ABSTRACT
While Spenser and Shakespeare generally find their great images of order in celebrations of love, marriage and the family, Jonson turns more to the public institutions of society. Jonson's treatment of the Arthurian material anticipates Tennyson's and has its roots in Virgil's vision of Rome's responsibility in the Aeneid. The true adventure is the advance of civilization, the ordering of society. Jonson's parade of English kings is in fact an anatomy of kingship, stressing not only the king's power but the principles that restrain that power. It must be underpropped by civil arts, and governed by moral virtue. Many of Jonson's ideas about culture and society come together in Poetaster. Generosity to a representative of the arts takes a form Jonson finds particularly congenial; again the tone is comic. Ruefully aware of his own reputation for arrogance about his art, Jonson promises that he will not make a nuisance of himself by reciting his own verses.
