ABSTRACT
This chapter considers what happens when a play starts coming together in a playhouse and individual parts finally interlock. Jonson's admiration for men's self-possession and their ability to maintain Stoic independence in the face of changing personal circumstances, political climate, or fashions, is well known. Imitation was one of the most vexing subjects for Jonson, who understood it as a way of either tempering or surrendering one's self by emulating another. Morose is often singled out as an example of Jonson's willingness to imagine a centred self twisted out of proportion in a tragicomic mockery of our pursuit of inner composure and self-sufficiency.
