Intertextuality and Satire: Ben Jonson’s Poetaster

This chapter also focuses on a genre which requires an intertextual response from its audience in order to achieve its ends. Satire requires knowledge of the target of that satire, be that another literal text, a more expansive understanding of ‘text’ as discourse, belief, or idiom, or an individual. Jonson’s satirical play Poetaster is intensely intertextual, presenting Jonson’s ongoing feud with some of his contemporaries in a framework of the production of classical texts by classical writers via its narrative set in the court of the Emperor Augustus. It also instigated an intertextual response, Marston and Dekker’s Satiromastix. As well as investigating the propriety of satire, the text also makes claims for the proper production and use of poetry, all via an intertextual reading.