ABSTRACT
The authorial strategy I have been tracing through Jonson’s career need not be seen as antithetical to the strategy of textual monumentalization that the 1616 Folio enacts. True, the Folio removes Jonson’s plays from the immediacy of physical space, where audience censure and bad performance can damage them, into the space of the book. But if Epicoene, The Alchemist, and the revised Every Man In had positioned their author as a privileged interpreter of London space and theatricality as a potent shaper of the urban environment, this sense is not lost from the plays in their Folio publication. Rather, with the 1616 collection, Jonson could doubly assert his control by making his own poetic performance the plays’ only expression.
