ABSTRACT
Ben Jonson’s tendentious euhemerism is able to orchestrate an avowedly panegyrical apotheosis for James that is an oblique textual divinization, creating the conditions for James to surpass the divinity of the emperor gods of pagan Rome without hubristically infringing on the divinity of Christian God. There is the Ben Jonson ‘within’ the text, who makes his virtuous king a god – but from a new euhemerist perspective, also the Euhemerus contextualized, standing outside the frame, and offering clues to the fiction of making James a god. Thomas Dekker would go on to publish 'the authorized' narrative as The Magnificent Entertainment Given to King James – a text that sits in interesting and barbed counterpoint to Jonson – and the architect Harrison would publish an illustrated festival book, the first of its kind in English. Jonson, deliberately, it seems, gazumping Dekker by publishing first, offers a very different vision of the day.
