Ben Jonson's Skeptical Friend: Gorgias in the English Renaissance

The poem's overt message is that malicious, spying readers are intruding into the domain of poetic creation, where justice is properly correlated with deception; their injustice makes them bad poets, whose deceptions will be credited only by themselves. But there is nothing in the wording to suggest that they are actually mistaken in noticing the weaving of current issues into a drama supposedly set in the past [...].  

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