Abstract: This chapter is the first of two that take Samuel Taylor Coleridge (and later his family and relatives) as case studies for the understanding of Romantic allusion to Jonson. It starts with a consideration of William Hazlitt's claim that lines in Coleridge's early, unpublished verse drama, Osorio (later revised, and performed with much success as Remorse) were owed to Echo's song in Jonson's Cynthia's Revels. Through a consideration of Coleridge's reading of Jonson, the chapter explores whether this might have been the case; and in doing so, it thinks about the way in which Coleridge himself came back, again and again, to think about particular moments of Jonson's writing across his own reading and writing life. But the chapter also takes seriously the lexicon of debt in which accounts of Romantic allusion are often couched, measuring these against a close historicizing account of the financial debates in play at the time Coleridge was (or perhaps was not) alluding to Jonson. Taking the example of the relationship between paper money and bullion, the chapter uses this as a provocative metaphor for understanding the relationship between imitated and imitator, a relationship that links Coleridge's later adaptation of Jonson's lyric ‘The Nymph's Passion’ (adapted as ‘Mutual Passion’) with his exactly contemporary journalism on the apparent financial crisis of the early 1810s: in a period during which forgeries of bank notes rose dramatically, the chapter asks, how are the activities of a literary imitator to be distinguished from those of a literary forger? The chapter's closing point is Coleridge's purchase, on 29 March 1815, of John Stockdale's four-volume edition of The Dramatic Works of Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher (1811), his annotations to which inform the examples and arguments of the following chapter.

Keywords: inheritance, echo, allusion, imitation, forgery, money, family, currency, theatre,