Bednarz, James E. Representing Jonson: Histriomastix and the Origin of the Poets' War. Huntington Library Quarterly.

(excerpted by Clifford Stetner)

"He had many quarrels with Marston beat him & took his Pistol from him, wrote his Poetaster on him [;] the beginning of ym were that Marston represented him in the stage."

—Ben Jonson, Conversations with William Drummond

Between 1599 and 1601, Ben Jonson and John Marston were locked in a struggle for poetic mastery—a  poets' war—during the course of which they caricatured each other, with increasing derision on the stage. William Drummond, to whom Jonson confided that Marston "represent­ed" him in this manner, must certainly have known that the source of Jonson's anger was a roman a clef alluding to him as the philosopher-poet Chrisoganus in Histriomastix, Or the Player Whipt.  During the course of this struggle for poetic authority, Marston created in succession three characters designed to represent Jonson: Chrisoganus in Histriomastix (1599), Brabant Senior in Jack Drum's Entertainment (1600), and Lampatho Doria in What You Will (1601). He may have also contributed to Dekker's parody of Jonson as Horace in Satiromastix (1601). Jonson, in turn, replied to each of these impersonations with corresponding portraits of Marston: as the pretentious Clove added to Every an Out Of His Humour (1599), Hedon in Cynthia's Revels (1600), and Cispinus in Poet­aster (1601). By the time Jonson "beat" Marston and "wrote his Poetaster on him," this personal and professional rivalry had become so acrimo­nious that Dekker, late in 1601, described it in his introduction to Satiro­mastix as a "terrible Poetomachia" (line 7).

1HLQ, 54 (1991): 1-30

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Histriomastix was Marston's first complete drama, and his representation of Jonson served as a vehicle for assessing a powerful precursor who had already established his reputation as a satirist in the Eliza­bethan commercial theater. In evaluating Jonson, Marston was announc­ing his own arrival. One might assume that in this liminal situation Marston's attitude toward his successful rival , whose literary project was uncomfortably similar to his own, would be fraught with ambiva­lence, with a mixture of admiration and derision, respect and indepen­dence. Such proves to be the case. But literary historians of Elizabethan drama, including E. K. Chambers, Philip Finke Pearl, Anne Barton, and David Riggs, have accepted the mistaken suggestion of F. G. Fleay that Marston's depiction of Jonson as Chrisoganus is wholly positive.2 Marston, we are told, set out to flatter Jonson in Histriomastix, but Jonson misinterpreted the play and aggressively turned on his admirer because he either mistook Marston's panegyric for satire or felt that Marston had invaded his privacy, since any biographical representation from a poet­aster, no matter how flattering, merited contempt. It was Jonson not Marston, according to Herford and Simpson, who initiated the Poets' War by stridently attacking the author of Histriomastix as Clove in Every Man Out in order to show his displeasure with what was, in fact, an act of homage (H & S, 1:25). There is no question that Jonson parodied Marston in Every Man Out. Clove is an intellectual charlatan, who briefly enters Every Man Out for the sole purpose of rattling off examples of eccentric diction, culled in part from Histriomastix and the verse satire of The Scourge of Villanie (1598/99). "Yond' gallants observe us; pr'y thee let's talke fustian a little, and gull 'hem: make' em beleeve we are great schollers" (III.iv.6-8), Clove whispers to his confidant Orange, before ending his absurd monologue with the assurance that all he has said is verified by "PLATO'S Histriomastix" (III.iv.30). But was Jonson legiti­mately "provoked" in Histriomastix, as he would later imply in his apol­ogy for attacking Marston again in Poetaster? Or was he, indeed, contrary to his own statement to Drummond, the instigator of the Poets' War?

The only major critic who has rejected the prevailing positive characteri­zation of Chrisoganus is Alvin Kernan, who describes him as "a mere pedant" whose learning is "so bookish, so contrary to common sense, and so obviously loaded with Latin tags that it seems a parody on argu­ments of this type."3 Using scholastic language as ridiculous as the

HISTRIOMASTIX AND THE ORIGIN OF THE POETS' WAR 3

alchemical gibberish in The Alchemist," Chrisoganus , according to "instructing nobles in their moral duties" tries to "lead them into the bogs of speculative thought." And even though "he is right in his evalu­ation of others," Kernan continues, Chrisoganus lacks "humility and understanding of his own culpability," Histriomastix is accordingly "a study in social breakdown, and the ranting satirist is pictured as one form of abnormality, little better than the other debased characters among whom he lives and on whom he feeds." Kernan’s reading obvi­ously stands in manifest contradiction to the recent statement by David Riggs that "Marston seems to have intended Histriomastix, the play that lurks at the origin of the poetomachia, as an expression of solidarity between himself and Jonson."4 The difficulty with accepting Kernan's argument, however, is that it depends primarily on an interpretation of the tone of Histriomastix, which, as in much of Marston's writing, is notoriously difficult to ascertain, While Kernan suggests that the tenor of Chrisoganus' dialogue reflects nothing but "impractical scholastic hair­splitting," George Geckle rejects this reading at face value, arguing that his language embodies the wisdom of "the first of Marston's educated social critics and political leaders."5 Had Kernan and Jonson misread encomium for irony in their similar interpretations of Histriomastix?

To answer this question, one does not have to look further than Marston's choice of "Chrisoganus" as a pseudonym for Jonson, The word literally means "golden born," and appears at first glance to suggest Jonson's unique status as an inspired philosopher-poet. But any ges­ture of praise is simultaneously canceled by t e fact—previously undetected by modern critics—that Marston specifically borrowed the name from a recently published satiric epigram on Jonson in Skialetheia, Or A Shadow of Truth (1598), written by Marston's friend Everard Guilpin, In the first and only other application of this name to Jonson, Guilpin censures the poet for straining to achieve the effect of terribilita. Why does Jonson make such ferocious grimaces at the world, Guilpin wonders, when all this posturing is superfluous, since his face is already naturally offensive?

Of Chrysogonus, 30

Chrysoganus each morning by his glasse,

Teacheth a wrinckled action to his fac e,

And with the same he runnes into the street,

Each one to put in feare that he doth meet:

I pry thee tell me (gentle Chrysogone)

What needs a borrowed bad face to thine owne? 6

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The wit of this epigram depends on our knowing that Jonson was often considered by his contemporaries to be an unusually ugly man, given to frighteningly exaggerated facial expressions. Guilpin's epigram is the first published parody of Jonson. It is also the first to employ a satiric technique that Mikhail Bakhtin has called "the grotesque image of the body," a strategy through which the satirist emphasizes the grossness of physical reality, especially the face, in order to undermine any sense of our connection to an ideal order.7 This approach was soon to become a standard topos of Jonson criticism, which he could counter (when he later became obese) in such poems as "My Picture Left In Scotland" by stressing the difference between appearance and reality. According to Guilpin, Jonson is a satirist who is both physically and psychologically deformed, a grotesque of nature who further distorts himself through his excessively belligerent posturing, in a berserk example of Renais­sance self-fashioning. Here we find him sculpting his fearful persona in his mirror before taking it "into the street" –a joke that implies that there is really little difference between the private and public man, the natu­rally ugly face and its projection as a social ma k. When a large painted portrait of Jonson is brought out on the stage in Satiromastix, Captain Tucca sarcastically remarks: "by this I will learne to make a number of villanous faces more, and to looke scurvily upo 'th world as thou dost" (I.ii.265).8 Jonson's swarthy, pock-marked face afforded his critics an easy and constant opportunity for satire. Even though the name Chriso­ganus seems at first to be complimentary, indicating that Jonson is fortu­nate to have been "golden born," Guilpin's paise is tongue-in-cheek and casts an ironic glance at Jonson's dark complexion, an observation shared by Dekker's further description of Horace/Jonson in Satiromas­tix, as a "copper-fact rascal" (I.ii.285) and a "saffron-cheeke" . . . "sun­burnt Gypsie" (I.ii.367-68), with a face "like rotten russet Apple, / When tis bruz'd" (lV.iii.93-94). When the personal abuse of the Poets' War reached a climax in 1601, Dekker specialized in the satire of "our unhandsome-faced Poet" (V.ii.153). Although Jonson began his career as a strolling player, Dekker writes, he was unfortunately "not able to set a good face upon't." Not even Jonson's acne is overlooked by Dekker, who continuously refers to his "perboylde-face" ( ii.253), "full of pockey­holes and pimples" and "puncht full of / Oylet holes, like the cover of a warming pan" (V.ii.237; 258-59). And like Guilpin, Dekker records his amazement at Jonson's animated features: "Its cakes and pudding to me," he writes, "to see his face make faces, when he reads his Songs and Sonnets."9

Marston selected the name "Chrisoganus" because it possessed a dou­ble meaning, suggesting apparent praise for the "golden-born" poet, even as it advertised its source in Guilpin's recent satire.

