ABSTRACT
An understanding of Jonson’s deployment of panegyric in both poetry and masque is an essential prerequisite for any analysis of the antimasque and its growth. The question that needs to be addressed here is why did Jonson obviously believe that the panegyric of masque needed to be offset by the irony of the antimasque? I believe that we will find the germ of an answer by scrutinising the poetry and paying attention to the ways in which the most hyperbolic of Jonson’s panegyric can, at times, subtly incorporate a note of mockery. I hope to demonstrate that rather than being a weakness in his poetic eulogies this rhetorical instability is, in fact, a great strength, ensuring the poet’s integrity and simultaneously fulfilling the terms of patronage. So it is to Jonson’s poetry I turn initially in an attempt to account for the antimasque’s evolution from ironic suggestion to overtly ambiguous satire; this entails taking into account both the historical context of certain poems as well as the implications of such an instability for Jonson’s personal philosophy and poetics. These are continuing concerns threading through the book, but my primary aim in this chapter is to demonstrate that the characteristic features of the antimasque are present from the first in an embryonic form in the earliest masque and poetry.
