SOURCE: "Literature as Equipment for Living: Ben Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage," in 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...