Introduction

There have been many discussions of Jonson's political vision – or visions – but this is the first book-length study of how Jonson deployed ‘the resources of kind’ in order to shape his political fictions. As with the counterpart to this volume, Donne and the Resources of Kind, our starting point is Bakhtin's insistence that each genre offers a window on the world: that each of the kinds makes available a perspective on the world, one which is inherited and variously renewed (or sometimes, of course, inherited but not renewed). The questions arising from such a consideration necessarily include these. If genres each offer a perspective – which is to say, in effect, a confluence of perspectives – on the world, how does any given writer use what they make available? How are those perspectives enlarged or diminished, redirected or subverted, violated or endorsed? In this case, then, how does Jonson use genre to offer representations of the political – to refigure what he perceived as the political actualities of early Stuart society? Thus, correlatively, to what extent does he involve his readers in the remembering and remaking of genre, thereby drawing them into recognition of and putative acquiescence with his renderings of political concepts and relations? Engaging with the Jonson canon by way of those and other such questions, this book at once complements current scholarship and reinterprets major Jonsonian texts.