"Honesty and vulgar praise": the Poet's War and the literary field.

IN works such as Distinction, The Field of Cultural Production, and The Rules of Art, Pierre Bourdieu argues that the determination of the value of an artwork is structured by a series of paired oppositions--high, low; avant-garde, bourgeois; popular, elite; interested, disinterested; vulgar, refined--and that in the literary field the shape of these oppositions and the value attached to one or another pole emerges in the context of historical struggles between writers, between writers and their audiences, between writers and publishers (however defined), and between publishers and audiences. (1) The structure of the field is therefore a product of these struggles over the right to determine the principles by which works will be judged. The specific content of these oppositions vary over time, but struggle over that content remains a more or less constant feature of the literary field and the field of cultural production more generally. At the same time, the field depends on the development of a relative autonomy from external categories of evaluation--in other words, in order for the literary field to exist as a field it must develop its own canons of judgment. (2) Conflict over canons of judgment thus play two roles--they determine the shape of the literary field, its hierarchies and terms of evaluation, and they declare the independence of the field from categories that do not derive from within the field. (3) Bourdieu's ideas suggest ways to historicize the development of a recognizably modern literary field over the course of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

I

Early modern professional writing developed in a social world characterized by conflict and dissension between writers and stationers, writers and dramatic companies, writers and audiences, and writers and writers--as well as all the permutations of these groups--and those conflicts defined the shape and structure of the emerging literary field. (4) The Parnassus plays (performed at Cambridge between 1598 and 1601) and the roughly contemporaneous Poetomachia are only two manifestations of this larger conflict; however, I will argue that the terms they put into play are terms important to the subsequent structuring of the literary field. (5) As a final statement in the Poetomachia, Ben Jonson's Poetaster (1601) takes as its central subject the nature and function of the writer and makes an argument for the ascendancy of a particular kind of writer and writing--conveniently, one represented by Jonson himself. As such, the play is not only an intervention in the Poetomachia, but also functions as an attempt to shape the developing field of professional writing. The Parnassus plays lament the passing of an older, patronage-based model of the writer's social role because of the rise of the professional writers who Jonson strives to shape in his own image. (6) This group of plays provide particularly vivid examples of an ongoing conflict, a conflict that structures both the literary field and the profession of writing.

As has often been noted, professional writing developed in the wake of the printing press during the slow transition from a feudal to a capitalist economic order. (7) However, the profession of writer did not take shape solely or even primarily as a result of the development of print and a market for b, nor did it arise from more or less purely "literary" pressures. Neither did the profession develop from some simple combination of the two, as a blend of literary and economic concerns, but it also developed in the context of a more general movement toward professionalization in early modern culture. (8) The transformation in the literary field in early modern England occurred in tandem with economic and social transformations. The ranking of genres shifted decisively and drama took a new position outside of the civic and liturgical context of its early history. The social composition of the population of writers changed dramatically at the same time as the audience for plays, poems, and literary prose grew immensely. The populations of producers and consumers changed in the course of the sixteenth century as humanist educational ideals spread through English society, as literacy rates rose, and, perhaps most importantly, as the business of printing made "learning" accessible to a much wider public. (9) As the market for cultural products broadened, so did access to a formerly more restricted literary culture. This broadening enabled new categories of producers to develop and find an audience for their writing. (10) The primary site of this development was the theater, which saw the advent of explicitly professional writers who came into competition with university-trained writers who had been supplying much of the demand for new scripts. (11)

The anonymous Parnassus plays (The Pilgrimage to Parnassus, 1 and 2 Return From Parnassus) were performed at Cambridge between 1598 and 1601. These student plays depict a world in which the skills gained at Mount Parnassus (Cambridge) find no recognized outlet in the world--characters complain about their lack of opportunity, the travails of competition for patrons, and their conflicts with the emerging professional writers associated with the presses and theaters in London. The plays lament the passing of an always at least somewhat imaginary patronage system that, to the characters' minds, ought to have provided places for university-educated men. The student-playwrights nervously depict the advent of a commercial system that does not value the cultural capital represented by a Cambridge MA as much as did the patronage system whose passing the plays lament. (12) Characters such as Ingenioso, Furor Poeticus, Phantasma, Philomusus, and Studioso recognize the advent of a system that fails to recognize them and retreat from it--leaving the field, in a sense, to the writers they criticize.

The Poetomachia, a "stage quarrel" among writers who were emerging as leading professional dramatists, was at its height from 1598 to 1601. The most important participants were John Marston, Thomas Dekker, and Ben Jonson. (13) In what follows, I prefer the term Poetomachia to War of the Theaters (the other common name for the conflict) for two reasons. First, it was the term used by contemporaries (Dekker refers to the "terrible Poetomachia" lately fought out on the stages of London in his dedication to Satiromastix) and, second, it makes the fact that this was a conflict between writers, not theaters, clear. In fact, theaters as such seem not to be in conflict here at all except insofar as they compete for audiences. The professional conflict between writers represented by the Poet's War is not characteristic of rivalries among theaters. Beneath the invective and personal recrimination that pervade these plays, the war was a debate about the definition of the writer, his possible social roles, and the relative value of different styles (here, the various modes of satire). That this struggle works itself out in terms of personal conflicts has as much to do with the genre of the plays as it does with the combative dispositions of the writers. Along with having significant personal differences, Jonson, Marston, and Dekker occupied distinct positions in the field and the plays' invective serves to identify and contest these positions. Because of the biographical interest of the conflict, relatively little attention has been paid to the war's role in the professionalization of writing in late Elizabethan England. Nevertheless, the stakes of this conflict were the right to define the nature and structure of the emerging professional field of writing. Positions in the war thus depend both on individual dispositions and structural positions in the evolving field. As a debate about the nature and structure of the field of professional writing, the Poetomachia participates in the definition of the emergent category of "literature" and the terms the Poet's War puts into play exert a powerful influence over that emergence. (14)

II

    It is the field of production, understood as the system of objective
    relations between these agents or institutions and as the site of
    the struggles for the monopoly of the power to consecrate, in which
    the value of works of art and belief in that value are continuously
    generated.
    --Pierre Bourdieu, "The Production of Belief"

Pierre Bourdieu argues that the value of art (and the success of its creator) in whatever genre depends crucially on the shape and hierarchical structure of the field in which that work of art is produced. The field of production comprises the relations of writers, readers, and publishers; relations that are "the site of struggles for the monopoly of the power to consecrate," to declare one work rather than another to be legitimate and valuable. (15) The power to consecrate is the most valuable prize in the struggles that structure the field of production since it establishes the categories of value that determine success or failure for writers. In the 1590s, the field of literary production (for lack of a less anachronistic term) was divided between gentle amateurs, university-educated writers, and an emergent group of professionals working for London stationers or for the acting companies. (16) The institutional context of the "power to consecrate" poetry and other written works of art was, as will be discussed below, shifting from a patronage model measuring success in the esteem of "virtuous" (i.e., noble or gentle) readers to one in which success was measured in terms of the market. (17) Control over this power was at least momentarily up for grabs, and interested parties (such as writers, stationers, the Crown, or the Church) struggled to define the categories of evaluation for "literary" art. In the course of these struggles "literature" was gaining its modern definition.

Literature as a category of cultural production did not exist in the same way in early modern England as it does today in our technologized and specialized society. (18) According to the Oxford English Dictionary, literature did not acquire its modern definition until the eighteenth century. The older sense was "acquaintance with 'letters' or books; polite or humane learning; literary culture." Playtexts, pamphlets, and novels had to fight for recognition as "polite or humane learning." Literary production was divided between gentle amateurs, "professionals" of whatever rank, anonymous writers, lawyers, preachers, and others. All of these writers produced texts we would recognize as "literature," but those texts and their writers would have looked different to readers in the sixteenth century. (19) "Poesy" was a highly contested sphere at least partially defined by struggles and negotiations within it. Works like Sidney's Defense of Poetry or, in an indirect manner, George Puttenham's Art of English Poesy take on the question of the nature, usefulness, and social position of writing and writers in the context of a debate about the moral effects of poetry. (20) Professional writers themselves struggled, more or less explicitly, to define their place in a series of negotiations with these generic hierarchies claiming positions within existing structures and, sometimes, transforming them. Texts and their authors were engaged in a complicated and ongoing competition for audiences, patrons, and economic success.