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5

In Every Man In His Humour (1598), Jonson was for the first the in his career as a dramatist to insist publicly that the state of poetry was "Blessed, aeter­nall, and most true devine" (V.iii.317). It is on the basis of his identifica­tion with "Sacred invention," "Attired in the majestie of arte, / Set high in spirite with the precious taste / Of sweete philosophie" (V.iii.325-27), that Jonson would draw a primary distinction between himself—“a true Poet"—and the "empty spirits" (V.iii.341-42) against whom he contend­ed in the theater. If some modern critics are deceived by the witty inver­sion of meaning contained in the name "Chrisogonus,” Jonson, along with many of the members of the play's elite audience, including his friends and acquaintances who had read Skialetheia, certainly were not. That Marston knew the import of Guilpin's epigram is indisputable. He and Guilpin were second cousins whose lives and works are inter­twined. The "striking impression one receives from Guilpin's satires," writes his modern editor D. Allen Carroll, "is the close affinity they have with Marston's."10 If my theory concerning Marston's struggle to estab­lish his own poetic identity is correct, he adde "Satyra Nova," his attack on Joseph Hall, to the enlarged edition of the Scourge of Villanie (1599), in a verse epistle addressed to "his very fiend, maister E. G.," shortly before he featured Guilpin's name for Jonson in Histriomastix. 11 Guilpin consequently served as both a source and sounding board for Marston's two principal acts of literary aggression at the commencement of his career, as he turned from verse to drama. The evidence I have pre­sented thus strongly suggests that Marston changed the focus of his adversarial criticism from Hall to Jonson, late in 1599. From that time forward Jonson alone would serve as his significant "other" in drama, in an ongoing critique that extends from Histriomastix through Jack Drum's Entertainment to What You Will. This supposition in turn strengthens two related assumptions: first, that Histriomastix was produced in the final weeks of that year by the Children of St. Paul's, after Jonson's latest play Every Man Out had already been staged by the Chamberlain's Men; and second, that Jonson added his parody of Clove to the previously com­pleted acting script of Every Man Out directly to counter Marston's recent criticism.12

II

In translating Chrisoganus from epigram to drama Marston expands on Guilpin's prototype. As we would expect, he amplifies the range of Jonsonian attributes and associations in a comic plot, and he situates his new Jonson surrogate in a social context that re-creates the late Eliza­bethan literary/ theatrical scene. This contemporary social milieu is

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suggested by Chrisoganus' interaction with two specific cultural groups—a coterie audience whom he ineffectually seeks to educate and the com­mon players with whom he unsuccessfully negotiates the sale of his plays. The Chrisoganus of Histriomastix is set in a biographical fantasy concerned with representing the difficulties of Jonson's career, of his troubled relationships with his patrons and the common players. And it is by writing Jonson into the plot of Histriomastix that Marston speculates, as drama, on his theoretical and personal strengths and weaknesses.

It shouldn't surprise us that Chrisoganus is introduced as a philo­sopher dedicated to the pursuit of epistemological certainty, or that he advocates the acquisition of universal knowledge, in an educational pro­gram that fuses the liberal arts and the sciences. It was in 1599, Jonson tells us in "An Execration upon Vulcan," that he began to accumulate the books and manuscripts that comprised the "twice-twelve yeares stor'd up humanitie" (line 101), which burned in the fire that destroyed his library in 1623. Especially through his study of literary criticism, Jonson was at this time beginning to come to terms with the question of his own relation to the ideal model of the poet-scholar delineated by classical and Renaissance literary theoreticians. After his public advocacy of the sacred, or vatic, status of poetry in Every Man In His Humour (1598), Jonson would subsequently extend this defense of "the majestie of art" (V.iii.325) into the explicit humanist rhetoric of his three "comicall satyres," Every Man Out, Cynthia's Revels, and Poetaster. These works, written between 1599 and 1601, are nothing less than direct statements of Jonson's art of poetry that mark a distinct and important phase in his development as a dramatist.13 It was during this period, Richard Helgerson has observed, that Jonson first sought to present himself as a "poet laureate" – “a  virtuous, centered, serious self, characterized by its knowledge of and fidelity to itself and the governing ethos of the age." And it was during this same period, notes David Riggs, that Jonson first actively sought to test the viability of his literary program by soliciting literary patronage from the Elizabethan elite. Chrisoganus is accord­ingly, in the first act of Histriomastix, surrounded by a coterie audience of aristocrats, merchants, and lawyers, who volunteer to act as his "Patrons," even as he insists that his goal is beyond materialism: "To make you Artists, answeres my desire, / Rather then hope of mercenary hire" (3:254). Chrisoganus' second set of social relations is introduced in the third act, where he unexpectedly appears as a confident, one might say smug, dramatist associated with the public theater. It is in this role that he arrogantly lectures Sir Oliver Owlet's Men, a band of witless players, on the value of his "rich invention," with its "sweet smooth lines," while denouncing the barbarous "multitude" who fail to appreci­ate his "art" (3:273). Both of Chrisoganus' career relationships, however,

HISTRIOMASTIX AND THE ORIGIN OF THE POETS' WAR 7

break down during the course of Histriomastix: in the second act, when the coterie audience rejects scholarship for pleasure, and in the third, when the players reject the learned poet in favor of his rival Posthaste, who tailors his work to fit the popular audience Chrisoganus spurns. Now, if the behavior of Chrisoganus can be shown to be exemplary in both relationships, it would be fair to agree with the traditional view that Marston idealized Jonson in Histriomastix. But it simply cannot be done. For while the coterie audience and the common players are at fault for repudiating scholarship, Chrisoganus' didactic program is also called into question by its failure to command moral authority and to cement meaningful social relationships capable of justifying his voca­tion.

Chrisoganus' problems begin when the nation's new prosperity causes his upper-class patrons to forsake scholarship to p rsue more "pleasing sportes" that "fit the Plentuous humour of the time' (3:257). The scholar tries to stave off their retreat by asking, "What better recreations can you find, / Then sacred knowledge in divinest thinges" but the restless aris­tocrats, who had previously vowed to be his patrons, refuse to capitu­late. "Your bookes are Adamants," Philarcus responds, "and you the Iron / That cleaves to them till you confound yourselfe." His compan­ion, the extrovert Mavortius, agrees:

I cannot feed my appetite with Ayre,

I must pursue my pleasures royally, . . .

And leave this Idle contemplation,

To rugged Stoicall Morosophists. (3:257)

Again, Chrisoganus cautions: "O! did you but your owne true glories know, / Your judgements would not then decline so low"; but the nobles' pursuit of appetite over judgment deafens them to the pleas of the man they now mock as "Master Pedant." "'Tis still safe," Philarcus continues, "erring with the multitude," to which Chrisoganus curtly replies, "A wretched morall; more then barbarous rude." There is cer­tainly an element of satire aimed at the nobles who forsake reason for instinct. They are, in this sense, analogous to the common players who similarly err with the multitude in patronizing Posthaste, the instinctual poet-player, rather than his mighty opposite, the poet-scholar Chriso­ganus. The nobles' substitution of appetite for reason will inevitably lead to the civil war of the fifth act, which pits them against each other as a consequence of their choice. Here, too, Chrisoganus is unable to intercede, and is summarily rebuffed by both factions. What is most interesting about Chrisoganus, then, is his total failure to hold on to an

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elite constituency that forsakes him because they perceive their interests to be at variance with his. He is incapable of either resisting or subvert­ing the ascendant "humour of the time," which is not only beyond the control of his didactic program, but which dooms it to failure from the start.

Chrisoganus' program fails because he himself is unable to live up to the Stoic standard that he sets for others, a standard that demands self-­control as the prerequisite for social harmony. He has, in this regard, a particularly difficult time mastering the humours of Pride and Envy. When the allegorical figure of Envy enters in the third act, she predicts that her influence over the commonwealth will result in class warfare that includes the denigration of Chrisoganus:

Now shall proud Noblesse, Law, an d Merchandize,

Each swell at other, as their veines would breake,

Fat Ignorance, and rammish Barbarisme,

Shall spit and drivell in sweete Learnings face,

Whilst he halfe starv'd in Envie of their power,

Shall eate his marrow, and him-selfe devoure. (3:277)

Envy does not allow even Chrisoganus to scape her control over human destiny, and instead of affirming his resistance to the passions of the moment, she catalogues his fate among her social effects. Under her spell he quarrels with the players, refusing to sell his plays at the cus­tomary price of six pounds, declaring that he will not let his "booke pass, alasse for pride," but will force the players to "starve" until they "fawne and crouch to Poesie" (3:273). Chrisogonus' related humour of Envy surfaces later in his long soliloquy on the subject, during which he curses the "ideot world" and wishes himself" consum'd in aire" (3:281) at the thought of his neglect. But is his dilemma in the theater of his own devising? "The best Poets," the innocent Gull accurately observes, have "growne so envious / They'le starve rather than we get store of mony" (3:283). Thus, if Chrisoganus' didactic program with its Stoic art of self­-control, is intended to change the nation, it fails dismally. Marston sug­gests that Jonson's humanism, although apparently lofty in its aspira­tion, is incapable of reforming even the one man who believes in it and who masks his excesses as its rule of law.

