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The Peace of the Poetomachia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

John J. Enck
John J. Enck*
Affiliation:
University of WisconsinMadison 6
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Extract

The Poetomachia, no matter how explained, embarrasses nearly everyone now working with Elizabethan drama. The term itself sounds like a coinage which a nineteenth-century crank lifted from some minor essayist who copied Bacon or Burton—“World, I was once resolu'd to bee round with thee, because I know tis thy fashion to bee round with euery bodie: but the winde shifting his point, the Veine turn'd: yet because thou wilt sit as Iudge of all matters … I care not much if I make description (before thy Vniuersality) of that terrible Poetomachia, lately commenc'd” et cetera—and out of it coaxed a provincial philosophy. Disturbing to some eyes and naïve to others, this Victorian heirloom, like a former source of innocent merriment which any amateur psychoanalyst can tell screens a neurosis or like great-grandfather's waste tract which never yielded its ore, serves chiefly as an ornate tribute to misapplied ingenuity. Contriving chimeras in a fantastic realm between the Globe stage and the Mermaid hearth or searching for the key to release beleaguered playwrights from dramatis personae bothers equally scholars who attempt to reconstruct and critics who seek to renovate. Literary historians alone cannot drop the romantic fiction with impunity, but no one blames them for relegating it to a footnote. Reviewers of the Variorum Troilus and Cressida dutifully listed the aspect among the many surveyed or begrudged the three pages out of six hundred which the volume allocated it. Shortly after one group established the neutrality of Shakespeare's supposed foray, another, through several monographs, dismissed Jonson's and Marston's (and Dekker's and everyone else's) hostility beyond the sniping in Poetaster and Satiromastix. To a backward glance peace or, rather, the absence of war may reign.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 77 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1962 , pp. 386 - 396
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1962

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References

1 Thomas Dekker, Dramatic Works, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge, Eng., 1953 ff.; 4 vols.), i, 309. To simplify citations, throughout this paper references to plays, after the edition is identified, appear in the text. Matter from the play proper is given by act and scene in Roman numerals, line(s) in Arabic. Material from prologues or epilogues is cited by the page only, except where the edition has several volumes; then the volume appears in Roman and the page in Arabic numerals.

2 Reviews by Robert Adger Law, JEGP, liii (1954), 110–114; and Alice Walker, RES, n.s. v (1954), 288–291.

3 Review by M. A. Shaaber, SQ, iv (1953), 171–181.

4 Ralph W. Berringer, “Jonson's Cynthia's Revels and the War of the Theatres,” PQ, xxii (1943) 1–22; Ernest William Talbert, “The Purpose and Technique of Jonson's Poetaster,” SP, xlii (1945), 225–252.

5 Abbie Findlay Potts, “Cynthia's Revels, Poetaster and Troilus and Cressida,” SQ, v (1954), 297–302; William T. Hastings, “A Survey of Shakespeare Scholarship in 1954,” SQ, vi (1955), 130–131; H. David Gray and Percy Simpson, “Shakespeare or Heminge? A Rejoinder and a Surrejoinder,” MLR, xlv (1950), 148–149.

6 Millar MacLure, “Shakespeare and the Lonely Dragon,” UTQ, xxiv (Jan. 1955), 109–120.

7 Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions (New York, 1952).

8 Henryk Zbierski, Shakespeare and the “War of the Theatres” (Poznań, 1957).

9 Wilfred T. Jewkes, Act Division in Elizabethan and Jacobean Plays (Hamden, Conn., 1958).

10 C. H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson, Ben Jonson (Oxford, 1925 ff.; 11 vols.), i, 148; cf. n. 1.

11 Moody E. Prior, “The Elizabethan Audience and the Plays of Shakespeare,” MP, xlix (Nov. 1951), 101–123.

12 Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions, p. 119.

13 John Russell Brown, “The Interpretation of Shakespeare's Comedies: 1900–1953,” Shakespeare Survey 8 (Cambridge, 1955), pp. 11–12.

14 G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire, 4th ed. (London, 1949), pp. 71–72; cf. Winifred M. T. Nowottny, “‘Opinion’ and ‘Value’ in Troilus and Cressida,” Essays in Criticism, iv (1954), 282–296.

