Ben Jonson never tired of railing against those who would apply his supposedly innocent satire to particular persons and “make a libel which he made a play.” Yet the central irony of Poetaster (1601) – and, indeed, of Jonson’s playwriting career – is that he undeniably did lampoon specific individuals, not to mention the host of more ambiguous topical analogies that appear in his plays. In Poetaster – set in an Augustan Rome that clearly stands for England – Jonson sharply satirizes the late Elizabethan surveillance state through the clash between Horace, the virtuous satirist and authorial stand-in, and Lupus, the corrupt and ignorant tribune. From the Bishops’ Ban in 1599 to the aftermath of the Essex Rising in 1601, the regime cracked down on verse satires and seditious libels with unusual severity; the line between satire and libel threatened to vanish altogether. Yet Jonson remained undaunted. In Poetaster, he counts on his audiences to draw precisely those topical applications that he stridently denies. If they make his play a libel, it is because he has turned playgoers into libel-makers.

It is a mistake to think that Ben Jonson spent his time and art in a disapproving posture toward Ovid as the boldest of the Augustan love poets. This chapter treats a large body of evidence in what may be viewed as Jonson’s repertoire, all of which testify to his great respect for Ovid and his sense of duty to defend the liberties the Roman poet and his Elizabethan imitators took with the decorums of the early empire. The chapter deals with his marginal notes in his personal copies of classical texts, the commentaries in the humanist texts he consulted, his poems and plays, and his subsequent commentators. Of particular interest are Jonson’s marginal notes on his personal copy of Martial; his poetic sequence The Forest; and especially his play Poetaster, or the Arraignment, both in its dramatic iteration and its textual forms. Jonson’s work on the poetry of Ovid and his successors shows, above all, that he wished to cast himself as Ovid’s public defender, a legal advocate of the Roman poet’s boldness in exercising the liberty of speech.