The anonymous Parnassus plays (1598-1601) portray conflicts between a set of expectations rooted in a patronage model and the realities of the developing market for written products. Despite being written and performed in Cambridge, the plays are painfully aware of the London market for intellectual products--the London printers and players are both the only option for the characters and no option at all. In The First Part of the Return from Parnassus, Ingenioso, a scholar and poet, gets only two groats for a series of verses commissioned by Patron and, recognizing that this is likely to be all he will receive, decides to go off to London and live "by the printinge house" (375). Ingenioso, Philomusus, and Studioso, all impoverished scholars, "goe to the press" (1474) as a response to the failure of the traditional patronage economy to support them. This turn to publication and the print market recurs throughout both parts of the Return from Parnassus. Characters comment repeatedly on the flood of printed works inundating the churchyard of St. Paul's. Ingenioso and Iudicio describe a proliferation of publications of dubious value--the presses produce many "draughty" inventions of unqualified writers (i.e., non-"scholars")--that crowd out the worthy works of writers such as themselves. (21) The principle of value operating in this market is whether or not something will sell, not whether or not a work is valuable for its artistic merit or moral usefulness. Traditional paths of reward--noble or gentle patronage or service to crown or church--are represented as insufficient, debased, unavailable, or all three. (22) The final Parnassus play ends with all the scholar characters retreating from London--Philomusus and Studioso go off to become shepherds; Ingenioso, Furor Poeticus, and Phantasma move to the Isle of Dogs and write satires complaining about their fate; and Academico goes back to Cambridge. (23) In the face of the debasement of all traditional markets, the Parnassians retreat from London. The play closes with no note of merriment because of the economics of scholarship and the lack of positions for qualified men. Ingenioso says that those:

    Who kenne the lawes of euery comick stage, And wonder that our scene
    ends discontent. Ye ayrie witts, subtill, [Iudiciuous], Since that
    few schollers fortunes are content, Wonder not if our scene ends
    discontent. When that your fortunes reach their owne content, Then
    shall our scene end here in merriment
    (2202-8)

Ingenioso's last words include the members of the audience, Cambridge men all, in the "scene" promising that only when their "fortunes reach their owne content" will the play actually be able to end in merriment. By pointedly violating generic convention, the speech drives home the point that "few schollers fortunes are content" and that it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. The play assumes an audience familiar with "the lawes of eurery comick stage" and recognizes both the authority of those laws and justifies violating them. The appeal here to the "lawes" suggests the the criteria of evaluation are understood in "literary" terms--in terms of the field of production. University men are in competition for places in the writing field with men who lack formal qualifications--the Parnassus plays come from the perspective of the placeless educated--and the Parnassians' final rejection of the world of professional writing represents a despairing recognition that those qualifications no longer provide guarantees of success in an increasingly open and contentious market.

Where the Parnassians and the University Wits (especially Robert Greene) often railed despairingly over the changing markets and criteria for their work, other writers took advantage of the transition from a patronage to a commercial metaphor for writing. (24) In Dekker's Guls Horn-Booke (1609) the print market is understood through a patronage metaphor:

  The theater is your Poets Royal Exchange, upon which their Muses,
  ([which] are now turned to Merchants,) meeting, barter away that light
  commodity of words for a lighter ware then words, Plaudites, and the
  breath of the great Beast; which ... vanish into air ... when your
  Groundling, and gallery-Commoner buys his sport by the penny, and,
  like a hagler is glad to utter it againe by retailing. (25)

The Muses now operate in the marketplace--once the inspirers of manuscript verse dedicated to patrons, now the factors of a new mercantile venture. The Muses are still present but operate within an utterly changed context. Value, once thought to be conferred by moral or social usefulness and the appreciation of an elite audience, now could derive from an alternate and competing source in theatrical performance and, not insignificantly, in books. The category of "patron" expands enormously in this conceptualization--in the largest sense, the market itself is the patron of writers--and moves some distance toward the modern definition of patron as customer, that is, as buyer of goods or services. This emerging market for cultural goods complicates the question of value by making the loci of judgment multiple. The plays associated with the Poet's War are examples of negotiations with these complicated and tangled questions of value.

These shifting loci of value for intellectual or cultural products in early modern England point toward the development of a literary field--a subset of a more general intellectual field, itself in the process of change. Dekker's comment on the Poet's Royal Exchange vividly illustrates the transition from the model of aristocratic patronage and stable expectations lamented by the Parnassians toward a new system where multiple new constituencies have a role in determining a work's success or failure, and, more importantly for writers like Dekker, Jonson, and Marston, its merit. The Parnassians recognize the passing of one model without presenting a new one, while the generation of writers represented by Jonson, Marston, and Dekker struggle to define new criteria of evaluation in an equally new cultural terrain.

The Poetomachia depicts struggles over the nature and shape of that terrain as it develops into a recognizably literary field. Authorial remarks in prologues, epilogues, and elsewhere in plays all designate the opposition as being between "poetasters" or "playsters" and authors or poets, not university men and tradesman writers. The class conflict described by Greene and the Parnassus plays--between gentle and non-gentle writers--is transformed into a battle within a profession whose participants recognize the debate in terms of writerly skill, not of rank. (26) This terminological transformation suggests that writers were engaged in an effort to forge a corporate identity as writers in the late sixteenth century. (27) Thomas Dekker's The Wonderful Year (1603) shows signs of this effort in its dedication to Walter Thuresby, London's water-bailiff. He writes that:

  I have clapped the cognizance of your name on these scribbled papers;
  it is their livery. So that now they are yours, being free from any
  vile imputation save only that they thrust themselves into your
  acquaintance. But general errors have general pardons: for the title
  of other men's names is the common heraldry which all those lay claim
  to whose crest is a pen and inkhorn. (28)

Dekker asserts that writers have a heraldry and a crest of their own: the "heraldry" of the writer is the name of his patron, and the "crest" of the writer is a pen and inkhorn. Dekker places his work under the protection of his putative patron by virtue of the dedication, and his language suggests that this practice is a common one ("general errors have general pardons"), a practice understood by both writer and dedicatee. In the dedication to the reader, Dekker describes an established pattern of production and reception with its own terms of success or failure that will be recognized by "wise men" who will see in the condemnation of the mass of readers a confirmation of value. (29) Recognizing the importance of the market, Dekker addresses booksellers as the "factors to the liberall sciences" and, more than a little disingenuously, treats publishing as a regrettable but necessary part of the act of writing. (30) Dekker's work points to the establishment of a set of norms for writers, their writing, and their reception. The norms of a literary field are as much the product of struggles within the population of writers as they are of negotiations between writers and their audiences. The Poetomachia, as a kind of crystallization of such a struggle, offers access to the fraught beginnings of the transition from a market dominated by patronage and external legitimating authorities towards an internally coherent and self-legitimating field of cultural production.

III

    I care not much if I make description ... of that terrible
    Poetomachia, lately commenced betweene Horace the second, and a band
    of leane-witted Poetasters. They have bin at high wordes, and so
    high, that the ground could not serve them, but (for want of
    Chopins) have stalk't upon stages ... Horace hal'd his Poetasters to
    the Barre, the Poetasters untruss'd Horace: how worthily eyther or
    how wrongfully, (World) leave it to the Iurie ...
    --Thomas Dekker, "To the World" Satiromastix (1602)

During the years of the Poet's War (1598-1600) Dekker, Jonson, and Marston were all relative newcomers to the writing of plays. Jonson's first plays were performed in 1597-98, Dekker's in 1598, and Marston's in 1599. (31) Not only were they starting their careers, they were also experimenting with the genre of comical satire that was in fashion at the same time as the Poetomachia raged. The Bishops' Ban on satire in 1599 closed the market for verse and prose satire and Marston, for one, turned to the stage to find an outlet for satirical commentary. Jonson had already been working out a stage language for satire in his Humour plays and was coming to align himself with the legacy of Horatian satire. Dekker appears as a dramatist in Henslowe's diary in 1598 and his prose work begins to appear after the turn of the century. As David Riggs notes Jonson and Marston (and, I would add, Dekker) were more alike at the turn of the century than they were different and this similarity bred conflict. (32) In contrast to Riggs's position that the resemblance and thus the rivalry is personal, my contention is that the intensity of the conflict has more to do with these writers' professional need to differentiate their plays from each others' early in their dramatic careers than with specifically personal rivalries. The intensity of the conflict points to the closeness of the competitors' positions in the field and drives the escalating rhetorical violence of the war as the combatants strive for distinction within it. This struggle for differentiation characterizes the developing field of professional writing and the Poet's War is only one of the more public and historically resonant of these struggles. (33)