Even though the nobles are themselves morally compromised, one of them, Mavortius, seriously questions Chrisoganus', and by implication Jonson's, claim to possess the moral authority vested in the poet's sacred office. Bored and irritated by Chrisoganus' pedantic lecturing and his superior attitude, Mavortius finally cuts him short, in a pointed

HISTRIOMASTIX AND THE ORIGIN OF THE POETS' WAR 9

denunci­ation directly applied to Jonson:

How you translating-scholler? you can make

A stabbing Satir, or an Epigram,

And thinke you carry just Ramnusia's Whippe

To lash the patient; goe, get you clothes,

Our free-borne blood such apprehension lothes.

            ( :257-58)

Reference to the genres that Jonson was currently employing (satire, epi­gram, and, elsewhere, drama) is here combined with a sense of his char­acteristic belligerence and self-aggrandizement his work's chronic dependence on scholarship (mocked as mere translation), and his pover­ty. Jonson was, of course, consistently involved with one of the principal concerns of humanism—the translation and reinterpretation of ancient texts. "He was better Versed & knew more in Greek and Latin, than all the Poets in England and quintessence<th> their braines" (H & S, 1:149), he had boasted, according to Drummond. "His inventions are smooth and easie," Drummond admitted, "but above all he excelleth in a Translation" (H & 5, 1:151). Marston's description of him as a "translating-scholler" calls two associations to mind: not only his skill in repro­ducing the classics in English but also the allusive echoes of these texts that pervade his work. This is a charge that Marston would expand in later attacks. But in Histriomastix he was the first critic to observe what Dryden would reiterate (even more sarcastically ) when he dubbed Jonson "a learned plagiary." 15

And yet it might be countered that Mavortius is himself flawed and does not constitute an authorial voice, so that his critique of Chriso­ganus, rather than Chrisoganus himself, is being satirized. But what is clear from this passage is that in stating that Chrisoganus is unworthy to "carry just Ramnusia's whippe," Marston, who had opened The Scourge of Villanie by vaunting that he bore "the scourge of just Ramnusia, / Lashing the lewdness of Britannia," is putting Jonson in his place. The Ramnusian whip, entitling its bearer to act as the scourge of the under­world, functions as one of Marston's literary signatures. In Faunus and Melliflora (1600), for instance, John Weever writes of "the excellencie, / Of the Rhamnusian Scourge of Villanie." In Every Man Out, Jonson's spokesman Asper vows to "strip the ragged follies of the time" and "Print wounding lashes in their iron ribs" with "a whip of steele" ("After the second sounding," lines 16-20). In Histriomastix Chrisoganus /Jonson is thus implicitly contrasted with Marston himself and is found unfit to bear this symbol of punitive satire wielded by the author of The Scourge of Villanie. Mavortius' dismissal of Chrisoganus with the words,

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"goe, get you clothes," reminds us of Jonson's financial distress. Jonson's poverty—the wages of scholarship—is well known. But his situation must have been particularly deplorable at this time, since after he had been convicted of murdering Gabriel Spencer in 1598, all Jonson's prop­erty would have been confiscated as part of his punishment.16 The stig­ma of poverty borne by Chrisoganus might have been mitigated by the sage's denunciation of "This ideot world" that "comforts all / Saving industrious art" (3:281), had he not been so soundly answered: "Peace prating Scholler" and "A pox upon this linguist, take him hence" (3:287).

Histriomastix thus harbors an attitude of extreme ambivalence toward Jonson, a writer whom Marston viewed simultaneously as both a men­tor and flawed rival. And the question is not whether Jonson had been satirized in Histriomastix, but how deep the stream of satire runs against the current of compliment. Jonson and Marston had simultaneously engaged in the writing of formal verse satire, and Marston had even published his work in this genre, long before Jonson. But by 1599 Jonson had already achieved considerable success as a playwright for both the Admiral's and the Chamberlain's Men, while Marston was still strug­gling through a period of apprenticeship. In what was most probably his first production for the Boys of St. Paul's, before an elite audience at the cathedral theater, Marston felt impelled to position his own writing in relation to Jonson's, and to achieve symbolically a form of domination in drama that he had as yet been unable to secure in life. Jonson's influence in Marston's first comedy is thus both pervasive and stringently con­tained. In Histriomastix Marston consequently engages in a bid for poetic mastery, producing an ambiguous assessment of Jonson that makes a tentative concession to his erudition even as it dramatizes his arrogance. If it is fair to admit that Kernan's reading is slightly exaggerated in its denigration of Chrisoganus, it is certainly not more exaggerated than the orthodox theory that he is "a literary ideal." Marston often maintains what Samuel Schoenbaum has called a "precarious balance" between conflicting motives that makes it difficult, if not impossible, to be sure of his meaning in all instances.17 Yet the fact that Kernan's study is unen­cumbered by the presupposition that Chrisoganus represents Jonson (a possibility he never entertains) allows him to escape from the usual knee-jerk assumption that the character must have been treated in a completely honorific manner because it represents Jonson.

But since Kernan believes that in Elizabethan fictions all representa­tions of satirists, without exception, demonstrated moral flaws, he goes too far in seeing nothing positive in Chrisoganus. Elizabethans did not automatically isolate Stoic fortitude from the function of moral censure, nor did they believe that every act of satire was an illegitimate attack, based on critical malice. That "righteous anger” was often given a

HISTRIOMASTIX AND THE ORIGIN OF THE POETS' WAR 11

spe­cial exemption from being classified along with the other passions can be readily seen, for instance, in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, one of the most widely disseminated classical treatises in the English Renaissance. Aristotle, in essence, provided a moral justification for satire that Jonson would join to an ideal of Stoic fortitude in Cynthia's Revels, trading a measure of tranquility for the mixed rewards and frustrations of social involvement. Yet to some of his critics, both in the Renaissance and at present, he had lost his center in a hopeless bid to synthesize the two competing modes of philosophical detachment and angry social engage­ment. But the theory that all satirists necessarily follow a "cankered muse," since anger is a vice, is a monolithic indictment of satire that not only blocks an understanding of Jonson's humanist standard but pre­vents a more nuanced, albeit contradictory, reading of Histriomastix. This more complex response does justice, at least in part to the experience of most readers, who have located elements of panegyric in Marston's ambivalent play. Why, for instance, should Chrisoganus be allowed to regain his status in the commonwealth at the end of the play, instead of being sent into exile with Posthaste and his actors? One has only to examine Marston's later and far more derisive portraits of Jonson as Brabant Senior in Jack Drum's Entertainment or Lampatho Doria in What You Will to sense how he was pulling punches in Histriomastix. Or better yet, one has only to consider the difference between Marston's ambiva­lent treatment of Jonson as Chrisoganus and his merciless parody of Anthony Munday as Posthaste in the same play to come to a similar con­clusion. Histriomastix was written before Jonson had even thought of parodying Marston, and Marston would completely darken his tone toward Jonson only after he had been stung by his rival's hostile response in Every Man Out (III.iv.21-40).

III

Contrary to the impression given by its title, Histriomastix, Or The Player Whipt is not entirely concerned with theatrical affairs. It is, instead, an estates satire that offers a comprehensive critique of Elizabethan society, numbering among its targets nobles, lawyers, merchants and their wives, and tradesmen, along with players and their "poets." On its most general level, Histriomastix is an anti-acquisitive satire that illustrates the corrupting influence of prosperity, which undermines the common­wealth by encouraging pride, envy, and, inevitably civil war. Why then does Marston refer only to the players in the title of his work, if he meant to lash the commonwealth as a whole? He evidently wants to advertise one of the unique features of his drama: in remarkably specific

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satire on contemporary theatrical affairs. For in the act of inserting him­self into the commercial culture of Elizabethan theater, Marston re-cre­ates that culture in a subplot of his drama as means of symbolically asserting his control over it. In that subplot, as Marston's title suggests, the main target for satire is not Chrisoganus but his rival Posthaste and the company of incompetent actors he leads. When Shakespeare writes in Hamlet that "there was for a while no money bid for argument unless the poet and the player went to cuffs in the question" (II.ii.354-56), he is thinking of the vogue created by Histriomastix.

Marston's meta-theatrical subplot contains a deceptively simple fable of poets and players. Chrisoganus is a philosopher surrounded by a coterie audience that admires his intellectual gifts, while his opposite Posthaste is a buffoon who advocates naive improvisation and organizes a group of wayward tradesmen into a company of incompetent actors, called Sir Oliver Owlet's Men. The actors solicit work from Chrisoganus, but because his price is too high they choose Posthaste's plays instead, only to have their subsequent productions of "Troilus and Cressida" and "The Prodigal Child" mocked as "barren trash." In the final act, Sir Oliver's Men lose their aristocratic patronage and, since they will not work, are impressed into foreign service, while the outcast Chrisoganus, who had been forsaken by his followers, weathers adversity and eventu­ally regains the favor of the intellectual audience that had deserted him.

