Jonson’s Poetaster and the Politics of Defamation

Abstract

This essay argues that Jonson’s late Elizabethan comedy Poetaster explores in highly complex ways the role of defamatory accusations in the operation of state power, the defense of public morality, and the status of poetry as a form of moral discourse. It does this through two plot-lines, one consisting of efforts by the informer Asinius Lupus to ingratiate himself with the Emperor Augustus by accusing the poets Ovid and Vergil of sedition; the other involving conflicts between Horace, who represents Jonson himself, and other characters who complain against his satires as seditious libels. Lupus’ successful accusation against Ovid raises difficult issues about whether a ruler committed to restoring public morality can tolerate erotic poetry and playfully scandalous erotic behavior within his own family and household. Close reading suggests that Jonson regarded eroticism as less dangerous than the jealous repression of libidinous instincts, but he provides enough outwardly plausible support for the case against Ovid to challenge thought. In the play Horace successfully defends himself by claiming that his satire attacks vices rather than individuals and that his accusers have defamed him by claiming otherwise. But this position is coyly undermined by the fact that two of those accusers are thinly veiled caricatures of Jonson’s rival poets Thomas Dekker and John Marston, who are subjected to ritual humiliation at the play’s conclusion. By engaging in defamation even while pretending to repudiate it, Jonson implied that despite their potential for misuse, libelous attacks on individuals remained a necessary weapon of the satiric poet. [R.M.S.]