The plays associated with the Poetomachia employ a series of opposing terms--poet to poetaster, original to ape, priest to the Muses to play-dresser, author to plagiary, speedy or slow, deliberate or hasty--that mark one writer as valuable and others as pretenders, fakes, or hacks. (34) Jonson valorizes these terms in ways that are readily recognizable to a modern audience--being original is good, slow and careful is better than hasty and sloppy, aping is bad--but these value judgments would not have been self-evident to an early modern audience, an audience that would have contained a significant number of people trained to take pleasure in imitation and in the development of traditional themes and plotlines. Jonson's attacks on "plagiaries" points to his careful definition of imitation and its distinction from mere aping. As Richard Peterson notes, imitation is crucially important to Jonson's writing. He argues that for Jonson "to imitate in the true sense is to assimilate and remake in a spirit of admiration that inevitably shades over into active emulation and rivalry." (35) This is not the "aping"--mere copying--that the poetasters are guilty of. Part of what Jonson does in the course of the Poetomachia is propose (with some success) a novel value system in which to evaluate writing that ranks originality over traditionalism, independence over clientage, professionalism over amateurism. The primary opposition in the structure Jonson sets up in the course of the Poetomachia is between the poet and the poetaster. Poets are "priests to the Muses," respected by the state, and possess a legitimate voice in both the sphere of poetry and in the court. That this system of oppositions emerges in the context of a professional contest between playwrights is no accident. Title to the designation of "poet" becomes a stake in a struggle for audiences. (36)

Jonson's effort to redefine the nature and role of the "poet" changes the terms of the debate by changing the criteria by which works are evaluated. Jonson makes his satire an integral part of his play's action--the subplot of Ovid's fall works in close tandem with the main plot about Horace's eventual victory over the poetasters Crispinus and Demetrius in a battle over the nature and purpose of writing and writers. Jonson shifts the satire to matters of vocabulary, of style, and of decorum rather than being wholly bound up in caricature. (37) Marston's recognition of Jonson as "Most refined and serious poet, and his sincere and wise friend" in the Latin dedication to The Malcontent (1604) points to both Jonson's victory in this war and his opponents' acceptance of that victory and its terms--Marston praises Jonson as a "serious poet," the very title Jonson strove for in the Poet's War. The Poetomachia's staging of a contest over categories of value occurs within a highly competitive professional marketplace in which playwrights sought commissions from acting companies and acting companies sought scripts. Jonson, Marston, and Dekker are only three representatives of a much larger category of producers all of whom were in competition for the attention of the acting companies.

In addition to this competition among playwrights, public and private acting companies competed for the same London audience at the turn of the century. The Children of the Queen's Revels had just begun playing at Black-friars and necessarily found themselves in conflict with the established adult companies. This conflict has often been simplified into an opposition between high and low culture or between types of theater. Jonson has been traditionally aligned with the child companies and elite culture, which places Dekker and Marston on the side of the adult players and a more popular mode. (38) Marston's career in particular does not fit well with this schematization since the bulk of his plays were produced for the child companies. Thus, the plays and playwrights cannot be so easily divided up into opposing camps. Jonson and Dekker wrote for both adult and child companies and Marston seems to have debuted either with Henslowe or with the Children of Paul's. (39) The lines of battle in the Poet's War have more to do with professional struggles within a broader institutional context than with divisions between adult and child companies, much less elite or popular culture. (40) None of these writers showed any kind of exclusive affiliation with one company or kind of company--Shakespeare being an exception--and their careers are those of freelance writers seeking work from whoever would pay. (41) Under such circumstances, popularity and public success were crucially important stakes in the struggle for commissions. The conflict represented in these plays is thus less one between different types of acting companies than it is between different kinds of playwrights.

As Shakespeare notes in Hamlet, the contention between the "poets and players" seemed to be on all the stages of London at the turn of the century. According to Rosencrantz's account, the "little eyases" of the child companies "so berattle the common stages" that fashionable theater goers fear to attend the public theaters and for a time the only successful plays were those in which the child and adult companies attacked each other. (42) Despite Rosencrantz's comments, these plays he describes are more concerned with conflict between poet and poet than between "the poet and the player." (43) Hamlet himself notes the folly of a conflict between child actors and the adult actors they will grow up to become: "Will they not say afterwards, if they should grow themselves to common players--as is most like, if their means are no better--their writers do them wrong to make them exclaim against their own succession?" (2.2.345-49). (44) Being more insightful than Rosencrantz, Hamlet sees that the responsibility for the war lies with the writers, not the actors. The writers have more of a stake in these exclamations and their interests are necessarily different than those of the players--especially of the child actors who "exclaim against their own succession" in these plays. (45)

Plays associated with the Poetomachia were popular successes, apparently occupying a significant portion of the market for plays at the turn of the century. This popularity translates to economic success for the acting companies, and, indirectly, into professional success for the playwrights. The conflict between these three writers has much to do with this fundamentally economic struggle, a struggle mystified into a conflict over standards of quality for plays. In Poetaster, Jonson advocates a particular kind of diction, simple and direct, which he opposes to the fustian of some of Marston and Dekker's work and seems to believe that this diction would be more attractive to (as well as morally better for) audiences. (46) It is not by accident that the pill Horace administers to Crispinus in Poetaster forces him to vomit up fanciful words drawn from Marston's satires and early plays. Jonson's play attempts to purge such vocabulary and, by extension, such works from the profession. Poetaster criticizes both Marston and Dekker as bad writers and holds up Horace and Virgil as the standard to which all writers should aspire. Jonson strives to establish his kind of play as a standard--which would ensure both his status as poet and his marketability as playwright.

Marston's Histriomastix (1599, Q 1610) seems to have been written for a child company and the play is less a unified satire than a series of loosely related episodes tied together by a double subplot--one of which is a transparent attack on the common players with whom the Children of Paul's were competing. (47) The main narrative of Histriomastix demonstrates the pernicious effects that Peace and Plenty have on a slothful populace. Each act is presided over by a different ruling passion that dominates the action of all the characters in that act. Marston sutures the subplot of the players (Posthaste and Sir Oliver Owlet's Men) and Chrisoganus's educational program for the courtiers of the "ill-nurs'd age of Peace" onto this allegorical material (which was likely an older play Marston was revising) and these subplots represent Marston's intervention in the Poet's War. (48) The subplots layer a kind of pseudo-realism over the highly conventional and moralistic primary plot of the play. Sir Oliver Owlet's Men form as a result of the plenty attendant on Peace's ascendancy:

  Incle. This Peace breeds such Plenty, trades serve no turnes.
  Belch. The more fooles wee to follow them.
  Posthaste. Lett's make up a company of Players,
  For we can all sing and say,
  And so (with practise) soone may learne to play.
  (250)

The players' original trades (beardmaker, fiddle-string maker, and peddler) "serve no turnes" and they therefore turn to playing. Belch, Incle, and Gut seem greedy rather than unemployed and readily assent to Posthaste's proposal. (49) Marston spares no effort in making them appear ridiculous. Posthaste, the company's playwright, is a buffoon with pretensions to gentility and his play is a poor retelling of the story of Troilus and Cressida. The actors in the company are incompetent drunkards who mangle Posthaste's already mangled lines. Such a depiction--played as it seems to have been by the Children of Paul's--could only have been a challenge to the established adult companies and, more importantly, their playwrights.

At the turn of the century, Marston was writing verse satires for an elite audience of Inns of Court men, classically educated courtiers and bureaucrats, as well as the broader book-buying public. Philip Finkelpearl argues that his primary audience would have been at the Inns, an elite audience of budding lawyers, sons of gentry attending the "noblest nurseries of humanity and liberty," and administrators in training. (50) After the banning of satire in 1599, Marston turned to drama and wrote for the Children of Paul's, a company performing in one of the private houses near the Inns of Court, finding there, Finkelpearl argues, an audience he saw as fit for his work. (51) Histriomastix owes much to this context--Marston was striving to make a name for himself in a new (for him) genre--and Marston's targets in this play have much to do with the new market in which he was working. The newly reconstituted boy companies would have been in competition with the well-established adult companies playing at the public theaters, and Marston's picture of adult players doubtless owes much to this competition. By criticizing the adult companies and their playwrights as buffoonish incompetents, Marston proclaims the superiority of his new employers and of his own work. In the words of Landulpho, Histriomastix adult actors dare with:

    Most ugly lines and base-browne-paper-stuff
    Thus to abuse our heavenlie poesie,
    That sacred offspring from the braine of Jove,
    Thus to be mangled with prophane absurds,
    Strangled and chok't with lawlesse bastard wordes.
    (264) (52)

Landulpho's "our" makes "heavenlie poesie" the rightful possession only of gentlemen like himself, not players and playwrights. Ugly, base, and bastard words conspire in Landulpho's speech to abuse "poesie," which is defined as sacred. The status language here seems calculated to appeal to the "elite" sensibilities of his audience, and alludes to the superior quality of Marston's own work and medium. The "lawless bastard words" Marston claims are choking "heavenly poesy" are ironically the target of Jonson's ire in Poetaster--the Marston character vomits up what Jonson characterizes as precisely this kind of vocabulary. This element of the play is a direct intervention in a highly competitive dramatic marketplace, a marketplace seeing the rapid rise of Ben Jonson.