No player is actually whipped in Histriomastix ; the title is metaphoric, referring in a general sense to the work's harsh criticism of the acting profession. Marston had designated himself "Theriomastix" –the whip­per of beasts—in The Scourge of Villanie. But there is one player, the most fully developed of Marston's actors, for whom the title is particularly appropriate, and that is Posthaste, a jack-of-all-trades in the popular the­atrical tradition. Posthaste is an alazon, a literary boaster, negatively characterized in a portrait that lacks the nuances of praise and blame afforded to Chrisoganus. But like Chrisoganus he represents a particu­lar poet, in this case Anthony Munday, one of Jonson's ideological oppo­nents in the public theater. Posthaste/Munday and Chrisoganus/Jonson thus come to represent a division in late Elizabethan drama between two diametrically opposed approaches to dramatic composition: the debased native tradition and its more sophisticated humanist counterpart.

Marston uses the name "Posthaste" to characterize Munday as a liter­ary Hotspur who prefers extemporaneous acting and improvisation to deliberate thought. The character also contains a covert reference to Munday's role as a duplicitous government agent. Munday was a bal­ladeer, playwright, and business agent for the Admiral's Men, an author and translator of romances, and a writer of civic pageants. Yet he also served between 1588 and 1596 as "Messenger to Her Majesties Cham­ber,"

HISTRIOMASTIX AND THE ORIGIN OF THE POETS' WAR 13

a position that he first announced on the title pages of his transla­tions of Palladine and Palmerin D' Oliva. Although Munday was officially required by his office to carry the queen's correspondence throughout England, his primary function was that of a pursuivant, a recusant hunter who, under the direct supervision of Richard Topcliffe, persecut­ed nonconformists and Roman Catholics alike. It as in this capacity as a Messenger of the Chamber, Munday writes, that he was compelled "by Her Majesties appointment, . . . to post from place to place on such affaires as were enjoyned."18 One of the hidden ironies of Histriomastix is revealed by the fact that Jonson had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1598, which was a felony in Elizabethan England; that he had been arrested by Topcliffe in 1597 for his part in writing The Isle of Dogs; and that he had himself parodied Munday along similar lines as "Antonio Balladino," in a passage added to The Case Is Altered (I.ii.1-83). Marston's contrast between Chrisoganus and Posthaste was existential as well as literary. Marston's covert references to Munday begin with Posthaste's first appearance, when he converses with Incle, a member of his new compa­ny. "We can all sing and say," Posthaste exults, and "soone may learne to play."

Incle. True, could our action answer your tempore.

Posthaste.        I'le teach yee to play true Politicians.

Incle.   Why those are th' falsest subtle felloes lives. (3:250)

The conjunction of extemporaneous acting and political duplicity creates a particularly strong biographical referent. Marston was clearly familiar with a story that had already appeared in print, that Munday, early in his career, had been a failure at improvisational acting. After Munday had published his account of the capture and execution of Edmund Campion, an anonymous Roman Catholic priest answered him in a pamphlet, entitled The True Report Of The Death and Martyrdome Of M. Campion. The priest, out to discredit Munday any way he can, relates that Munday went to Rome as a spy, where he picked up a taste for extemporaneously improvised acting. But, he continues, when "this scholler. . . did play extempore, those gentlemen and others which were present, can best give witness to his dexterity, who being wery of his folly, hissed him from the stage."19 Marston weaves this gossip, with its key word "extempore," into the texture of Histriomastix, and even includes a fictional re-creation of Munday's fiasco. when the actors gath­er to rehearse The Prodigal Child, Posthaste volunteers to perform it "extempore" (3:260), only to be rebuffed. But when The Prodigal Child is

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rejected in medias res by its learned audience, Posthaste, taking advan­tage of this opportunity, breaks in: "My Lords, / Of your accords, / some better pleasure for to bring, / if you a theame affords, / you shall knowe it, / that I Post-hast the Poet, / extempore can sing" (3:265). Landulpho provides a theme for Posthaste to improvise on, but when he concludes, responds: "I blush in your behalfes at this base trash" (3:266).

Munday had written political pamphlets, including A Watch-Woord to Englande to beware of traytours (1584), was a low-level government func­tionary, and had served in various "imployments" for the City of Lon­don. It is for this reason that Posthaste offers to teach the players how to impersonate "true Politicians," and the gullible lout later asks, "I'st not pity this fellow's not imployed in matters of State" (3:260). But Incle rightly rejects Posthaste's offer to instruct him how to act the part of a true politician, because he interprets the word, in its negative connota­tion, as referring to a "politic" person—a shrewd schemer, a plotter or intriguer—thereby suggesting a plausible indictment of Munday's career as a government informant. The word "politician" was also com­monly used to describe an acting company's business agent, a connota­tion that shades into the others, since Munday was regularly employed by the ,Admiral's Men in this capacity.

Munday, whom Jonson evokes as "Antonio Balladino" in The Case Is Altered, had been a ballad singer in his youth and Marston combines this activity with his theatrical interests to produce a caricature of an immoral poet wholly involved in the creation of the lowest form of pop­ular entertainment. Plays and ballads are indistinguishable for Posthaste. Asked by the actors how he is proceeding with "the new plot of the prodigall childe," he replies, "Ther's two sheets done in follio, will cost two shillings in time" (3:259). And even Munday's honorary associ­ation with the draper's guild (one that he often touts on the title pages of his publications) is drawn on by Marston to indicate his intellectual superficiality, when Posthaste absurdly defines himself as: "A

Gentleman's Gentleman, that hath a cleane shirt on, with some learning" (3:263). Riding the tide of prosperity that prevails at the beginning of the play, Gulch voices the actors' pleasure with Posthaste's humble style: "Well fellowes, I never heard happier stuffe,/ heer's no new luxurie or blandishment,/ But plenty of old Englands mother words" (3:260). Drayton had similarly praised the "true method" of Munday's "home­borne stile" in his commendatory poem to Primaleon II. But soon, even the players, who formerly regarded him as 'a Gentleman scholler" (3:263), come to understand that Posthaste's work is a tissue of rhetorical absurdities, and shout him down when he begins to recite: "Our Pro­logue peaceth. . . . "

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15

Gulch. Peaceth? what peaking Pageanter pend that?

Belch. Who but Maister Post-hast.

Gutt. It is as dangerous to read his name at a playe-dore

As a printed bill on a plague dore.

(3:282)

Now even the players are disgusted with Posthaste /Munday, who was also at the time, as Gulch implies, writing civic pageants. Marston' s criti­cism is summarized in the Italian aristocrat Landulpho's rebuke, when the players try to pass off Posthaste's drivel to an elite audience. After being subjected to an odd blend of romance and morality, in a disconti­nuous play fusing Troilus and Cressida and The Prodigal Child, Landulpho explodes:

Most ugly lines and base-browne-paper stuffe

Thus to abuse our heavenly poesie

That sacred off-spring from the brain of Jove,

Thus to be mangled with prophane absurds,

Strangled and chok't with lawlesse bastards words. (2:264)

Even though Marston is interested in making the actors look ridiculous on their own terms, in Histriomastix the quality of a theatrical perfor­mance is primarily a function of the dramatic text upon which it is based, so that that the company's selection of a poet invariably deter­mines the nature of its artistic vision. Posthaste is both the player's choice and a player himself. He is the quintessence of the lowest com­mon denominator of popular taste, and his fate in Histriomastix is inex­tricably tied to that of his fellows.

For all his criticism of Jonson, Marston dearly shows far more respect for the academic poet Chrisoganus than for his foil, the poet-player Posthaste. This dichotomy between the poet-scholar and the poet-player must be factored into any consideration of Chrisoganus' status in the play. In opposition to the usual fare offered by the Elizabethan entertain­ment industry, Chrisoganus advocates a higher standard of value than his culture is generally willing to accept. It is Chrisoganus who distin­guishes "Arte" as a product of sacred knowledge, right reason, and rational control, from the crass commercialism of his age. He gains sym­pathy as he voices the despair of disaffected academics at the end of the sixteenth century who watched others prosper,

…whilst pale Artizans

Pine in the shades of gloomy Academe,

Faint in pursuite of vertue, and quite tierd

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For want of liberall food: for liberal Art,

Give up the goal to sluggish Ignorance. (3:282)

This is a far cry from the moral and technical incompetence of Posthaste. In comparison to Posthaste, Chrisoganus is golden. The literary hierar­chy of Histriomastix exalts its own author Marston over Jonson and Jonson over Munday. Although Marston acknowledges the connection between his representation of Jonson and Guilpin's, between Skialetheia and Histriomastix, his attitude toward Jonson cannot for this reason be entirely reduced to parody, which is only one component in a funda­mentally ambivalent assessment. Marston's attitude toward Munday, on the other hand, is entirely sarcastic. Critics who either equate Chriso­ganus with Posthaste (like Kernan) as being similarly debased, or distin­guish them as polar opposites (as is customarily the case), misread the play. Marston's ambivalent portrait of Chrisoganus is neither complete parody nor unmitigated praise; it falls somewhere between these rigid categories of value. Indeed, what blinds most readers to Chrisoganus' intellectual and moral flaws is what appears to be his exemplary posi­tion in the play as both a humanist scholar, who argues for self-control, and an accomplished playwright, who denounces a popular but com­pletely discredited theater culture. Indeed, when the nobles again seek his assistance at the conclusion of the play, Chrisoganus is still treated as a paragon of spiritual "concord," whom "the heavens have created" (3:296).

