SOURCE: "The Plays," in Ben Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage, Bucknell University Press, 1989, pp. 246-68.

In the following essay, Evans examines the impact of patronage on Jonson's dramatic work, detecting in the plays Jonson's strategic self-advertisement and dramatic self-portraiture, as well as evidence of Jacobean London's system of power, hierarchy, and social advancement.

Patronage was obviously an important influence on Jonson's poems and masques, but its impact on his drama is less immediately clear. Many of his poems are addressed explicitly to patrons, while his masques were sponsored by the court and were performed for its recreation. The plays, however—especially the great comedies on which his reputation depends—seem more distanced from any open concern with patronage. The fact that they are plays is partly responsible: in them Jonson speaks less clearly in his own voice, and the audience he addresses seems broader than the single...