many wearing Rapiers, are affraide of Goose-quils, and dare scarse come thither.
Ham. What are they Children? Who maintains 'em? How are they escoted? Will they pursue the Quality no longer then they can sing? Will they not say afterwards if they should grow themselues to common Players (as it is like most if their meanes are no better) their Writers do them wrong, to make them exclaim against their owne Succession.
Rosin. Faith there ha's bene much to do on both sides: and the Nation holds it no sinne, to tarre them to Controuersie. There was for a while, no mony bid for argument, vnlesse the Poet and the Player went to Cuffes in the Question.
Ham. Is't possible?
Guild. Oh there ha's beene much throwing about of Braines.
Ham. Do the Boyes carry it away?
Rosin. I that they do my Lord, Hercules & his load too.
The be-rattling of the common stages and their spirited
replies, thought by some to include a 'purge' in Troilus and
Cressida, with which Shakespeare 'put down' Ben Jonson,
form an element in the literary conflict known as 'the war of
the theatres', in which, however, this issue is much complicated
with others arising from the personalities of the dramatists
engaged, and notably from that of Ben Jonson himself.[1]
- ↑ The main interest of the 'war of the theatres', or 'Poetomachia' as Dekker, Satiromastix, Epist. 10, calls it, is for literature and biography, rather than for stage-history. I refer to it under the plays concerned in chh. xxiii, xxiv, and can only add a brief summary here. The treatment of R. A. Small, The Stage Quarrel (1899), is excellent, and may be supplemented by H. C. Hart's papers, Gabriel Harvey, Marston and Ben Jonson (9 N. Q. xi. 201, 281, 343, 501; xii. 161, 263, 342, 403, 482) and On Carlo Buffone (10 N. Q. i. 381), while the less critical view, partly derived from Fleay, of J. H. Penniman, The War of the Theatres (1897), is revised in his edition of Poetaster and Satiromastix. The protagonists are Jonson and Marston, with whom became allied Dekker. Daniel and many others, whose names have been brought under discussion, do not seem to have been really concerned. Jonson himself tells us, in the Apologetical Dialogue, probably written late in 1601, to Poetaster that 'three yeeres, They did provoke me with their petulant stiles On every stage'. This takes us to 1599, up to which year there is no just ground for suggesting any conflict between Jonson and Marston. Jonson may then have taken offence at Marston's portrait of him, intended to be complimentary, as Chrisoganus in Histriomastix. In the same year he criticized Marston's style in E. M. O. In 1600 Marston satirized Jonson as Brabant Senior in Jack Drum's Entertainment, and in 1601 as Lampatho Doria in What You Will. Jonson in turn brought Marston into Poetaster (1601) as Crispinus, and added Dekker as Demetrius. Dekker retorted a month or two later with his caricature of Jonson as Horace in Satiromastix. Some unascertained part in the 'purge' given to Jonson is ascribed in 3 Parnassus (1601) to Shakespeare. Jonson and Marston seem to have been reconciled by 1603; but the dispute had not been merely a paper one, for Jonson, Conversations, 11, 20, claims that he 'beat Marston, and took his pistol from him'.