That is not to say, of course, that Histriomastix is not hedged with doubts about the ability of Jonson's humanist poetics to reform society. In the central action of the play, Chrisoganus is incapable of morally transforming a nation that resists his rhetoric and according to the view of social history projected in the play's cyclical plot, it is the "humour of the time" and not the moral power of the poet-scholar that determines the nature of human consciousness. Histriomastix is, above all, an anti­acquisitive satire, the main purpose of which is to define the way in which social reality is controlled by a proces of cyclical change that moves in stages, away from Peace (Act I) and Plenty (Act II), through the disruptive phases of Pride and Envy (Act III), and War (Act IV), until, with Poverty (Act V), Peace (Act VI) miraculously returns, and with it the goddess Astrea, who initiates a golden age. According to Marston's version of cultural materialism, Peace inevitably causes Plenty, which in turn encourages the rise of Pride and Envy. Before each of the acts, the time's "humour" is handed on from one reigning deity to another in an allegorical tableau that shifts historical causation away from the individ­ual to the collective spirit of the age. Thus, in an effort to contain Jon­son’s

HISTRIOMASTIX AND THE ORIGIN OF THE POETS' WAR 17

satiric humanism, Marston creates a universe of hard determinism, constructed according to the common medieval notion of an irresistible Wheel of Fortune that controls human experience. Marston's particular variation on this theme is so traditional, in fact, that it can be summa­rized, almost verbatim, by a poem that George Puttenham translates in The Arte of English Poesie (1589) from the late medieval French poet Jean de Mehune.

Peace makes plenty, plenty makes pride; Pride brings quarrel, and quarrel brings war; War brings spoil, and spoil poverty, Poverty patience, and patience peace: So peace brings war, and war brings peace. 20

The one difference between de Mehune's version of history and Marston's, however, is that Marston superimposes a climactic ending, a golden age, inaugurated by the accession, at the inception of Peace's reign in act six, of Queen Elizabeth, who is evoked as the goddess Astrea. "I resign," Peace submits, "What I am is by Thee, my selfe am thine." It is Astrea who now brings in tow the "rites" that will "flour­ish" under the true "Queene of Peace" (3:301). Peace's commendation of Elizabeth/ Astrea voices her hope that time will now stand still for the new political order Elizabeth's masque-like presence occasions and rep­resents:

Mount Emperesse, whose praise for Peace shall mount,

Whose glory, which thy solid vertues wonne,

Shall honour Europe whil'st there shines a Sunne.

. . . live as long

As Time hath life, and Fame a worthy tongue. . . .

All sing Paeans to her sacred worth,

Which none but Angels tongues can farble forth:

Yet sing, for though we cannot light the Sunne,

Yet utmost might hath kinde acceptance wonne. (3:301)

Jonson attempts to depict the analogous power of poet and sovereign in the original conclusion of Every Man Out, when he represents Asper and Elizabeth together on stage. Marston, however, sees the same relation­ship quite differently in Histriomastix. Rather than strengthening the sta­tus of the poet, Marston's political mysticism, associated with the rise of Astrea/Elizabeth, makes the poet-scholar wholly subject to and depen­dent on an external source of power. At best, the poet can only hope to

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be bathed in the influence of the "Sunne" he "cannot light." And when the nobles again return to his instruction it will be a result of the ruling zeitgeist of Astrea, rather than anything Chrisoganus has personally done. The sage can consequently benefit from an age of peace that turns its eyes toward scholarship, but he cannot fix its vision. Marston's politi­cal mysticism contradicts the concept of poetic authority, since the didac­tic program Chrisoganus advocates—based on its desire to teach an art of life—does nothing to bring about the fruition of the reign of Astrea with which Histriomastix triumphantly ends.

IV

The generation of satirists that emerged in the late 1590s—writers like Marston, Jonson, Hall, Donne, Guilpin, Weaver, and Davies—is so homogeneous in its social and educational background that modern crit­ics often treat it as a group that shares a common intellectual orientation undisturbed by essential philosophical disagreement. Analyzed in terms of either Harold Bloom's theory of the anxiety of influence or Rene Girard's discussion of "mimetic rivalry," these satirists are often viewed by modern readers as quarreling with each other only because they were so similar. Writing of Marston's quarrel with Jonson, David Riggs, who avails himself of Girard's notion of a crisis of "Difference," concludes that: "A contemporary [Elizabethan] observer would... have surmised that two men who resembled one another so closely were bound to quarrel. The Elizabethan theory of social order rested on the assumption that two individuals will behave peacefully if and only if they can assign each other to a graduated social hierarchy." 21 There is some merit in this assessment, since it explains how the obsessive ranking of poets in The Scourge of Villanie and Histriomastix is meant to leave the impres­sion that only the author John Marston and; perhaps, his friend Everard Guilpin are worthy of the audience's attention. Both on the page and on the stage Marston sought to increase his an Guilpin's credit at. the expense of the satirists Hall and Jonson. Marston had gained consider­able notoriety for his literary flyting with Hall between 1598 and 1599. Indeed, for their efforts at personal satire Marston and Hall together received one very good and another devastating review. The always enthusiastic Francis Meres saw a healthy exchange of views in the invec­tive they launched against each other since, he argues in Palladis Tamia (1598), it served as a vehicle for verifying and correcting otherwise uncontested philosophical assumptions. It was through this war of truths, Meres maintains, that dogma submits to dialogue:

HISTRIOMASTIX AND THE ORIGIN OF THE POETS' WAR 19

As that ship is endaungered, where all lean to one side, but is in safetie, one leaning one way, and another another way; so the dis­sension of Poets among themselves, doth make them, that they lesse infect their readers. And for this purpose our Satyrists, Hall, [and] the Author of . . . Certain Satyres. . . are very profitable.

Some Elizabethans, however, were terrified by the excessive contention for status that threatened to undermine the very concept of social hierar­chy. This indeed was the way in which the archbishop of Winchester and the bishop of London viewed the controversy between Marston and Hall when, in June of 1599, they ordered a general ban on the publication of epigrams and satires and the confiscation of all copies of The Scourge of Villanie, Skialetheia, and Virgidemiae. They also stipulated that the works of Marston and Guilpin, the instigators of the latest war of words, be publicly burned. O. J. Campbell has argued that the bishops' ban forced both Marston and Jonson to create, in 1599, a kind of dramatic equiva­lent to the outlawed genre of verse satire to express their repressed impulse for criticism.22 This might or might not be the case, since satire continued to be printed despite the ban. It is clear, however, that Marston was, from the start, interested in evaluating his rivals in an aggressive manner, and that he transferred his involvement in "the dis­sension of Poets" from Certaine Satyres and The Scourge of Villanie to Histriomastix, exchanging adversaries—Hall for Jonson—with genres. And while Histriomastix managed to hold the stage without civil or ecclesiastical interference, it was greeted with literary and personal instead of official retaliation. Marston's representation of Jonson as Chrisoganus prompted Jonson not only to parody Marston in Every Man Out, but also physically to assault and rob him (as he twice bragged to Drummond), and to commemorate the event in Epigram LXVIII, on the "Playwright convict of public wrongs," who "Takes private beat­ings" (lines 1-2).

Yet there is a built-in limitation in the concept of the mimetic rivalry of "No Difference" used by Riggs to explain the literary war between Marston and Jonson, since it forces us unduly to minimize the actual ruptures in philosophical thinking that can and did divide writers as similar as Marston, Hall, and Jonson at the end of the sixteenth century. It is, in the final analysis, wrong to conclude that the satirists of the late 1590s were carbon copies of each other who created controversy merely

in order to disguise their similar premises and programs. The prospect of walking in the footsteps of Hall and Jonson seems to have caused Marston deep anxiety, and his own rite of passage took the form of criti­cism of them in verse satire and satirical comedy. But it is his own pecu­liar

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difference in philosophical outlook, as mu h as his need to distin­guish himself from the pack, that conditions his critiques of Hall and Jonson. It is true that the moral drive of Marston 's satire is never entirely obviated, even as it collides with a sense of the impossibility of reform. But what separates Marston from his two rivals is their unequivocal com­mitment to the idea of their own moral and literary authority. Marston viewed Jonson and Hall as possessing a set of values based on right reason and Stoic self-sufficiency, out of which they commanded the authori­ty of punitive satire. And although on occasion he himself assumes this very stance, he was nonetheless capable at other times of rejecting the philosophical certainty predicated by his rivals. "Hall's self-complacen­cy, and the calm confidence with which he assumed the censor's seat," writes Arnold Stein, "were gall to Marston."23 It is in a similar vein of confident self-assertion that Chrisoganus/Jonson describes himself as a paradigm of learning and virtue: "Behold the faire proportion of a man, / Whome heavens have created so compleate' (3:296). This immense self-confidence, so alien to Marston, allows Chrisoganus to turn aside the threat of philosophical skepticism posed by Mavortius, who seeks to drive a wedge between knowledge and the art completely inimical to didactic humanism:

Mavortius.

