Marketing the Gift: Jonson, Multiple Patronage, and Strategic Exchange.

Challenging the notion that gift and commodity economies were mutually exclusive in the early modern period, this article takes a fresh look at Jonson's negotiation of systems of aristocratic patronage. Examining literary gifts which were given to more than one recipient, and for the purposes of extracting multiple rewards, the article suggests that when poets such as Jonson strategically denied the self-interest of literary gifts, it was, in fact, a particular strategy for inducing competitive recompense. Jonson's writing combined and exploited gift ethics and market principles; in this way the poet strove to make a living as a professional writer at the same time as he asserted himself as the author of a classical body of Workes.