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

Publication: Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England

Publication Date: 01-JAN-06

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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)...

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