But if (by Art) as all our Artists say,

There is no reall truth to be attain'd,

Why should wee labour in their loves bestow?

The wisest said: I know I nothing know.

Chrisoganus.

The wisest was a foole for saying soe. (3:249)

After Chrisoganus gives the lie to Socrates, the issue comes to a stale­ mate, and Philarchus, unconvinced by his logocentric argument, gener­ously concedes, "Although I am not satisfied in this, / It doth me good to heare him thus discourse" (3:250). What is diff rent about Marston, as critics have long noticed, is the degree to which his faith in the humanist program of right reason and didactic satire is constantly erased by doubt that leads to a new and critical phase in the development of Renaissance satire, one in which the standard of self-knowledge is replaced by sub­jectivity. If Jonson and Hall grounded their sense of poetic authority on personal conviction and turned their social and literary critiques out­ward upon the world, Marston initiated a second, far more radical, form of satire by turning the scourge upon his rivals and himself, in sado­masochistic abuse that denies the fundamental co ception of a humanist poetics. Who else would write in the margin of his own satire, "Huc usque Xylinum" (up to this point, bombast)? 2 In his first volume,

HISTRIOMASTIX AND THE ORIGIN OF THE POETS' WAR 21

Certaine Satyres, Marston defined himself as a poet by cultivating an oppositional voice of self-incrimination, posited as an answer to Hall's expression of poetic authority:

But since myself am not immaculate,

But many spots my mind doth vitiate,

I'll leave the white roabe, and the bitink rimes

Unto our moderne Satyres sharpest lines. (2:11 -14)

"Beneath the brash bluster of the satires," observes. Davenport, "there lurks a dark pessimistic weariness that falls little short of complete despair."25 It is this condition of doubt about the nature of poetic author­ity that informs not only Marston's acts of self- representation but his ambivalent representation of Jonson as Chrisoganus in Histriomastix. And even if Marston held Jonson in high regard this scruple would have found its way into his critique. It is at these crucial junctures in his writing that Marston embraces the "naturalism" of the Counter-Renais­sance and contradicts the didactic model of his humanist precursors.26 In his movement away from the ideal, Marston consequently created the persona of the snarling satirist, whose vision reflects the dark truth of human inadequacy. Instead of the humanist standards of truth and fame, Marston thus identifies his work with "Opinion," the source of human error, and "Detraction," the subverter of merit. The Scourge of Villanie ends with a prayer "To everlasting Oblivion," a phrase that anticipates the inscription that Marston would late order for his tomb­stone in the Middle Temple church: Oblivioni Sacrum.

What links Marston's critique of Hall in Certain Satyres with his cri­tique of Jonson in Histriomastix is a common questioning of humanist poetics. Indeed, in the satires Marston makes explicit the doubts about literary didacticism that implicitly underlie his depiction of Chriso­ganus. In Satire IV of The Scourge (lines 99-166), for instance, the Aris­totelian proposition that virtue can be acquired through "our will or force" is denied, a position that contradicts one of the basic premises of didactic satire and at the same time leads to the model of historical determinism in Histriomastix. In "Satire VIII: A Cynicke Satyre," the most pessimistic in the volume, Marston begins by assuming the compromised voice of Shakespeare's Machiavellian Richard III: "A Man, a man, a kingdome for a man." The phrasing is from Shakespeare, but the project is that of the cynic Diogenes, who "lit a lamp in broad daylight and said, as he went about, 'I am looking for a man ." 27 Marston proves to be no more successful than Diogenes however, since "Circes charme / Hath turn'd them all to Swine" (lines 4-5). The human condition might

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be so hopeless, Marston ventures, that neither the educated "will" nor the supernatural order of grace shall rectify its distress. If Seneca's Epistles are right, he speculates, and that the "soules of men, from that great soule ensue":

Then sure the slime that from our soules doe flow,

Have stopt those pipes by which it was convai'd,

And now no humane creatures, once disra'd

Of that faire jem.

lines 197-200)

In a recent commentary on this passage Jonathan Dollimore, who fully appreciates the importance of Marston's struggle with Stoicism, captures its Augustinian or Calvinist bias when he writes that "Marston uses a protestant estimate of man to deny the stoic belief in man's rational esti­mate of man." Dollimore, however, takes this argument a step further, beyond what I believe Marston intended, when he states that Marston is here "suggesting also that man is so degenerate that he has no relation to God," and that, as a result, he "violates the central premise of Calvinism (or at least jars its most sensitive nerve)."28 On does not have to have a vested interest in vindicating Calvinist doctrine to recognize that Dol­limore's last-minute qualification cannot save is mistaken premise that Marston violates the canons of Protestant self-effacement—not when Marston ends the same satire by literally praying for inspiration, for the sacred "Synderesis" of grace:

Returne, returne, sacred Synderesis,

Inspire our truncks, let not such mud as this

Pollute us still. Awake our lethargy,

Raise us from out our brain-sicke foolerie.

(8: 199-202)

That Jonson associated this concept of "Synderesis," the infusion of inspi­ration or grace, with Marston's theological perspective is indicated by his selection of this wonderfully abstruse word for ridicule in Every Man Out (III.iv.22).29 Marston's thought is clearly not as radical in its implications as Dollimore would have us believe, and modern readers might be disappointed to hear that Marston comes closer to being an anti-Pelagian theologian than a counter-culture materialist. While it is important to see how Marston's satire makes an essential contribution to the emergence of subjectivity in late Renaissance culture, it is equally important to remember that Marston never challenges the notion that there is a supernatural order, the domain of a deus absconditus, control­

HISTRIOMASTIX AND THE ORIGIN OF THE POETS' WAR

23

ling human experience. Jonson knew this full well since he slyly com­ments to Drummond that "Marston wrott his Father in Lawes preach­ings & his Father in Law his Commedies" ( & 5, 1 :138). The unanticipated epiphany of Astrea/Elizabeth at the conclusion of Histriomastix is symbolically equivalent, in terms of the social order, to the "sacred synderesis" that Marston prays for in the Scourge. And it is thus possible to see a progressive exfoliation of Marston's thought (rather than a pattern of rebellion and reformation) that leads from his skepticism about the value of corrective satire in his poetry and drama to his ordination as an Anglican priest in 1609, at the end of his literary career.

There has been a tendency in modem criticism to trivialize the Poets' War by characterizing it as being either a series of personal vendettas, disguised as drama, or a publicity stunt, planned merely to generate a profit by creating a controversy. It would be wrong of course, to exclude either of these two motives as a contributing factor. Mercenary self-­advertisement might be said to be at the root of all careerist activity. Nevertheless, the Poets' War involved so much more than either of these two reductive explanations can adequately account for. Even if we con­sider the plays of the Poets' War as constituting a kind of literary social game, this game nevertheless involved the public reputations of several of the most important writers of the late Elizabethan period. The contro­versy it generated easily spilled over into physical violence, when Jonson not only parodied but also assaulted and robbed Marston for subjecting him to public ridicule. The serious side of the Poets' War is illustrated by the fact that there came a point at which Jonson could no longer sublimate his aggressive rage in drama. But, more importantly, the literary combat of the Poets' War involved basic philosophical issues—a debate on the theory of literature that came into being as a result of Jonson's insistence on a new and dignified status for the poet, based on principles of academic humanism. So that no matter how ad hominem the tone of criticism often became, it continued to be defined in relation to a philosophy of literature Jonson literally represented. As a struggle to establish literary reputations, the Poets' War was consequent­ly both as playful and as serious as the game of literature itself. The stage quarrel thus afforded Marston and Jonson a vehicle for aggressive­ly expressing differences that were already present into in their divergent approaches to questions of literary theory.

In Histriomastix, Chrisoganus reveals not only Marston's divided atti­tude toward Jonson, but more importantly his ambivalence about the satiric movement of which he was a member, and, indeed, his skepti­cism about the didactic value of literature itself. The character of Chriso­ganus therefore supplied him with a vehicle for reflecting on the prob­

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lems facing any self-appointed professor of poetic authority. But in so far as Marston projects his own internal dilemma concerning the value of didactic poetry into the plot of Histriomastix, and in so far as he makes Chrisoganus/Jonson bear the weight of his own objections to late Elizabethan high literary culture, it should not surprise us that Jonson would have resisted being used in this manner. The paradox of Marston's participation in the Poets' War is that he sought to obtain the purchase of glory-intellectual mastery and cultural predominance over Jonson-by philosophically questioning the redemptive value of poetry. At the very moment when Jonson was beginning to advocate the notion of a literary career based on the elevated status of the poet, Marston sought fame by scaling back Jonson's claims. It is for this reason that in the "apologeticall Dialogue" to Poetaster (a play he describes as being written "on" Marston) Jonson complains that he had first been "provoked" (lines 96-98). And it is for this reason that Jonson was justified in rejecting Marston's ambivalent representation of him as Chrisoganus in Histriomastix.

