Patronage [ Politics & Society / Social interaction ]
… The ‘golden age’ of literary patronage, in which all the best English poets enjoyed handsome pensions from the court or from aristocrats with literary tastes, is a myth fostered by disappointed writers in later years who assumed … was not money or protection, but ‘conversation’, that is, the participation in a social and discursive space – the court – that synthesized political and aesthetic power. For Dryden, the patron provided ‘conversation’, the ideal form of … partly depended on an audience. Performing music had of course always been connected to sociability, but where in a courtly setting it was part of a hierarchical power structure (with a clear distinction between the patron as enabler and …
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