![Ben Jonson, Poetaster (1602)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Ben_Jonson%2C_Poetaster_%281602%29.jpg)
''Poetaster'' is a late
Elizabethan
The Elizabethan era is the epoch in the Tudor period of the history of England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603). Historians often depict it as the golden age in English history. The symbol of Britannia (a female personifi ...
satirical
Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, often with the intent of shaming or e ...
comedy
Comedy is a genre of fiction that consists of discourses or works intended to be humorous or amusing by inducing laughter, especially in theatre, film, stand-up comedy, television, radio, books, or any other entertainment medium. The term o ...
written by
Ben Jonson
Benjamin "Ben" Jonson (c. 11 June 1572 – c. 16 August 1637) was an English playwright and poet. Jonson's artistry exerted a lasting influence upon English poetry and stage comedy. He popularised the comedy of humours; he is best known for t ...
that was first performed in
1601
This Epoch (reference date)#Computing, epoch is the beginning of the 400-year Gregorian leap-year cycle within which digital files first existed; the last year of any such cycle is the only leap year whose year number is divisible by 100.
Jan ...
. The play formed one element in the back-and-forth exchange between Jonson and his rivals
John Marston and
Thomas Dekker in the so-called ''Poetomachia'' or
War of the Theatres The War of the Theatres is the name commonly applied to a controversy from the later Elizabethan theatre; Thomas Dekker termed it the ''Poetomachia''.
Because of an actual ban on satire in prose and verse publications in 1599 (the Bishops' Ban of ...
of 1599–1601.
''Poetaster'' was entered into the
Stationers' Register
The Stationers' Register was a record book maintained by the Stationers' Company of London. The company is a trade guild given a royal charter in 1557 to regulate the various professions associated with the publishing industry, including print ...
on 21 December 1601, and was first published in
quarto
Quarto (abbreviated Qto, 4to or 4º) is the format of a book or pamphlet produced from full sheets printed with eight pages of text, four to a side, then folded twice to produce four leaves. The leaves are then trimmed along the folds to produc ...
in
1602
Events January–June
* January 3 – Battle of Kinsale: The English defeat Irish rebels and their Spanish allies. (The battle happens on this date according to the Gregorian calendar used by the Irish and Spanish but on Thursday, 24 Dec ...
by the bookseller Matthew Lownes. The title page of the first edition states that the play was performed by the
Children of the Chapel
The Children of the Chapel are the boys with unbroken voices, choristers, who form part of the Chapel Royal, the body of singers and priests serving the spiritual needs of their sovereign wherever they were called upon to do so. They were overseen ...
, one of the companies of
boy actors popular at the time. The play was next published in the first folio collection of Jonson's works (
1616). A prefatory note to the folio text identifies the main actors in the 1601 production as
Nathan Field
Nathan Field (also spelled Feild occasionally; 17 October 1587 – 1620) was an English dramatist and actor.
Life
His father was the Puritan preacher John Field, and his brother Theophilus Field became the Bishop of Llandaff. One of his brothe ...
,
John Underwood, Salomon Pavy,
William Ostler
William Ostler (died 16 December 1614) was an actor in English Renaissance theatre, a member of the King's Men, the company of William Shakespeare.
Ostler started out as a boy player in the Children of the Chapel troupe; he was cast in their 1 ...
, Thomas Day, and Thomas Marton. The quarto and folio texts both supply subtitles, with slight variants: in the quarto, the title is ''Poetaster or The Arraignment,'' and in the folio, ''Poetaster, Or His Arraignment.''
The principal character in the play is
Ovid
Pūblius Ovidius Nāsō (; 20 March 43 BC – 17/18 AD), known in English as Ovid ( ), was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a contemporary of the older Virgil and Horace, with whom he is often ranked as one of the th ...
.
It is widely accepted among scholars and critics that the character of
Horace
Quintus Horatius Flaccus (; 8 December 65 – 27 November 8 BC), known in the English-speaking world as Horace (), was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus (also known as Octavian). The rhetorician Quintilian regarded his ' ...
in ''Poetaster'' represents Jonson himself, while Crispinus, who vomits up a pretentious and bombastic vocabulary, is Marston, and Demetrius Fannius is Dekker. Individual commentators have attempted to identify other characters in the play with historical and literary figures of the era, including
George Chapman
George Chapman (Hitchin, Hertfordshire, – London, 12 May 1634) was an English dramatist, translator and poet. He was a classical scholar whose work shows the influence of Stoicism. Chapman has been speculated to be the Rival Poet of Shak ...
and
Shakespeare
William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's nation ...
— though these arguments have not been accepted by the scholarly consensus.
It is generally argued that the play is more than a mere venting of personal spleen against two rivals; rather, Jonson attempted in ''Poetaster'' to express his views on "the poet's moral duties in society." The play has been considered "an attempt to combine undramatic, philosophical material on good poets with satire on bad poets." Scholars have also traced out a broad range of particular connections between ''Poetaster,'' other Jonson works, and plays by other authors in the first years of the 17th century.
[Logan and Smith, pp. 74, 175-6, 221-2, 313.]
The term
poetaster
Poetaster , like rhymester or versifier, is a derogatory term applied to bad or inferior poets. Specifically, ''poetaster'' has implications of unwarranted pretensions to artistic value. The word was coined in Latin by Erasmus in 1521. It was fir ...
, meaning an inferior poet with pretensions to artistic value, had been coined by
Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (; ; English: Erasmus of Rotterdam or Erasmus;''Erasmus'' was his baptismal name, given after St. Erasmus of Formiae. ''Desiderius'' was an adopted additional name, which he used from 1496. The ''Roterodamus'' wa ...
in 1521. It was used by Jonson in 1600 and then popularised with this play a year later.
References
External links
* Quarto of 1602
scan(Internet Archive) an
transcription(EEBO-TCP)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Poetaster
Plays by Ben Jonson
English Renaissance plays
1601 plays
Cultural depictions of Ovid
Horace
la:Poëtaster