Proclaiming from the outset that the Poetomachia is about other writers' envy of his work, Jonson's Poetaster begins with envy personified rising up from below the stage in an effort to gain allies for an attack on the author. The prologue enters as Envie sinks down "againe" having found no one to "helpe [it] to damne the Author" (Ind. 46) telling the "Monster" to stay and let the prologue tread on its neck in victory:

      So spight should die,
    Despis'd and scorn'd by noble industrie.
    If any muse why I salute the stage,
    An armed Prologue; know, 'tis a dangerous age:
    Wherein, who writes, had need present his Scenes
    Fortie-fold proofe against the coniuring meanes
    Of base detractors and illiterate apes.
    (Prol., 3-9)

The prologue is, of course, describing the Poetomachia where the writer must be wary of attack and fortify his work against potential lurking enemies. The speech puts several key Jonsonian terms into play even before the action begins. First, Envy is despised and scorned by "noble industrie"--a virtue Jonson consistently claims for himself. (53) Noble industry triumphs over the calumnies of Envy, as Jonson believes his work as a product of such industry must triumph over that of his rivals. Jonson's industry is noble even if his background is not--this is a hierarchy based on merit, not external categories of rank. Jonson's claims here oppose the Parnassus plays' dismissal of him as a mere bricklayer by making his origins irrelevant. Second, he sets up an opposition between "who writes" and the "base detractors and illiterate apes" who populate this "dangerous age." This dichotomy characterizes the kinds of oppositions the play envisions as existing between various classes of writers. The epithets imply a specific hierarchy of evaluation and privilege a particular mode of writing. Jonson uses the language of social rank to criticize his critics--they are not merely detractors, but base ones--which places him on a higher rung of a writerly social ladder. (54) By calling his opponents "illiterate apes," Jonson asserts the value of writers who are literate originals--again, writers like himself. However, in such a dangerous age these values are not self-evident and therefore the prologue must therefore go armed.

Despite the envy and calumny of his attackers, the prologue asks that the "Author" not be blamed for separating himself from them:

      He doth implore,
    You would not argue him of arrogance:
    How ere that common spawne of ignorance,
    Our frie of writers, may beslime his fame,
    And give his action that adulterate name.
    Such ful-blowne vanities he more doth lothe,
    Then base dejection: There's a meane 'twixt both.
    Which with a constant firmenesse he pursues,
    As one, that knows the strength of his owne muse.
    (Prol., 15-24)

Jonson places himself above the "frie" of writers who have libeled him in an effort to take the high ground in the conflict. Imploring the audience not to think him arrogant, Jonson describes his course as a "meane" between the extremes of arrogance and "base dejection," a course appropriate to his sense of his place in the poetic hierarchy (he knows the "strength" of his muse). Casting himself, however, ironically, as an icon of restraint and probity (and, bizarrely, modesty) in the closing lines of the prologue he declares: "this [his work] he hopes all free soules will allow; / Others, that take it with a rugged brow, / Their mood he rather pitties, then enuies: / His minde is above their iniuries" (Prol. 25-29). Jonson separates himself from what he describes as the rabble, elevating himself and denigrating his detractors in one and the same move while disavowing that this is his goal.

The prologue situates Jonson in the midst of what he portrays as an acrimonious and unfair (to him) theater world. His tactics here, as within the play proper, are attempts to distinguish himself from his most immediate competitors in the field. This distinction, allegorized in the play by the contrast between the poetasters Crispinus and Demetrius and the poets Horace and Virgil, represents, straightforwardly enough, an attempt to mark himself as a poet worthy of the attention of discerning patrons (Horace and Virgil's relations to Mecoenas and Augustus being homologous). Jonson exploits the cultural capital still associated with the patronage system--by associating himself with Horace, a writer with a noble patron, Jonson makes a claim for his own talent--in order to win a professional conflict. By aligning himself with what he defines as noble virtues, he lumps his opponents into the rabble of commoners. (55)

In the 1616 Folio, Jonson prints an apologetical dialogue he asserts was suppressed "by authority" when the play was first performed. The dialogue rehearses the claims made by the prologue, dramatizes Author's stoic and reasonable response to the libels cast against him, and reinforces the image of Jonson/Horace/Author as reasonable, just, and virtuous. For example, in response to queries about why his work drew all the libels it did Author says that:

    I never writ that peece
    More innocent, or empty of offence ...
    ... My Bookes have still beene taught
    To spare the persons, and to speake the vices.
    ("To the Reader," 74-85)

In language reminiscent of his epigram "To my Book," Jonson asserts that Poetaster was "empty of offence," deserving none of the opprobrium heaped upon it by "enemies tongue." The play is hardly "empty of offence," containing as it does a large amount of personal satire and criticism. Nevertheless, this is precisely how he speaks of his epigrams, and such language characterizes Jonson's effort to shape his public persona into that of a sage and moral critic of contemporary abuses. (56) This effort, never particularly successful, intends to separate Jonson from the rabble by asserting his distance from those who fail to "spare the persons." Jonson articulates this as a position (whether or not he actually holds it) in the context of an effort to distinguish his plays and poems from that of other writers. It mystifies the various economic, personal, and artistic interests at work in the Poetomachia into a more abstract debate about the morality of satire.

In addition to this, the dialogue refers to Jonson's work as "bookes," not plays. In the Folio Works, itself a massive intervention in Jonson's ongoing definition of himself as an author, Poetaster becomes a book--a literary artifact--rather than a play. (57) By printing this apology, Jonson revives a dated (and factitious) defense in order to mark himself as a dignified or noble poet and not a base poetaster in permanent form. He describes the effect of his writing as an indelible mark on the foreheads of his enemies--"my prints should last, still to be read / In their pale fronts" when the things written against him "shall like a figure, drawne in water, fleete" ("To the Reader," 169-71). Like his competitors, Jonson depicts the action of his satire in terms of writing, the terms of the field in which the debate takes place. Poetaster's folio publication reinforces the sense that the contest represented in the plays of the Poetomachia is a literary one, a contest between modes of writing. (58)

Dekker's Satiromastix (1602) responds to Jonson's intervention in the Poetomachia and describes itself as an attempt to "untruss" the "humorous poet." Satiromastix grafts a series of scenes depicting an impecunious and dishonest Horace clearly modeled on Jonson onto a play with few, if any, other links to the Poetomachia. Structurally, this is similar to the way the players' subplot functions in Histriomastix. Dekker makes use of one of Jonson's own characters to conduct the untrussing: Jonson's Captain Tucca reappears in Dekker's play to attack Horace. In other words, he appropriates Jonson's literary weapons for use against him. Rather than create his own critic or appeal to an external authority, Dekker one-ups Jonson by co-opting his own creation. Like Jonson, he uses specifically literary tools to fight a literary battle. Moreover, the dedication "To the World" expresses Dekker's position on the war in explicitly writerly terms.

Dekker addresses the printed version of his play "To the World"--to the whole world of readers--in much the same way that Jonson addresses his audience in the suppressed dialogue that closes Poetaster. Where Jonson staged his position statement, Dekker pointedly writes it as part of the published version of the play. He opens by disingenuously stating his quondam resolve to "bee round with thee (the world)" ("To the World," 1)--i.e., the audience. "Yet because thou wilt sit as Iudge of all matters ... I care not much if I make description (before thy Universality) of that terrible Poetomachia, lately commenc'd betweene Horace the second, and a band of leanewitted Poetasters" ("To the World," 3-9). Dekker is engaging in essentially the same tactics as Jonson in his apologetical dialogue by claiming that he would rather not indulge in the conflict, but is forced to by circumstance. His second paragraph makes this clear.

