ABSTRACT
This essay was later adapted to form a chapter in John Gordon Sweeney's Jonson and the Psychology of Public Theater (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). The book as a whole traces Jonson's relationship with his audiences from the early comical satires to Bartholomew Fair and, briefly, beyond - a process within which, Sweeney argues, Jonson 'gradually surrendered his work to his play house audience' (p. 190). What is distinctive about his thesis is the way Sweeney balances what he sees as Jonson's personal investment in his characters and the issues they confront against a wider view of the commercial theatre and the kinds of quasi-contractual demands it placed on both dramatists and audiences. So Sweeney is effectively analysing two separate (but, he argues, interpenetrating) psycho logical phenomena simultaneously. In the case of Sejanus the issue is particularly acute because the audience at the Globe reacted against the play in ways that uncannily parallel how the people of Rome finally turned on Sejanus and dismembered him.
