ABSTRACT
Satire in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods featured a chorus of voices, many of them in direct competition, few distinctive enough to stand out in a crowded and often undervalued field. Within this atmosphere of contention and this most contentious of genres, however, arose one of the great satirical writers of the Renaissance, Ben Jonson. Although he wrote in a variety of genres, it was his talent as a satirist that drove his greatest works and that would ultimately define his place in English letters. More so than any other writer of his age, he strove to elevate the status of satire as a respectable vehicle of social reformation. 1 He was by no means the only individual to comment on the literary status and moral potential of satire, nor was his sanguine appraisal of it entirely unique. In an atmosphere of tumultuous literary debate exacerbated by the vogue for riotous satire, what made Jonson exceptional was his crafting of a restrained satiric style envisioned as a moderate purge capable of reforming not only society, but the field of satire itself.