  I could heere (eeven with the feather of my pen) wipe off other
  ridiculous imputations: but my best way to answer them, is to laugh at
  them: onely that much I protest (and sweare by the divinest part of
  true Poesie) that (howsoever the limmes of my naked lines may bee and
  I know have bin, tortur'd on the racke) they are free from conspiring
  the least disgrace to any man, but onely to our new Horace; neyther
  should this ghost of Tucca, have walkt up and downe Poules
  Church-yard, but that hee was raiz'd up (in print) by newe Exorcismes.
  ("To the World," 40-47)

This echoes some of the language in Jonson's dialogue, a dialogue Dekker likely would have seen, if Jonson's claim about it being performed onstage is true. Dekker writes that he could "wipe off" the indelible blots Jonson would have stamped in his forehead with his pen's feather. The attention Dekker gives here to materials--his pen, ink blots--moreover foregrounds the practice of writing. Like Jonson, Dekker casts the conflict in terms of writing, but unlike Jonson he admits to conspiring disgrace to at least one person: "our new Horace." (59) He casts at least part of his response as being prompted by "newe Exorcismes," which call up Tucca "in print," suggesting that the printed version of Satiromastix is responding to Jonson's own quarto.

Dekker's rhetoric points both to his engagement with Jonson's own language--an effort to use Jonson's tactics against him--and his involvement in the developing literary field. A field is defined by the practices common to it--common struggles, shared rhetoric, common rules of "the game." Dekker writes in language well-suited to this kind of debate--he uses similar rhetoric in the Gull's Horn Book among other pamphlets--abusing those he regards as fools in flip and vivid language. (60) "To the World" attacks Jonson's pretensions and imagines a literary court presided over by Apollo as the final arbiter of poetic value and the justice of such claims to superiority. In Apollo's court, Dekker says Jonson would have been the loser. (61) Dekker's epilogue, spoken by Tucca, recognizes that poetic strife will continue:

  If you set your hands and Seales to this, Horace will write against
  it, and you may have more sport: he shall not loose his labour, he
  shall not turne his blanke verses into wast paper: No, my Poetasters
  will not laugh at him, but will untrusse him agen, and agen, and agen.
  (Epilogue, 20-24)

This strife, fought in terms that, as they are repeated and recycled, become specific to this literary struggle, points toward the constitution of a dramatic (and by extension a literary) field with practices that guide both the production of plays and the competition for distinction among playwrights. Dekker's "agen and agen and agen" makes this kind of competition a structural feature of the field. Horace's efforts will not be wasted, he "shall not loose his labour," but will produce an ever-expanding body of responses and counter-responses. Perhaps the best evidence of this is the persistence of the term "poetaster" in discussions about good and bad poets--Dekker sarcastically adopts the term, but in that adoption he accepts the shape of the opposition between poet and poetaster Jonson is striving to establish. In the Poetomachia, both sides share a rhetoric that focuses attention on the participants as writers.

IV

Marston and Dekker graft their critique of Jonson onto the main plots of Histriomastix and Satiromastix. The "untrussings" they engage in act more or less transparently as attacks. (62) Jonson's play, on the other hand, makes the critique of Marston and Dekker an integral part of the plot and denouement of Poetaster. Unlike the essentially limited critiques Dekker and Marston offer, Jonson's play is a thoroughgoing effort to define the proper role, subject matter, and deportment for writers and as such raises the stakes of the entire debate. Where Marston and Dekker seem content to critique Jonson for what they depict as self-importance, Jonson measures his attackers, and, by extension, all of his fellow writers, by standards he portrays as given and immutable. From Marston and Dekker's personal attacks, Jonson turns to abstractions about good and bad writing. This movement, a reformulation of personal attack into a kind of statement of principles, represents both a straightforward mystification of those attacks (Jonson still engages in the kind of attack he claims to be disavowing) and an effort to win the contest by shifting its grounds. Poetaster is thus part of Jonson's effort to redefine the field, an effort that culminates in the publication of the 1616 Folio.

Poetaster lines up five examples of writerly personas in three groupings for the audience's examination: first, Demetrius and Crispinus; second, Ovid; and last Virgil and Horace. Demetrius and Crispinus are workmanlike writers described as "poetasters," "plagiaries," and "play-dressers." They are mere imitators, revisers, artisanal writers rather than poets. They are obsessively envious of Horace's preferment and do not recognize that that preferment is wholly contingent on Horace's superior skill as a poet. Stung by an accusation that he had borrowed from Horace, Demetrius cries:

  Alas, sir, HORACE! hee is a meere spunge; nothing but humours and
  observation; he goes vp and downe sucking from euery society, and
  when hee comes home squeazes himself dry. I know him, I.
  (4.3.104-7)

Demetrius attacks Horace as an imitator, a "spunge" sucking up words and ideas everywhere he goes, which is precisely the charge Jonson levels against both Marston and Dekker. Apish imitation, even in the mouth of a villain, is something to be criticized. Captain Tucca, who acts as a sympathetic advocate for the poetasters, chimes in, stating that "what he once drops vpon paper against a man, liues eternally to vpbraid him in the mouth of every slaue tankerd-bearer, or water-man" (4.3.111-13). Horace's satires seem to be popular where Demetrius's and Crispinus's work is scorned. Gallus even prefers Horace's company to that of Demetrius and Crispinus saying "O, that HORACE had staied still, here" (4.3.130) when faced with the prospect of dining with the two poetasters. Their motives in attacking Horace derive from envy of his success and that envy helps to doom them in their trial at the end of the play. Jonson suggests that envy of another's gifts leads to bad poetry.

Jonson treats Ovid as a kind of middle term in the continuum between the poetasters and himself. Ovid typifies the position of the gentleman amateur, spending his talents in the service of poetry rather than the state. Accused of frivolity and, worse yet, playwriting, by his father, who had planned for him to study the law, Ovid responds:

    I am not knowne vnto the open stage,
    Nor doe I traffique in their theatres.
    Indeed, I doe acknowledge, at request
    Of some neere friends, and honorable Romanes,
    I haue begunne a poeme of that nature.
    (1.2.63-67)

Ovid may be writing a play, but defends his work by asserting that it is not destined for the "open stage," instead it is a "poeme" commissioned by some "honorable Romanes." Jonson refrains from directing outright criticisms of the kind he makes of Demetrius and Crispinus at Ovid, but his position is shown to be compromised by a kind of moral laxity. His poetic talents, great though they be, are being directed at base entertainments--Ovid is exiled for participating in a feast where the diners impersonate the gods--not elevating the populace. The play condemns Ovid on both moral and literary grounds (not by accident is he caught at the feast by Horace, Caesar, and Mecoenas) for his wasting his poetic gifts in this manner when they should be placed in service of the state.

Horace and Virgil, the final pair of writers, stand at the top of the hierarchy and represent the ideal to which all poets should aspire. They unite talent and moral probity, thus escaping the fate of Demetrius and Crispinus who are merely bad writers, as well as the fate of Ovid, who is a good writer but lacks firmness of character. In the final scene, Caesar asks Horace his opinion of Virgil:

    What thinke you three of VIRGIL, gentlemen,
    (That are of his profession, though rankt higher,)
    Or HORACE, what saist thou, that art the poorest,
    And likeliest to enuy or to detract?
    (5.1.75-78)

Caesar asks Horace and his fellow professionals to evaluate Virgil's work, allowing poets to criticize or praise a fellow poet, before he makes any final determination about the work. This is an important point--Caesar asks Horace and the others for their professional opinion, implying that they are more qualified than he to judge the work of a fellow poet. The principle of peer judgment is one of the defining characteristics of a field--here Caesar recognizes the autonomy of the "literary" field by deferring judgment to those he deems best suited to make a fair evaluation: other poets. Even as the play dramatizes patronage--Mecoenas, after all, is the traditional figure of the generous patron--it attempts to obfuscate the financial aspect in favor of a spiritualized notion of poetic value. By dramatizing an act of professional judgment and maintaining the image of patronage, the play executes a double move: Jonson asserts that the judging of poetry is best done by poets while at the same time valorizing the judgment of Caesar and patrons more generally. Caesar recognizes Virgil's virtue and seats him in the throne. Horace responds to the idea that he is "likeliest to envy or detract," asserting that "he that detracts, or enuies virtuous merit, / Is still the couetous, and the ignorant spirit" (5.1.92-93) making the primary category of evaluation the quality ("virtuous merit") of the work and disclaiming a role for personal feeling in the matter. Caesar applauds this sentiment and asks the question again prompting Horace to describe Virgil as a "rectified spirit," a learned man, and as a poet whose work "shall gather strength of life, with being, / And liue hereafter, more admir'd, then now" (5.1.137-38).

