Abstract
This chapter discusses the relationship between Ben Jonson's play The Fountaine of Selfe-Love and the Earl of Essex. It argues that, as well as being a satire on court frivolities, Jonson's play used his audience's knowledge of some of the great fountains in royal gardens to make a coded plea for clemency towards the Earl of Essex, the disgraced Actaeon to Elizabeth's Diana. At about the same time as George Delves had portrayed himself in front of an elaborate imaginary garden composing the jaded little verses which were among its finishing touches, the most elaborate real garden in early modern England was being completed, a garden which similarly integrated texts and symbols into its design. This was the great garden at Nonsuch, showing how Jonson used coterie knowledge of those fountains, and of another at Hampton Court, to enhance and reinforce his pleas for the Earl of Essex.
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