ABSTRACT
Like Spenser in Book I of The Faerie Queene, Jonson as a scholarly writer alludes to numerous classical and Renaissance, literary predecessors in Timber: or Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter. He draws particularly on material from Seneca, Cicero, Quintilian, and Juan Luis Vives, a Spanish Catholic humanist heavily influenced by the Stoics.79 Unlike Spenser, who depicts his relation to a broad range of literary predecessors in terms of friendship and even dependence, Jonson exhibits a fiercely aggressive sense of rivalry and competition with ancient and early modern writers. He defends the manliness of his rhetorical art by attacking signs of effeminacy in rival laureates and aristocrats of his day. His anger at those aristocrats who have risen to the top of the social hierarchy through birthright rather than merit fuels these attacks. Throughout Timber Jonson implicitly challenges seventeenth-century notions of inherited wealth and property and envisions a social hierarchy in which individuals advance as a result of their wit and virtuous action instead.80 Spenser and Jonson differ not only in how they negotiate their relation to voices from literary history but also in how they imagine their works will be read by future audiences. Although Spenser displays little faith in his ability to control how men and women will interpret his poetry, Jonson attempts to shape how his poetry, prose, and plays will educate what he describes as a largely male audience. His methods of reading and responding to prior works and his efforts to shape and determine his own future literary reputation result in the impression of a strikingly different, scholarly man than Spenser.81 In contrast to Spenser, who emphasizes passionate Protestantism in
79 Bouwsma, A Usable Past, p. 60. 80 In Society, Politics and Culture, p. 375, James states that as early as the sixteenth
century “uncertainty about the status of heredity increased, with a proneness to present honour, virtue and nobility as detachable from their anchorage in pedigree and descent.”