Long Island University

NOTES

The writing of this essay was made possible by grants from the Huntington Library and the Research Committee of C. W. Post College.

1. "Conversations with William Drummond," in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1925-52), 1:140. Quotations from this tran­script and Jonson's plays are derived from this edition. Quotations from Marston's drama are from The Plays of John Marston, E . H. Harvey Wood, 3 vols. (London, 1934-39). Since this edition does not contain line numbers, references will be made to quotations from Marston's plays by volume and page. Marston's satires are quoted from The Poems of John Marston, E . A. Davenport (Liverpool, 1961). I have also used The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge, 1953-61), voLl, for all quotations from Satiromastix. All citations of these works will hereafter be embedded in the text. Hamlet is cited from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston 1974).

2. Richard Simpson, The School of Shakespeare (New York, 1878), 2:4-8, was the first post-Renaissance critic to recognize that the anonymously printed Histriomastix (first issued in 1610) was by Marston. but he missed the mark in viewing Chrisoganus as an authorial self-portrait that inadvertantly includes some of Jonson's characteristics. Fleay, in Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama, 1559-1642 (London, 1891), 2:71, correctly identified Chrisoganus with Jonson, but his assumption that Chrisoganus is wholly complimentary generat­ed a kind of pseudodoxia epidemica.

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Josiah Pennima , in The War of the Theatres (Boston, 1897), 33, accepted Fleay at his word, and from that point onward the matter seemed settled. R. A. Small, in The Stage Quarrel Between Ben Jonson and the So-Called Poetasters (Breslau, 1899; rpt. New York, 196 ), 89, thus writes that "Chrysoganus is evidently intended as a compliment to Jonson," depicting "his ideal literary man." Small was the first critic to censure Jonson for, in effect, not agreeing with modern criticism on this question: "To one that knows the super­sensitivity and irascibility of Jonson's disposition, it will seem no less natural that he received this well-intentioned attempt to represent his virtues upon the stage as a personal affront." There was, Small assures us, "little cause for hostile reaction." E. K. Chambers, in The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford, 1923), 1:381, canon­ized Small's guess that Jonson might have "taken offense at Marston's portrait of him, intended to be complimentary." Herford and Simpson, in their edition of Ben Jonson 0:25), concur that Marston attempted to fashion "the scholastic pedant Chrisoganus into the likeness of the great contemporary chastizer of Ignorance. The portrait was certainly meant to be flattering." The only reason, they explain, that "to modern eyes, and quite probably to those of contempo­raries, it reads like caricature," is that "Marston's bad imitation of Jonson's invective had an air of ridicule" unintended by the author of this "well-meant but irritating act of homage."

Anthony Caputi, in John Marston, Satirist (Ithaca, N. ., 1961), 94-95, defers, without further investigation, to Small, "whose opinion is standard in the mat­ter." Philip Finkelpearl, in John Marston of the Middle Temple (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), 212, similarly insists that "Chrisoganus is a totally admirable figure," although he acknowledges that "it is also easy to understand why Ben might have resented the broad strokes of characterization." George Geckle, in John Marston's Drama: Themes, Images, Sources (Rutherford, N. ., 1980),47, falls in line with a one-dimensional Chrisoganus who "shows Stoic fortitude and wisdom." Anne Barton, in Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge, 1984) 59, agrees that "There is a good deal here to suggest a portrait of Jonson as he wished to be seen" and that Chrisoganus "is evidently intended as a compliment to Jonson." David Riggs, in Ben Jonson, A Life (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 79, repeats this well-worn formula.

3. "John Marston's Play Histriomastix," Modern Language Quarterly, 19 0958): 137-38, and chapter 4, "The Satirist in the Theater," of The Cankered Muse (New Haven, 1959), 143-49. Because Kernan exaggerates some of Chrisoganus' flaws his position should be tempered in reference to the writing of his adversaries. Although I believe that the question of whether or not Histriomastix was revised cannot be successfully answered, I agree with Kernan that the play is most prof­itably considered from the perspective of its completion by Marston at the end of the sixteenth century.

4. Riggs, Ben Jonson, A Life, 79.

5. Geckle, John Marston's Drama, 47.

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6. Skialetheia, Or A Shadow of Truth, in Certain Epigrams and Satyres, ed. D. Allen Carroll (Chapel Hill, 1974), 47-48. Guilpin might have discovered the name "Chrisoganus," as Carroll notes (118), in Cicero's atta ck on the greedy freedman of Pro Roscio; in Juvenal's use of it to describe a famous singer in Satires VI and VII; and in Martial's Epigrams, III. 42. Geckle mentions these sources for the name "Chrisoganus" in Histriomastix, but since he neglects Guilpin, fails to be convincing (John Marston's Drama, 34 and 48n).

7. See Rabelais and His World, translated by Helene Bloomington, Ind., 1984),303-67.

8. Jonson read Skialetheia and borrowed from it: taking the name "Captain Tucca," used in Poetaster, from its "Satyre Preludium.. ," lines 25-34. In the intro­duction to Satiromastix, Dekker identifies "Tucca" as a parody of a contemporary—Captain Jack Hannam (lines 29-35).

9. Even before Satiromastix was written, Marston had developed this theme in What You Will, where his caricature of Jonson, Lampatho Doria, is said to be a "nasty taber-faced" scoundrel (2:249) and a "Pole-head" (2:248), or tadpole, with a big dark head and bulging eyes. Late in the seventeenth century, John Aubrey states that Jonson had not always been plagued by his complexion and that he

"was (or rather had been) of a clear and fair skin," only to add that he "had one eie lower than t' other, and bigger, like Clun the Player, perhaps he begott Clun." See Aubrey's Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (Lon on, 1949), 178.

10. Skialetheia, ed. Carroll, 8. After the death of his father, Guilpin's mother Thomasin married William Guarsi, Marston's uncle, on 29 June 1592. There are numerous links between the Guilpins and the Marstons from this date that are sum­marized by R. E. Brettle in "Everard Guilpin and John Marston (1574-1634)," Review of English Studies, 16 (1965): 396-99, and by D. A en Carroll in his introducto­ry chapter on "Everard Guilpin: Literary Life and Relations" in his edition of Skialetheia, 5-12. Verbal and conceptual affinities found n Skialetheia, Certaine Satyres, and The Scourge of Villanie are also documented in Carroll' s notes. Guilpin's alliance with Marston against Jonson begins with the latter's us of the name "Chrisoganus" in Histriomastix. It is also possible that Marston's interlocutor Ned Planet, who tri­umphs over the Jonsonian alazon Brabant Senior in Jack Drum's Entertainment (1600), recalls Guilpin, whom Marston continually addresses s "Ned" in "Satyra Nova." What is more, Arlice Davenant, in "The Quarrel of the Satirists," Modern Language Review, 37 (1942): 123-30, shows that Marston, Guilpin ,and Jonson were pilloried together as, respectively, the "Satirist," "the Epigrammatist," and the "Humourist," by W. I. (probably John Weever) in The Whipping of the Satyre (1601). Jonson's pseudonym comes from the title of his two "humour" plays, Every Man In and Every Man Out (the second of which parodies Marston for the first time, as "Clove"). Guilpin then defended the "Satyrist" (Marston) and the "Epigrammatist" (himself), but would leave the "humourist" to fend for himself, in The Whipper of the Satyre His Pennance (1601), his last publication.

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11. The full sequence of Marston's attack on Hall (and Guilpin's connection with it) from 1598 to 1599 is as follows: (1) Hall censures a group of contemporary poets, not including Marston or Guilpin, in Virgidemiae (1597). (2) Marston criti­cizes Hall throughout Certaine Satyres (1598), but especially in "Reactio," a poem that mocks Hall's literary opinions. (3) Guilpin, in Skialetheia (1598), states that although some praise Hall-"The double volum'd Satyre" - for "his Rods in pisse" [the English equivalent to the Latin word "vigidemiae"], "Yet other-some, who would his credite crack / Have clap'd Reactioes Action on his back" (lines 93-96). (4) Marston informs readers (The Scourge, "Satyra Nova," lines 46-49) that Hall had caused an epigram characterizing him as a dog who needed castrating "to bee pasted to the latter page" of every copy of Marston's Ovidian narrative Pigmalion (bound up with Certaine Satyres) that "came to the stacioners of Cambridge." (5) Marston responds to this provocation in "Satyra Nova," a poem addressed to Guilpin, which he adds to the 1599 edition of The Scourge, pub­lished before the bishops' ban in June of that year. Guilpin had attended Emmanuel College, Cambridge, with Joseph Hall, and has, as a result, been sus­pected of supplying Marston with background for his parody.

