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 1599), the satirical urge had no other remaining outlet than the stage. The resulting controversy, which unfolded between 1599 and 1602, involved the playwright Ben Jonson on one side and his rivals John Marston and Thomas Dekker (with Thomas Middleton as an ancillary combatant) on the other. The role Shakespeare played in the conflict, if any, has long been a topic of dispute among scholars.

The least disputed facts of the matter yield a schema like this:

Apparently Jonson and Marston later came to terms and even collaborated with George Chapman on the play Eastward Hoe in 1605. That play offended King James with its anti-Scottish satire, a part apparently written by Marston. While Marston evaded capture, Jonson and Chapman ended up in jail as a result.

Shakespeare probably alludes to The War of the Theatres in a scene between Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern:

Scholars differ over the true nature and extent of the rivalry behind the Poetomachia. Some have seen it as a competition between theatre companies rather than individual writers, though this is a minority view. It has even been suggested that the playwrights involved had no serious rivalry and even admired each other, and that the "War" was a self-promotional publicity stunt, a "planned ... quarrel to advertise each other as literary figures and for profit." Most critics see the Poetomachia as a mixture of personal rivalries and serious artistic concerns—"a vehicle for aggressively expressing differences...in literary theory...[a] basic philosophical debate on the status of literary and dramatic authorship."

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