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COPYRIGHT 2003 Modern Humanities Research Association
Shakespeare & the Poets' War. By JAMES P. BEDNARZ. New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press. 2001. x + 334 pp. $49.50 (pbk $19). ISBN 0-231-12242-X (pbk 0-231-12243-8).
The year 2001 witnessed the 400th anniversary of the 'terrible Poetomachia', in which Jonson, Marston, and Dekker were supposed to have satirically 'berayed' each other, and Shakespeare is said by the Cambridge students to have given Jonson a purge. Opinions on the 'war' differ sharply today. While Bednarz devotes this book to its importance, Rosalynd Lander Knudson exhorted scholars to regard the war against satirism as a myth (Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare's Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)). Are we witnessing a terrible 'scholastomachia'?
Bednarz is convinced that the Poets' War began in 1599 with Jonson defining himself as Shakespeare's opposite and ended two years later with Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, in which the 'purge' was the depiction of Ajax as Jonson. Hence, he also takes the view that Elizabethan theatre was highly competitive (p. 2), instead of being based on guild-inspired fraternity (Knudson's view)
The aim of the author is to present 'the first comprehensive account' of the Poets' War 'as a crisis of legitimation, a literary civil war during which Jonson's vanguard project clashed with the skepticism of Marston, Shakespeare, and Dekker, who literally laughed him off the stage' (p. 3). Jonson's project was the claim 'that he alone possessed a credible form of poetic authority, based on neoclassical standards that demolished his rivals'...
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