Ben Jonson's Poetaster: Classical Translation and the Location of Cultural Authority

Abstract

Tom Cain concludes his essay on the satiric force of Poetaster by remarking that it ‘emerges as a play that demands a more prominent place in the Jonson canon than it is normally given’.1 This essay is in part an attempt to attend to Poetaster as he suggests, and this attention takes two forms. First I think it is worth focusing upon the play as a work both composed of and in some sense about the act of translation; a work in which translations, as well as the translator, continually challenge us to consider their place in the office of the ‘poet’.2 Poetaster is, quite explicitly, about the negotiation of the social and aesthetic distinctions between ‘poet’ and ‘poetaster’, but it frames this debate within the broader allusive context of the similar negotiation in Horace’s Satires. As an authorial strategy this is both aggressively self-confident (because it associates Jonson with Horace himself) and strikingly submissive (where is Jonson if so much of this is Horace?). Second, I want to use a fuller understanding of the allusive strategies of the play to put some pressure upon the prevailing critical consensus regarding its close. Although several critics have stressed the powerful role of the poets themselves in magnifying and shaping Augustus’ authority, the view that the final scenes present an idyllic and equally balanced relationship