Dramatist, poet, and soldier, Shakerley Marmion in his brief career as a playwright employed Ben Jonson's classical "rules" chiefly to promote the Platonic love cult that arose at the court of Queen Henrietta Maria in the early 1630s. In his elegy to Jonson, which appeared in Ionsonus Virbius (1638), Marmion freely acknowledged that his muse was Jonson's("Made by adoption free and genuine") and offered this cogent self-criticism:

    Nature has afforded me a slight
And easie Muse, yet one that takes her flight
Above the vulgar pitch.

In a revealing passage of this elegy, Marmion offered an insight into what Jonson's "rules" meant to an aspiring playwright of the time:

For whether He [Jonson], like a fine thread does file
His terser Poems in a Comick stile,
Or treates of tragick furies, and him list,
To draw his lines out with a stronger twist:
Minervas, nor...