Poetaster concludes with an elaborately staged trial scene that allows Jonson to present the opposition between the writerly persona he espouses and that which he attributes to his rivals Marston and Dekker in a particularly graphic manner. The trial begins with a reading of the charges against Demetrius and Crispinus. They are charged with calumny--depraving Horace, "taxing him falsely of selfe-loue, arrogancy, impudence, rayling, filching by translation, etc" (5.2.231-32). (63) The indictment names Crispinus as a "poetaster and plagiary," Demetrius as a "play-dresser and plagiary," but Horace is a "poet, and priest to the Muses" (5.2.216-28). The trial is judged by Virgil, speaking from Caesar's throne, who orders Tibullus to read samples of both Demetrius's and Crispinus's work. Crispinus' comes first:

    Rampe up my genius, be not retrograde:
    But boldly nominate a spade a spade.
    What, shall thy lubricall and glibberie Muse
    Liue, as she were defunct, like punke in stewes?
    (5.2.275-78)

The poem Tibullus reads is laden with vocabulary typical of Marston's early poems--lubrical, glibberie, snotteries, and the like--a vocabulary Jonson scorns as fustian and willfully obscure. A libel by Demetrius follows that almost quotes Satiromastix:

    Our Muse is in mind for th'vntrussing a poet,
    I slip by his name; for most men doe know it:
    A critick, that all the world bescumbers
    With satyricall humours, and lyricall numbers:
    And for the most part, himselfe doth aduance
    With much selfe-loue, and more arrogance.
    (5.2.302-8)

Jonson caricatures Marston and Dekker's diction in these verses in order to position himself as the true possessor of the poet's voice while at the same time defining that voice. Virgil reacts scornfully to these verses, and he tells Caesar they are "strangely worded," going on to say of Demetrius and Crispinus that "if they should confidently praise their works, in them it would appeare inflation" (5.2.297, 360-61). In other words, they are criticized for their poor writing.

Virgil and Horace exact a telling form of justice as the play closes. Horace administers an emetic that causes Crispinus to vomit up the words that offend the true poets. The pill administered, Crispinus begins spewing forth the words Jonson finds so objectionable:

    Crispinus. O--retrograde--reciprocall--incubus.
    Caesar. What's that, HORACE?
    Horace. Retrograde, reciprocall, and Incubus are come vp.
    Gallus. Thanks be to IUPITER!
    Crispinus. Glibbery, lubricall, and defunct.
    Horace. Well, said, here's some store.
    (5.2.468-73)

The vocabulary Jonson purges here is that associated with the early work of Marston leaving behind what he depicts as the more measured tones of his own "plain" style. Virgil prescribes a strict diet of Cato, Terence, Plautus, and the "best Greekes." Virgil asserts that this will cure Crispinus by making his work like that of a true poet's--measured, decorous, learned, and whole-some--like Jonson's self-representation. Jonson, however disingenuously, aligns himself with these traits of moderation as a way of claiming victory in the Poet's War, a war effectively ended with this play.

V

    It will be looked for, book, when some but see
    Thy title, Epigrams, and named of me,
    Thou shouldst be bold, licentious, full of gallWormwood, and
    sulphur, sharp and toothed withal;
    Become a petulant thing, hurl ink, and wit,
    As madmen stones: not caring whom they hit.
    Deceive their malice, who could wish it so.
    And by thy wiser temper, let men know
    Thou art not covetous of least self-fame,
    Made from the hazard of another's shame:
    Much less with lewd, profane, and beastly phrase,
    To catch the world's loose laughter or vain gaze.
    He that departs with his own honesty
    For vulgar praise, doth it too dearly buy.
    --Ben Jonson, Epigrams II ("To My Book")

Ben Jonson's admonition to his book at the opening of his Epigrams is part of an ongoing effort to reconfigure and control the reputation of his work. Jonson asserts that these poems, despite their origins and genre, will not be full of license, gall, or lewdness, but will be honest, decent, and worthy of serious praise. Nor are they directed toward the "vulgar," or interested in "self-fame," but rather they are intended for an audience that will "understand" them and justly praise them. The tension Jonson articulates here between "honesty" and "vulgar praise" is one of the structuring principles of the way he imagines the field. In practice, the distinction is blurry--particularly since Jonson is a relentless self-promoter--but its articulation represents a strategic intervention in the discourse about poetry. The project represented by this epigram is not restricted to the epigrams, but extends throughout all of Jonson's work. The plays become "dramatick poems" and, at least in the case of Sejanus, accrete a massive scholarly apparatus as they enter print. It is a commonplace to discuss Jonson's 1616 Workes as an effort to assert the literariness of plays--a kind of clearing of the way for the Shake-speare folio and the subsequent recognition of drama as a legitimate "literary" genre--but Jonson's intent in pronouncements such as the epigram quoted above, in his publications, and in his plays is not merely a claim for a genre's legitimacy (or for the value of his own work). Jonson's published works do make explicit claims for the value of his own work, but, more importantly, his assertions and self-positionings in the contentious literary marketplace of early modern London have lasting effects on the definition of the writer's role and on the shape of the literary field more generally. Throughout his career, Jonson strives to define his work and, by extension, his role as a professional writer as honest and, more importantly, worthy of respect.

The "terrible poetomachia" discussed above is a refracted representation of the struggles that define the field of cultural production--a field whose paradigms govern the production and reception of the work of art. Jonson, Marston, and Dekker's relation to each other's work and to the broader market for cultural products outlines part of the vexed transition from a "literary" field more purely governed by external concerns to one increasingly dominated by struggles and considerations recognized in terms of the field itself. The profession was thus coming to be defined on its own terms at the same time that playwriting was gaining a precarious legitimacy, as demonstrated by the increasing resort of gentlemen to it as a career. The Poetomachia demonstrates that playwriting was recognized by its practitioners as a profession with its own criteria of judgment, criteria that were the stakes of the war played out in Histriomastix, Poetaster, and Satiromastix. Jonson turns the Poetomachia into a struggle over the definition of a good play--his style being portrayed as superior to that of his rivals. This response, a response that becomes more common in later literary struggles, is both innovative and structured by the field itself.

The Poet's War ends, in part, because it produces an always-contestable image of the professional playwright. Jonson's Poetaster criticizes his rivals for failing to measure up to an authorial standard he himself defines. Whether or not Jonson (or Marston, or Dekker, or any other playwright) measures up to this standard is less important than the fact that such a standard was articulated and thus made contestable. Marston and Dekker are content to satirize elements of their rival's personality and poetic practice but only incidentally attack him as a writer. In response to these attacks, Jonson espoused a particular kind of professionalism--one defined by a kind of rhetorical restraint and, if the structure of Poetaster can serve as evidence, a commitment to a unified action on the stage. (64) Neither Marston nor Dekker made any such gestures; they contented themselves with criticizing what they depict as the pretensions of their rivals and did not take the additional step of articulating a position. (65) By espousing these stylistic standards, Jonson defines his work as distinctive, worthy of attention, and thus makes it marketable to both the acting companies and the paying audience. (66) Jonson's professionalism was thus not merely an effort to defend himself from what he saw as slander, but was also a claim for and defense of the marketability of his plays. Jonson's version of professionalism thus emerges in the context of the field--as an effect of a struggle for position--and his stress on standards (painfully clear in Poetaster's trial scene) derive from his individual disposition--his classicism, his contentiousness, his commitment to Horatian poetics--as well as the developing structure of the field. A social agent's actions are always structured by a combination of individual history and position in a series of fields and Jonson's declarations in Poetaster result from the confrontation between his immediate sense of being threatened and his location in the emergent professional field. (67)

Rather than offer a straightforward response to the charges laid against him, Jonson chooses to engage in a struggle to define the shape of the field of dramatic writing. Poetaster, instead of relying for its effectiveness on the kind of libels and comic personations of Marston and Dekker's plays, offers a picture of what Jonson views as the proper shape of a specifically literary hierarchy. The criteria for evaluating status in this hierarchy are literary (for lack of a better and less anachronistic term)--poetic quality wins over sensationalism--and the judges are writers, not patrons, buyers, or, as various out-bursts in Jonson's later career show, audiences. All three playwrights respond to attacks on their professional stature by reference to writing and their skills, but Jonson turns what could have been a relatively minor professional conflict into a position-taking in the field of cultural production. The impetus behind this position-taking remains professional, and Jonson is nothing if not a professional, but the conflict is refracted into a debate about standards of quality for plays--the refraction has long-lasting effects. This early modern struggle and the terms it introduces exert a profound influence on subsequent struggles and on the development of professional writing--contributing to the origins of a self-judging and self-authorizing "literature." (68)

Notes

1. "Value" here refers to aesthetic value along with commercial value and other kinds of judgments--all of which combine in the evaluation of the work of art.

