Donne’s famous line "Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls;/For, thus friends absent speak" (To Sir Henry Wotton ll.1-2) epitomizes theories antique to early modern, that a letter is "a conversation between two absent persons" (Erasmus, A Formula for the Composition of Letters 258). This, and Erasmus’ argument that a letter "will vary according to the person addressed" (On the Writing of Letters 19), have served to a large degree to define the work done both on the verse epistle in general, and on specific writers’ particular uses of the genre. Theories of the verse epistle thus far have also tended to consider the recipient a stable subject that is in no significant way affected by the letters addressed to them.
    About verse epistles to patrons, Stanley Fish rhetorically inquires "Isn’t its reader, its author-reader, directed to look at something he (or she) already is? ("Authors-Readers: Jonson’s Community of the Same" 32) – my answer is a definitive "No". If the ideal patron, and therefore the ideal patron-poet relationship, already existed then the verse epistles arguably would not need to exist either –at least not in the rhetorically intricate, often anxious, form that they do now. Because Fish does not acknowledge this complexity, he can, with little difficulty, also assert that Ben Jonson was "a poet whose every title would seem to mark him as a man dependent not only for his sustenance but fir his very identity on the favour and notice of his social superiors" (27), or, as is more commonly thought, that Jonson’s verse letters to patrons were what Evans termed "begging poems", pure and simple ("Literature as Equipment for Living: Ben Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage" 386). While it is certainly true that Jonson relied on his patrons’ favour, I will show that it is also true that, at least in the case of the epistles to Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland and Katherine, Lady Aubigny, they are, because of Jonson’s rhetorical machinations, equally dependent on him for their identities (as patrons).