Jonson and James both responded forcefully to the increase in popular discussion of state affairs and news circulation in the politically fraught period of the early 1620s, Jonson in a series of masques and manuscript poems, James in a variety of genres and media. This chapter explores how to some extent the works the two produced in these years are mutually reinforcing. There are even instances of the King appearing to borrow words and images from Jonson. The chapter also argues, however, that these works reveal marked divergences between James’s strategies of self-representation and Jonson’s depictions of the relations between the monarchy, the court poet, and the people. Especially through his extraordinary contributions to the culture of manuscript verse libel, James disrupted the fictions of monarchy that Jonson was trying to maintain. Attending to these divergences illuminates the pressure popular discussion and news exerted upon literary and political culture in the early 1620s. It also highlights the multiple challenges faced by Jonson as a court poet in the late Jacobean period, and his attempts nonetheless to defend that position.