Abstract: This chapter establishes the concerns explored in the second part of this book. Again, as in Chapter 1, taking as its focus Francis Godolphin Waldron's 1783 edition and continuation of The Sad Shepherd, the chapter situates the allusive texture of Waldron's literary continuation to Jonson's pastoral within a context of other Romantic allusions to the unfinished play (by Keats and Hunt), and uses it as an example with which to explore the book's theoretical engagement with Christopher Rick's model of ‘the poet as heir’. Waldron's choice of epigraph figures him as a belated ‘son of Ben’, and so, after thinking through existing models of Romantic and Jonsonian allusion, the chapter then offers a statement — born out in the following two chapters — of the ways in which Romantic allusion might also need to be understood within history as well as within ideas of the family.

Keywords: allusion, imitation, continuation, Christopher Rick, Romantic allusion,