12. I thus accept, as most probable, the theory that Histriomastix was undertaken by Marston for the revival of the Boys of St. Paul's in November of 1599. The date of winter 1598, proposed by Philip Finkelpearl in "Histrio-Mastix as an Inns of Court Play: A Hypothesis," Huntington Library Quarterly, 29 (1966): 223-34, is, I believe, untenable. This date for Histriomastix is, among other things, too early for a play that Jonson answered, according to Finkelpearl, a year later, in Every Man Out. Although a point-by-point refutation of Finkelpearl's hypothesis is beyond the scope of this essay, one of his major premises—that "the identifica­tion of Chrisoganus with Jonson" provides a "reason for believing" that Marston wrote Histriomastix for the Middle Temple in 1598 is directly relevant to the subject at hand. Finkelpearl conjectures that in 1598 "Marston was the most devoted disciple Jonson had, and other members of the Middle Temple were very close friends. . . . Within such friendly surroundings, an admiring portrait seems entirely fitting, but if we transfer the performance to the Children of Paul's, we have to imagine a rather unlikely situation in which a new dramatic enterprise begins with an idealized piCture of a prominent playwright of a rival company. . . . In short, the more likely the identification of Chrisoganus and Jonson, the more probable it is that Histrio-Mastix was designed for the Middle Temple" (233). Finkelpearl is inaccurate in assuming (based on H & S, 1:24) that there is any evidence to suggest that Marston was Jonson's "most devoted disci­ple" in 1598. But the fact that Marston's portrait of Jonson as Chrisoganus is ambivalent rather than idealized does nonetheless strengthen the theory that Histriomastix was indeed produced by a rival company, by the Children of Paul's (the troupe with which Marston was affiliated in 1599), as a rejoinder to Every Man Out, Jonson's latest offering for the Chamberlain's Men, acted at the new Globe Theatre in the last quarter of the year.

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That Histriomastix was written after Every Man Out, and that in Every Man Out Jonson added an attack on Marston to his already completed play, has been pre­viously urged by G. B. Harrison, in Elizabethan Plays and Players (London, 1940), 254-55, and W. David Kay, in Ben Jonson, Horace, and the Poetomachia (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1968),204-5. Both of these critics reason that Jonson intend­ed his parody of Histriomastix only to appear in the first quarto of Every Man

Out. Based on his comparison of the two plays, Kay consequently states that "the assumption that Histrio-Mastix is earlier than Every Man Out. . . should be aban­doned," adding that "the most plausible explanation of the satire in Clove's speech is that it was inserted before the publication of the play on 8 April 1600. The title page. announced that the play contained 'more than hath been Publickely Spoken or Acted.' Since Clove and Orange are explicitly said to be 'meere strangers to the whole scope of our play' (IILi.17-18), their part was probably a late addition included primarily for the purpose of ridiculing Marston." Kay, however, overlooks the fact that before the end of 1599 Dekker had already imi­tated Jonson's description of Clove in the stationer's shop (IILi.29-33) and had repeated one of his Marstonisms-the strange word "synderesis" (III.iv.22)-in Patient Grissil (ILi.19-23 and IIj.59), registered on 29 December 1599. These echoes are part of a pattern of imitations of Every Man Out in Dekker's play. Since Jonson's play had not yet been printed at that time, Dekker must therefore have seen the Clove interpolation acted as part of Every Man Out before the end of the year. Whatever material Jonson specifically added to the first quarto of Every Man Out did not consequently include his initial answer to Histriomastix, which had already been added in a prior expansion of the play's script. Jonson used the same procedure in his almost contemporary parody of Anthony Munday as "Antonio Balladino," which he inserted into the performance script of The Case Is Altered (I.ii) long before it was published. When Jonson states in the "apologeticall Dialogue" to Poetaster that during the course of "three yeeres, / they did provoke me with their petulant stiles / On every stage" (lines 96-97), he is thinking inclusively of an affair that actually extended over a period of only two years, which began with Histriomastix in 1599, continued through Jack Drum's Entertainment in 1600, and terminated with What You Will and Satiromastix in 1601.

13. The significance of Jonson's "comical satires" as part of his bid to establish a literary reputation as a dramatist in the public theater has been effectively argued by W. David Kay in "The Shaping of Ben Jonson's Career: A Re-examina­tion of Facts and Problems," Modern Philology, 67 (1970): 224-37.

14. Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (Berkeley, 1983), 102, and Riggs, Ben Jonson, A Life, 67-68.

15. Dryden, An Essay on Dramatick Poesy, in The Works of John Dryden, ed. Samuel Monk (Berkeley, 1971), 17:21, continues: "you track him every where in their Snow: If Horace, Lucan, Petronius Arbiter, Seneca, and Juvenal, had their own from

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him, there are few serious thoughts which are new in him; you will pardon me therefore if I presume he lov'd their fashion when he wore their cloaths." In The Scourge of Villanie, Marston had censured the close imitation and even the trans­lation of classical models, defying both classical precedent and those critics who note that his satires are in "Persius' vein" and reflect the "crabbed strain" of Juvenal and Horace (even though his poems do reflect their influence). These claims of imitation, according to Marston, are an "indignity" to his "respectless free-bred poesy." Years later, in his address "To the Generall Reader" prefacing Sophonisba, Marston would blast Sejanus (a play he had formerly praised in an epigram prefixed to the published version) in deference to his own freedom from slavish imitation: "To transcribe Authors, quote authorities, & translate Latin prose orations into English blank-verse, hath in this subject beene the least aime of my studies."

Richard C. Newton, in "The (Re-)lnvention of the Book," Classic and Cavalier, Essays on Jonson and the Sons of Ben, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Pittsburg, 1982), 39-40, explains that Jonson adopts "not only details but the associated classical concepts themselves" and that he "imagines a reader whose readings are philological and historiographic," concluding that "Jonson's allusions, tied so specifically to both original form and original content, insist on themselves and tie his work to the classics, rather in the way that the classics are necessarily tied to each other by the tissue of cross-reference created by centuries of editorial work"

16. After pleading benefit of clergy (having proven that he could read Latin), Jonson was branded on the thumb with "the Tyburn T" and required to forfeit his possessions as punishment for the manslaughter which resulted from his duel on 22 September 1598. The indictment against Jonson was first printed in The Athenaeum, 6 March 1886, 337-38.

17. S. Schoenbaum, "The Precarious Balance of John Marston," PMLA, 67 (1952): 1069-78.

18. This quotation appears in Munday's dedication of Gerileon of England, Book II, which excuses his delay in translating the work Quoted from Celeste Turner, Anthony Mundy: An Elizabethan Man of Letters (Berkeley, 1928),92.

19. Turner, Anthony Mundy, 59. My analysis has been guided by Turner's com­ments on Histriomastix in her chapter on "Antonio Balladino," 121-31. Turner updated some of her findings in "Young Anthony Mundy Again," Studies in Philology, 56 (1959): 150-68. See also, Mark Eccles' discussion of "Anthony Mundy," Studies in English Renaissance Drama, ed. J. W. Bennett, Oscar Cargill, and Vernon Hall, Jr. (New York, 1959),95-105.

20. Quoted by Caputi, John Marston, Satirist, 83.

21. Riggs, Ben Jonson, A Life, 79. A similar explanation is offered by George E. Rowe in Distinguishing Jonson: Imitation, Rivalry, and the Direction of a Dramatic

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Career (Lincoln, Nebr., 1988), 20, who states that during he Renaissance "the intensity of competition" between co-rivals "increases the more closely they are linked (hence, for example, Jonson's focus on Marston in the War of the Theaters)." Rowe cites Girard's statement in Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore, 1977),49, that "Order, peace, and fecundity depend on cultural distinctions: it is not these distinctions but the loss of them that gives birth to fierce rivalries."

22. O. J. Campbell, Comicall Satyre and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida (San Marino, Calif., 1938), 1.

23. Arnold Stein, "The Second English Satirist," Modern Language Review, 38 (1943): 274.

24. This appears as an annotation in Certaine Satyres, 5:1

25. Davenport is quoted from his introduction to The Poems of John Marston, 17.

26. Hallett Smith, Elizabethan Poetry (Ann Arbor, 1968), 242, writes that "Marston does not have, like Hall, a set of values based upon academic life, upon ancient simplicity and decency, and upon a moral earnestness which wished to correct the faults visible in a changing society." What I find an interesting conflict in Marston's poetry is nevertheless seen as a defect by Lynette McGrath in "John Marston's Mismanaged Irony: The Poetic Satires," Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 18 (1976): 393-408.

27. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks (Cambridge, Mass., 1958),2:43.

28. Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy (Chicago, 1986), 167.

29. For an analysis of the connection between this theological concept, usually spelled "synteresis," and the Christian mystical tradition, based on the neopla­tonic notion of a divine spark, see Caputi, John Marston, Satirist, 59-60.