ABSTRACT
If these configurations of autonomous authorship appear both as product of and defence against the intruding hand of the market, other attempts to historicize Jonson’s authorial selves have specified different determinants and constraints. One of the most potent possibilities, given Jonson’s ‘laureate’ status, is suggested by his relationship to the monarchy, and to King James in particular. While Helgerson’s ideal of the laureate author implies – if it does not over-emphasise – a necessary relationship between government and poetry, and Jonson himself wrote of the parallels between poets and kings [104], the most thorough and complex description of this relationship has been provided by Jonathan Goldberg. Drawing on the investigations into the symbolic vocabulary and apparatus of political power undertaken by the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz, Goldberg situates the author in relation to the king by way of an aphoristic declaration that allows the identification of discourse, symbols, and stories as the substance of power, rather than their designation as the properties of a separate, subordinate realm: ‘ “The real is as imagined as the imaginary,” and the actuality of politics requires the fictions of poets’ (Goldberg 1983: 55). This is not a strange declaration that everything is imaginary, fantastic, unreal – simply the assertion that the power to shape and organise the world always takes place through a repertoire of signs and symbols, systems of meaning-production shared with the activities that are sometimes held apart as ‘literature’. Consequently, authorship and kingship might both be understood as dealing in this repertoire, this production and reception of meanings which are simultaneously means through which relations of power are established. Goldberg’s book sets out to trace the ways in which Jonson’s texts and James’s authority share in these processes, and in doing so produces an extremely close identification of Jonson’s writing with James’s strategies of government. For example, Goldberg finds in James a contradictory figure, who governs through a public visibility which is paradoxically simultaneous with an asserted remoteness from the eyes of his subjects. His claim to govern personally and absolutely makes of his private person a profoundly political entity; it also turns his person into a public sign of his authority. He is both author of meanings and the text to be read, and in James’s claims regarding the ways in which government took place through representation we find the identity of poetry and kingship of which Jonson wrote, and of which James – whose ‘Works’ were also published in 1616 – was a living, yet symbolic, embodiment.