2. This autonomy is always only relative--external forces do act within fields, but are mediated through the laws of the field. See Bourdieu's argument about the emergence of "art for art's sake" in "The Field of Cultural Production, or, The Economic Field Reversed" in Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 29-73.

3. See Pierre Bourdieu, "Intellectual Field and Creative Project" (Social Science Information 8:2 [1969]) for a discussion of the development of a relatively autonomous intellectual field. He argues that in the course of the Renaissance "the intellectual field becomes an increasingly complex system, increasingly independent of external influences ... a field of relations governed by a specific logic: competition for cultural legitimacy" (90). It is this struggle that I will be discussing below.

4. Edwin Havilland Miller in his Professional Writer in Elizabethan England: A Study of Nondramatic Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959) describes this Grub Street in terms of a constant and difficult struggle by writers for financial support for their work whether from printers or from wealthy patrons.

5. "Poetomachia" refers to a group of plays written between about 1598 and 1602 (the dates are subject to debate as are the numbers of plays involved) that engage in a combination of personal satire and poetic competition. See below for a more developed definition.

6. The Parnassus Plays make specific reference to Jonson ("the wittiest fellow of a bricklayer" in England), Shakespeare, and to the Chamberlain's Men as representatives of what the Parnassians struggle futilely against.

7. See Miller Professional; Richard Helgerson, Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976) and Self-Crowned Laureates (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Gerald Eades Bentley, The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare's Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971); William Ingram, The Business of Playing (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); James Forse, Art Imitates Business (Bowling Green: Popular Press, 1993). On print more generally, see Eisenstein's work on the printing press and related social and technological changes and Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday, eds., The Renaissance Computer (New York: Routledge, 2000).

8. I have discussed the emergence of professional governmental administrators in "He is but a bastard to the time: Status and Service in The Troublesome Raigne of John and Shakespeare's King John" ELH 65.4 (1998): 779-98.

9. See David Cressy's Literacy and Social Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) for data on literacy rates in Tudor England.

10. See Pierre Bourdieu, Rules Of Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 252-64 on generic upheavals.

11. Robert Greene is the most obvious example of a university trained writer lamenting the rise of other writers.

12. The plays offer a kind of gloss of Cuddie's complaint in Spenser's "October" eclogue from the Shepheardes Calender that "Mecaenas is yclad in claye." For the Parnassians, Mecaenas is replaced by the inadequate substitutes of the players and the printers. Greene's repentance pamphlets, discussed below, speak to this sentiment as well.

13. The modern literature on the Poetomachia dates from the late nineteenth century and works like F. G. Fleay's Chronicle of the English Drama (London, 1891), J. H. Penniman's War of the Theatres (Boston, 1897), and R. A. Small's Ben Jonson and the Poetasters (1899. New York: AMS Press, 1966) establish the outlines of the War (its participants, the plays involved, and the dates). Early twentieth-century work continues the project of deciphering what real writers characters in the plays refer to and make efforts to understand the conflict in terms of rivalries between companies (see Robert Sharpe, The Real War of the Theatres (1935; New York: Kraus Reprint Association, 1966). Later work, like James Bednarz's Shakespeare and the Poet's War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), explores particular plays as they relate to biography, individual careers, or changes in public taste. See also Alan Sinfield "Poetaster, the Author, and the Perils of Cultural Production" in Lena Cowen Orlin, ed., Material London, ca. 1600 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). Most recently, Roslyn Knutson's Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare's Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) has questioned the traditional reading of the Poetomachia as a struggle between personalities.

14. For example, a late poet's war between Brome, Davenant, Shirley, Suckling, and Massinger makes use of terms current in the 1599-1601 Poetomachia. See Matthew Steggle, Wars of the Theatres: The Poetics of Personation in the Age of Jonson (University of Victoria: Victoria, British Columbia, 1998). See also Peter Beal, "Massinger at Bay: Unpublished Verses in a War of the Theatres," Yearbook of English Studies 10 (1980): 190-203.

15. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 78.

16. These are not rigidly defined groups, of course, but writers at the time recognized the fundamental divide between the generally non-gentle professionals working in London's commercial markets and university-educated or gentle writers working in a patronage economy.

17. The Parnassus plays document this shift in the lamentations of the patronless writers and their unwillingness to work in the new, more explicitly commercial, market. See below.

18. See Timothy Reiss, The Meaning of Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992) for a thorough treatment of the development of "literature" as a category. He locates its full development in the eighteenth century, but I would argue Jonson and his contemporaries laid a great deal of the groundwork.

19. See Jeffrey Masten's Textual Intercourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) for a useful reconsideration of the development of authorship as practice and concept in the period.

20. See also the raucous debate about theatre and its social role and the status of those who write and act in plays. Where a Ben Jonson would argue for the edifying potential of a play, a Stephen Gosson would rail at the immorality and depravity of both plays and playwrights. Anti-theatrical writings play a significant role in the kinds of defenses writers produce. See Thomas Heywood's Apology for Actors (1612).

21. See lines 140-60 of the First Return.

22. The treatment of the awarding of clerical livings in the plays demonstrates the corruption of a system that once, in the world of the play at least, provided places for learned men. See especially the Second Return.

23. Satire, interestingly, is the genre Marston begins writing before turning to drama and the Parnassians' place of retreat refers to a lost satirical play written by Jonson and Nashe in 1597--just before the composition of the Parnassus plays. Jonson and Nashe found themselves in trouble with the Privy Council and audience members may have expected a similar fate for Ingenioso, Furor Poeticus, and Phantasma, particularly after the bishop's ban in 1599.

24. Greene's repentance pamphlets famously complain about the fickleness of the public and the theater companies and warn his fellow University Wits not to rely on either for support. See especially Greene's Groatsworth of Witte, Bought With a Million of Repentance (1592). The stridency of Greene's (and by extension the Parnassians') complaints has a great deal to do with the fact that the players and the printers are fast becoming the only game in town. Greene is deeply ambivalent about print and theater.

25. Thomas Dekker, The Guls Horn-Booke in Nondramatic Works of Thomas Dekker (vol. 2, A. B. Grosart, ed., New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), 246-47. Kathleen McCluskie uses this passage as the epigraph for her important article "The Poet's Royal Exchange: Patronage and Commerce in Early Modern Drama," Yearbook of English Studies 21 (1991), 53-62.

26. This move is both a mystification--these writerly struggles are, at least in part, involved in status conflicts--and an effort to develop alternative principles of distinction. Marston's own ambiguous status as a gentleman, a member of the Inner Temple, and poet and playwright drives some of his efforts to secure distinction much as Jonson's own bricklaying background does his. Struggles over principles of authorship refract a series of social determinations at the same time as they remain struggles over "poesy."

27. I will not make any claims that these writers were engaged in any kind of conscious group-forming, but rather that the struggles for ascendancy in the late Elizabethan literary field resulted in the formation of a stable and recognizable social type: the writer.

28. Thomas Dekker, Thomas Dekker, ed. E. D. Pendry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 27.

29. See Bourdieu, "Field of Cultural Production," for a discussion of the way popular rejection functions as a signal of artistic success in a later state of the field.

30. See Franklin B. Williams, "Commendatory Verses: The Rise of the Art of Puffing," Studies in Bibliography 19 (1966): 1-14, for a discussion of dedicatory practices. These kinds of disclaimers become conventional feature of dedications in the period. See also J. W. Saunders's "The Stigma of Print: A Note on the Social Bases of Tudor Poetry," Essays in Criticism 1(1951): 139-64. Whether print really was a stigma is, of course, open to question, but the practice of disavowing print function rhetorically in struggles for distinction. See Steven May, "Tudor Aristocrats and the 'Stigma of Print'" Renaissance Papers (1980): 11-18.

31. Jonson and Dekker appear on the playwriting scene ca. 1597-58 while Marston's first play seems to have been produced in 1599. Henslowe records a payment of two pounds to a "Mr Maxton the new poete" in September of 1599 and Chambers holds that this is a reference to Marston (Elizabethan Stage, 3:428). It is unclear what this play was, but Marston is unlikely to have begun his career as a playwright much before 1599.

