War of the Theatres: Difference between revisions
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==Sequence of events== |
==Sequence of events== |
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The war started because of an apple that fell from the sky. Benjamin Franklin got hit in the head and thought the world was ending. Chicken Little told everyone that the world was ending. And then the war began. |
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==Context== |
==Context== |
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Revision as of 16:08, 3 December 2019
The War of the Theatres is the name commonly applied to a controversy from the later Elizabethan theatre; Thomas Dekker termed it the Poetomachia.
Because of an actual ban on satire in prose and verse publications in 1599 (the Bishops' Ban of 1599), the satirical urge had no other remaining outlet than the stage. The resulting controversy, which unfolded between 1599 and 1602, involved the playwright Ben Jonson on one side and his rivals John Marston and Thomas Dekker (with Thomas Middleton as an ancillary combatant) on the other. The role Shakespeare played in the conflict, if any, has long been a topic of dispute among scholars.
Sequence of events
Context
Shakespeare probably alludes to The War of the Theatres in a scene between Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern:
- Rosencrantz: Faith, there has been much to do on both sides; and the nation holds it no sin to tar them to controversy: there was, for a while, no money bid for argument unless the poet and the player went to cuffs in the question.
- Hamlet: Is't possible?
- Guildenstern: O, there has been much throwing about of brains. (Hamlet 2.2.362-9)
Scholars differ over the true nature and extent of the rivalry behind the Poetomachia. Some have seen it as a competition between theatre companies rather than individual writers, though this is a minority view. It has even been suggested that the playwrights involved had no serious rivalry and even admired each other, and that the "War" was a self-promotional publicity stunt, a "planned ... quarrel to advertise each other as literary figures and for profit."[1] Most critics see the Poetomachia as a mixture of personal rivalries and serious artistic concerns—"a vehicle for aggressively expressing differences...in literary theory...[a] basic philosophical debate on the status of literary and dramatic authorship."[2]
Notes
References
- Bednarz, James P. Shakespeare and the Poets' War. New York, Columbia University Press, 2001.
- Chambers, E. K. The Elizabethan Stage. 4 Volumes, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1923.
- Halliday, F. E. A Shakespeare Companion 1564–1964. Baltimore, Penguin, 1964.
- Hirschfeld, Heather Anne. Joint Enterprises: Collaborative Drama and the Institutionalization of English Renaissance Theatre. Boston, University of Massachusetts Press, 2004.
- Logan, Terence P., and Denzell S. Smith, eds. The Popular School: A Survey and Bibliography of Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama. Lincoln, NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1975.