ABSTRACT
Dr Norbrook also notes in Late Jonson’s neo-Elizabethanism and nostalgia for the past a tentative appropriation of the political rhetoric associated with Spenserian poets such as Michael Drayton and George Wither who similarly cast back to the days of Elizabeth as a means of reflecting adversely on the age of the Stuarts. Indeed, Jonson had in the past been bitterly at odds with the Spenserians, of whose ideological assumptions – patriotic Protestantism and anti-Spanish militancy – he was profoundly distrustful. Jonson’s decisive personal break with Whitehall came early in 1631, when he quarrelled with Inigo Jones concerning artistic responsibility for his last masques. Jonson completes his Caroline panorama by his inclusion of the clergyman, Parson Palate. Jonson’s evocation of mid-Tudor rural life in A Tale of a Tub has much less in common with the cult of Elizabeth than it has with the attitude to her reign voiced by the Earl of Newcastle in his advice to Charles II.