32. David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 79. Riggs argues that Jonson saw Marston as an "enemy twin" (80)--a doppelganger--and thus psychologizes a professional conflict.

33. The insistence on the identity of the author in many early pamphlet titles--Greene, Nashe, for example--points to a need for writers to claim their place in an emergent hierarchy within the sphere of writing. Greene's digs at Shakespeare can be read both as a kind of social or educational snobbery and as an effort to establish rankings within the field of cultural production. The lack of authorial attribution for many dramatic texts may be sign of a different kind of hierarchical principle at work in the professional theater--principles organized in terms of companies, not writers. This does, however, change, as Masten's book shows.

34. Note that these are specifically writerly categories, as opposed to the fundamentally status-centered categories at play in the Parnassus plays. "Poetaster" is a Jonsonian coinage, first cited in the OED in his 1599 play Cynthia's Revels. It refers to "a petty or paltry poet; a writer of poor or trashy verse; a rimester." Jonson consistently uses the term to refer what he depicts, from his position in the field, as writers who pander to their audiences.

35. Imitation and Praise in the Poems of Ben Jonson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 6. This is not the "aping"--mere copying--that the poetasters are guilty of. See the discussion of the trial scene in Poetaster below.

36. Jonson happens to be the person making these claims, but the claims themselves have much to do with positions in the field. In many accounts, Jonson figures as a kind of heroic figure championing a model of early modern authorship, what I would like to argue is that though this may be the case, his position-taking depends on the field as much as it does on Jonson's individual agency.

37. This shift away from persons is something Jonson refers to disingenuously throughout his plays and poems. In this play, it is particularly disingenuous because Demetrius and Crispinus are transparent caricatures of Dekker and Marston respectively.

38. This characterization is typical of the early literature on the Poet's War, and is based, at least in part, on Jonson's late "Ode: To Himself." See also Kathleen McLuskie, Dekker and Heywood (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994) for a discussion of the opposition between a popular and an elite stage.

39. See Chambers Elizabethan Stage, vol. 2. All three men appear as playwrights for the first time in Henslowe's records, and his theaters have been associated with a more "popular" mode of playwriting.

40. No solid information about Histriomastix's place of performance exists. Conjecture has ranged from it being Marston's first play for the Children of Paul's to it being performed by Derby's men at the Curtain to it being composed for revels at the Inns of Court. This fact alone makes the usual lines of opposition--between the child companies (Jonson) and the adult players (Marston and Dekker)--untenable. Dekker's Satiromastix was written for the Lord Chamberlain's Men and was also performed by the Children of Paul's.

41. See Bentley, Professional Dramatist, for a useful discussion of the distinction between an "attached playwright" like Shakespeare and unattached ones like Jonson, Marston, and Dekker.

42. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, (H. Jenkins, ed. New York: Routledge, 1990, 2.2.340-42; 350-54. Rosencrantz's comments are another source of the idea that the Poet's War is really a war between theaters, not writers.

43. What complaints there are about players in the various plays have more to do with skill or lack thereof than with their being adults or children--Jonson's episode with Histrio and the pyrgi in Poetaster criticizes both kinds of actor. Marston's players in Histriomastix are castigated for being bad, not for being professionals.

44. It is ironic that Rosencrantz's representation of the Poetomachia has been accepted as an accurate picture when he proves himself to be at best an inattentive listener and observer.

45. Hamlet's comment also bears witness to the links between child and adult players, links that make rigid distinctions between child and adult companies difficult to maintain. See Joseph Loewenstein, "Plays Agonistic and Competitive: The Textual Approach to Elsinore," Renaissance Drama 19 (1988): 63-96. Loewenstein discusses the eyases passage as evidence of current events in the London theater world.

46. See Jonas Barish on Jonson's commitment to what Jonson terms the "plain style" in his Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960). The complexity of Jonson's diction does not belie this commitment--what he attacks in Marston and Dekker is what he depicts as a willful obscurity of vocabulary. As with other moves in the Poetomachia, this too is strategic and aims at separating Jonson from his rivals.

47. The play has been dated variously (from a few years earlier to a few later), placed in various performance contexts (from the Inns of Court to the Children of Paul's), and described as a revision of an earlier play. Marston's authorship has been generally accepted, however. See Philip Finkelpearl, John Marston of the Inner Temple (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 119-24 for a discussion of various theories about the play's first performances. Recently, Roslyn Knutson has argued that Histriomastix is not by Marston and that it has little to do with the Poet's War (Playing Companies and Theatrical Commerce in Shakespeare's Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). James Bednarz accepts Marston's authorship of the play in his Shakespeare and the Poet's War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). The jury appears still to be out on the play's authorship and I accept the traditional ascription. It does seem that Jonson responds to the play and its depiction of Chrisoganus and the actors make it relevant to the Poet's War and to my argument.

48. John Marston, Plays of John Marston (H. Harvey Wood, ed., Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1934), 3:281. All citations of Histriomastix are to this edition, which is unlineated.

49. Some players could make a considerably better income than laborers or artisans. Some successful actors made large fortunes--Alleyn endowed a college with money earned as an actor and Sharer--larger than those Belch, Incle, and Gut could reasonably hope for from their trades. Incle's comment on Plenty's effect on trade make the economic dimension of their ambitions clear.

50. Finkelpearl, chapter 7.

51. Lynda Boose has argued that the Bishop's Ban on print satire drove writers to the theatre as they sought a venue for their work. See "The 1599 Bishop's Ban, Elizabethan Pornography, and the Sexualization of the Jacobean Stage," in Richard Burt and John Michael Archer, eds., Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 185-200.

52. That this scene owes its structure to Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream seems obvious, but the criticism is not of "rude mechanicals" but professional players (however short their career).

53. See also the opening poems of his Epigrams, which make a similar claim about his honest labors. See Halpern's discussion of Spenser's industry in The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). See also Robert Matz on the importance of figuring poetry as work in his Defending Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

54. This hierarchy is described in more detail below.

55. Jonson lines himself up with the worthy few in contrast to his competitors, the "common spawne of ignorance, / Our frie of writers." Importantly, he also asserts that theatre can be art fit for noble consumption. Here as elsewhere in his work, Jonson claims a status traditionally denied to theater and, at the same time, this claim intervenes in the market for performed and printed drama by asserting the superior value of his work as opposed to that of his envious and vulgar detractors.

56. Another collection laden with personal attacks, if not under real names.

57. Or a short-term intervention in a trivial writers' tiff.

58. See for example, Timothy Murray, Theatrical Legitimation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), for a discussion of Jonson's monumentalizing efforts in the folio publication.

59. Dekker, like Marston, appears not to have held to this animosity, if animosity it was, for long. He and Jonson collaborated on the King's Entertainment in 1604.

60. See passages on poets, critics, and how to behave at the theater in The Gull's Horn Book.

61. It is Jonson's play that contains a literary court presided over not by Apollo but by Caesar Augustus and Dekker loses in that court.

62. It is all but impossible to see how Dekker's Tucca and Horace fit into the already chaotic main plot of his play and Marston's players (and Chrisoganus too, for that matter) are out of place in the morality structure that characterizes the bulk of Histriomastix. Dekker in particular seems to have opportunistically dressed up (to appropriate Jonson's insult) his play with an attack on Jonson at a moment when this "stage-quarrel" was current and drawing large audiences.

63. Tucca has, in a radical act of misreading, taken an epigram in progress to be a treasonous libel and, supported by Demetrius and Crispinus, accuses Horace of this crime. The charges are laughingly dismissed and the tables turned on Horace's accusers.

64. This is not to say that Jonson actually achieved these goals, but to say that he articulated them as goals.

65. Marston's praise of Jonson's skill in the dedication to The Malcontent (1604) may be a kind of peace offering, but one that tellingly uses the same vocabulary Jonson uses to describe worthy poets.

66. His failure with Sejanus aside. Though the fact that it was performed publicly speaks to the King's Men's willingness to trust his skill.

67. See Bourdieu on habitus in Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

68. In later poetic conflicts, rivals claim to be the legitimate heirs of Jonson's comic legacy--his language becomes a marker of distinction in subsequent battles over literary status. See Brean S. Hammond's "'An Allusion to Horace,' Jonson's Ghost and the Second Poet's War," in Reading Rochester, ed. Edward Burns (New York: St. Martin's, 1995), 166-86. Hammond argues the Jonson's image and language play an important role in a conflict between Rochester and Dryden.