ABSTRACT
Since the career of 'self-creating' Ben Jonson has been an important site for Foucauldian excavations, it should be an excellent place to reconsider their effects on the once-familiar figure who has been parceled into so many functions and discourses. In the spring of 1603, Queen Elizabeth died and James VI of Scotland traveled south to London to be crowned. He arrived in May along with the bubonic plague. Ben Jonson, meanwhile, had left the city, ostensibly because of the king's progress rather than that of the pestilence. It may be unfair for modern readers to sit in judgment, removed as we conveniently are from the horror of bubonic plague on the one hand, and on the other from the combined pressures of ambition and low status in a literary system propped up by patronage. The journey to Conington, however, brought Montaigne's 'great question' home in a new way. Sometime after arriving, Jonson had a vision.
