1 Tim MARKEY STYLE AND TRADITION IN BEN JONSON’S VERSE EPISTLES For W. V. C., 'to whom I owe All that I am in arts, all that I know'. To judge (and we must) by title, of Ben Jonson’s nearly three hundred poems, most addressed to contemporaries, more or less patronizing, familiar, or friendly, only twelve are epistles: none in the Epigrammes, two in the Forrest, both books being printed first in the Workes of 1616, and the rest, with one negligible exception, in the Underwood, from the posthumous Folio of 1640-41. What defines these rare creations, whose very name and number invite our scrutiny? This neglected question is critical, and, to answer it so far as possible here, I will not be the first to look to ancient and Renaissance poetry and prose, but as much to Jonson’s epistles themselves. 'The onus', indeed, 'is upon posterity to recognize the vitality of the tradition it inherits' 1 ; nor is the truth for that claim onerous, albeit complicated by time and by culture far from ours; its responsibilities, historically approached, should send us back at all events with pleasure to the poet and his poetry, to the living hand that in letters partaking of the present returned to life for Renaissance England all that it touched of the past. Determining, in some degree, the canon of verse epistles in Jonson is the first step in understanding them. I mean verse epistles as distinct from all other genres, such as epigram, with which they have been too long confused, even by great scholars. The approach has been to consider all poems definitely by Jonson entitled or called by him epistles as epistles; without such evidence, under authorial control, no genre study could really be made, much less study across genres, and happily, more evidence exists for the unity, the decorum, of these poems than has been noted. The aim, then, is not to prove what poems by another title are epistles, if any exist, but to explore a few of the poems by that name, and one in certain depth, by a poet whose motto, inscribed on most of his 1 Ian Donaldson (ed.), Ben Jonson: Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. xviii.