ABSTRACT
Thus far in this book I have argued for the pervasive presence of irony in Jonson’s work, both offsetting and complementing the more orthodox praise of much of his poetry and masque. This is not to say that Jonson was hypocritically sniping at the Crown while presenting himself as its servant, or that he unequivocally celebrated this institution and its leading members, but rather to argue for a Jonsonian dialectic that has multiplicity and the availability of plural meanings as its distinguishing characteristics. It is this multidimensional aspect of Jonson’s work that currently concerns many critics and, indeed, the holding in tension of complementary and contradictory perspectives in a single work is Jonson’s great achievement as a literary artist. Bruce Thomas Boehrer’s recent and impressive book chimes with many of my thoughts on Jonson, and he emphasises the semiotic fluidity of much of Jonson’s writing. In relation to Jonson’s notion of authorship, Boehrer writes, ‘I would emphasize the simultaneity and interdependence of these various notions of authorship, each of which arises as a solution to a problem generated by one of the others, while in the process generating difficulties of its own, which render the previous attitudes indispensible in their turn’. 1 While it may seem erroneous to equate dialectic with the multiplicity argued for by Boehrer, the dialectic of masque, based on the presence of irony and panegyric, works to the same multivalent effect, resulting in a conditional endorsement of the monarchy.
