornden mentions it as one that the poet particularly liked to quote. Simply as a work of "art," it is hard to imagine why Jonson would have been so proud of it; but as an example of how one could skillfully manipulate a patron--itself an artful undertaking--it becomes easier to understand how a poet who gave evidence of valuing poems in such terms could think so highly of it. Seen in this way, it is a sophisticated work indeed.

Jonson uses the first quatrain to establish a clear opposition--in the mind of the Countess, and in the mind of anyone else to whom she or Jonson might show the poem, or quote it--between the niggardliness of the unnamed lord and the Countess' spontaneous generosity. In interpreting this poem, as in interpreting many others by Jonson, it is important to remember that the works of Renaissance poets were often "published" long before they were ever actually printed and sold. Manuscript circulation or readings of the poems in small groups could be far more significant in establishing a poet's reputation than merely selling copies of a printed book--especially if the manuscripts were circulated among or read to those who shaped the tastes and values of the poet's society. Manuscript publication and readings also meant that a poet could control--or try to control--the distribution of his work more effectively than if it were widely published in print. Proper interpretation of the poem might then depend upon the context the poet established during his reading of it. This point becomes especially significant when one is considering Jonson's satiric attacks on unnamed malefactors, as in the present work. Although the lord is left unnamed in the printed version, there is every reason to suspect that when Jonson read the poem or showed it around, his audience was made aware of the identity of the man he attacked.

Jonson claims that while the unnamed lord had denied his specific request, the Countess granted his desire before he could even make an appeal to her for it. He puns with the initial rhyme-words, "repented" and "preuented," seeming to suggest in the first line that he has something to feel sorry about, until it emerges in the next lines that it is the unnamed lord who is at fault. Similarly, in claiming that he was "preuented" from asking the Countess for the buck, he seems for an instant to imply that someone squelched his intention, until it becomes obvious that he means that the Countess anticipated his need before he could voice it. Both puns emphasize the characteristic he ascribes to each of the aristocrats--the blameworthiness of the unnamed lord, the generosity of the Countess. In reminding Lucy of this event, however, he not only compliments her, but reminds her of his power to affect her own reputation. Just as he made known to her in conversation the illiberality of the lord whose name he disdains to mention in the poem, so her failure to fulfill the grant she offered him could lead to the same result. Indeed, the very poem in which he now compliments her generosity would then stand as a potentially public rebuke; the clear distinction established in the first quatrain between the Countess and the unnamed lord would collapse, and the Countess would even stand to seem more culpable, since she, after all, had explicitly promised Jonson the buck he sought. She would not simply be denying a request; she would be reneging on a promise.

In a sense, then, the Countess herself holds the key to how the poem will be interpreted: depending upon how she acts, it will either speak well or ill of her. Jonson gives the Countess an opportunity in this poem to prove herself a more worthy patron than the lord who at first refused him; yet the poem pressures her into seizing the opportunity lest she be thought even less worthy. To explain the effect of the poem in such terms, however, is to risk under-emphasizing the subtle means by which the effect is achieved. It risks failing to notice how skillfully Jonson employs humorous self-deprecation--presenting himself as a somewhat silly, wine-guzzling poet with an overactive imagination--to minimize any overt sense of threat to the patron while making himself as lovably attractive a potential recipient as possible. He explicitly holds out to her the promise of public gratitude if she fulfills her grant "euery Muse should know it," and his willingness to print the present poem suggests that the poem itself discharges that promise, and therefore that the grant was indeed fulfilled. Yet the poem also serves to remind both the Countess and the unnamed lord of the poet's power to affect their reputations, while it demonstrates to a modern reader Jonson's ability to play the competing interests of individual members of the aristocracy off against each other to enhance his own.

In the Renaissance, all the arts could be used to celebrate a patron, but literature by its very nature could do more. A poem could be used not simply to extol the interaction between the writer and his patron; it could also be used to comment upon their relationship, to manipulate its nature and direction. In other arts the relationship between the artist and his benefactor occurred mostly outside the work (however indirectly and insistently the relationship might impinge upon it). Study of the relationship thus becomes mainly a problem for biography. But in many of Jonson's poems the relationship continues--is negotiated--within the work. The epigram to Lady Bedford is a slight but striking example. It suggests in a rather blatant way what might seem more subtly true of numerous other patronage poems--a view of the poem as a bargain, a compromise, an accommodation of egos. But precisely because this accommodation is carried out within or through the work, it becomes more than simply a matter for biographical study. It becomes a problem for aesthetics and criticism, a matter with definite implications for the success (and for the successful understanding) of the poem as poem.

As a vehicle for prosecuting the writer's interaction with his patron, a poem offered definite advantages. To a much greater degree than "spontaneous" conversation or the contacts of "everyday life," the tactics or structures of a poem could be calculated or premeditated. Indeed, it is precisely this studied, artful nature of the poem that makes a genuinely literary-critical approach to patronage verse possible. Because the poem was more stable, however, more permanent and more literally tangible than the fluid give-and-take of normal daily discourse, it was also in some ways more dangerous. The very ability to give lasting shape and expression to a thought--which was one of the poet's chief claims to importance and social recognition--meant that a tactical mistake or miscalculation in a poem would be less easy to correct or forget. A slip or faux pas in conversation might be erased in the very next moment by a smile, a glance, an explanatory phrase. But a blunder committed to paper was thereby both easier to recollect and harder to revoke. In their own works, Jonson's enemies often mocked lines he had written just months previously or many years before.

Paradoxically, the very effectiveness of the poem as an instrument for self-promotion meant that the writer who most obviously used it for that purpose was less likely to succeed. Not only did he make himself an easier target for antagonists; he was also more likely to arouse the suspicions or provoke he disdain of the person he addressed. Studying patronage poetry therefore often means studying strategies of indirection and implication. This is less true--there is less reason for it to be true--of the poems Jonson aimed at his rivals and enemies. There he can afford to speak more bluntly and abruptly. Even in those poems, however, he was writing for a larger audience than any particular antagonist. Just as when addressing a patron he always had to be aware of possible rivals and rivalries, so in attacking an enemy he could not forget that he was presenting an image of himself to a wider world.

Jonson could not write as more recent poets have been able to: primarily to express themselves, to shape their individual feelings, attitudes, and perceptions. Both his circumstances and his own instincts demanded that he play a more social role, but it was a role that was defined entirely neither by society nor by the poet himself. Constantly renegotiated, the role (like the poems that grew out of it) was complex and entangled, equivocal in the literal sense. The voice that speaks in Jonson's poems is a self-conscious voice, but more importantly it is a voice aware of other voices, to which it silently responds and adjusts itself. Studying Jonson as a patronage poet can help us better grasp not only the complications of his life, but the corresponding intricacies of his art. And it can help us begin to grasp the complex impact that the patronage system had not only on his work and career, but on the lives and writings of other Renaissance poets.

Source: Robert C. Evans, "Literature as Equipment for Living: Ben Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage," in CLA Journal, Vol. 30, No. 3, March, 1987, pp. 379-94.