15 A. S. Knowland, “Troilus and Cressida,” SQ, x (1959), 363.

16 Wilbur D. Dunkel, “Shakespeare's Troilus,” SQ, ii (1951), 334.

17 Aerol Arnold, “The Hector-Andromache Scene in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida,” MLQ, xiv (1953), 335–340.

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19 William R. Bowden, “The Human Shakespeare and Troilus and Cressida,” SQ, viii (1957), 172; cf. Brian Morris, “The Tragic Structure of Troilus and Cressida,” SQ, x (1959), 481–491.

20 William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, ed. Alice Walker (Cambridge, 1957), p. [lix]. This page does not appear in William Shakespeare, Complete Works, ed. George Lyman Kittredge (Boston, 1936) to which all ensuing Shakespeare citations refer; cf. n. 1. Cf. Robert Kimbrough, “The Origins of Troilus and Cressida: Stage, Quarto, and Folio,” PMLA, lxxvii (June 1962), 194–199.

21 William Witherle Lawrence, Shakespeare's Problem Comedies (New York, 1931), p. 172.

22 Oscar James Campbell, Shakespeare's Satire (New York, 1943), p. 103.

23 Alvin Kernan, The Cankered Muse (New Haven, 1959), p. 197.

24 E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's Problem Plays (Toronto, 1949), p. 51.

25 Robert K. Presson, Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida & the Legends of Troy (Madison, Wis., 1953).

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27 Hyder E. Rollins, “The Troilus-Cressida Story from Chaucer to Shakespeare,” PMLA, xxv (1917), 383–429.

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29 John Berryman, “Shakespeare at Thirty,” HudR, vi (Summer 1953), 175–203; William Empson, “Hamlet When New,” SR, lxi (1953), 15–42; 185–205.

30 Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art (Madison, Wis., 1954), p. 366.

31 Marvin T. Herrick, Tragicomedy, Ill. Studies in Lang. and Lit., xxxix (Urbana, 1955).

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34 W. Schrickx, Shakespeare's Early Contemporaries (Antwerp, 1956).

35 Robert C. Elliott, The Power of Satire (Princeton, 1960).

36 Charles Read Baskervill, English Elements in Jonson's Early Comedy, Reprint of Univ. of Texas Bull., 178 (Austin, 1911).

37 Oscar James Campbell, Comicall Satyre and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida (San Marino, Calif., 1938).

38 William Elton, “Shakespeare's Portrait of Ajax in Troilus and Cressida,” PMLA, lxiii (1948), 744–748.

39 The Three Parnassus Plays, ed. J. B. Leishman (London, 1949), p. 337. (The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus, iv.iii.1769–73).

40 Jonas A. Barish, Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy (Cambridge, 1960), pp. 126–128.

41 Bernard Spivack, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil (New York, 1958).

42 Johnstone Parr, Tamburlaine's Malady (University, Ala., 1953), pp. 3–23.

43 Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting (Cambridge, 1953, 2 vols.), i, 141.

44 Patrick Cruttwell, The Shakespearean Moment (London, 1954), pp. 1–38.

45 David Lloyd Stevenson, The Love-Game Comedy (New York, 1946); Franklin M. Dickey, Not Wisely but too Well (San Marino, Calif., 1957).

46 Theodore Spencer, Shakespeare and the Nature of Man, 2nd ed. (New York, 1949), p. 111.

47 John Dryden, Dramatic Works, ed. Montague Summers (London, 1931 ff.; 6 vols.), v, 12; cf. Bertrand Evans, Shakespeare's Comedies (Oxford, 1960), pp. 167–185.

48 William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London, 1935), p. 34.

49 Johannes Kleinstück, “Ulysses' Speech on Degree as Related to the Play of Troilus and Cressida,” Neophilologus, xliii (1959), 60–63.

50 Paul M. Kendall, “Inaction and Ambivalence in Troilus and Cressida,” English Studies in Honour of James Southall Wilson, ed. Fredson Bowers, Univ. of Virginia Studies, iv (1951), 144.

51 L. C. Knights, Some Shakespearean Themes (London, 1959), p. 82; cf. D. A. Traversi, An Approach to Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (New York, 1956), pp. 63–81.

52 I. A. Richards, Speculative Instruments (Chicago, 1955), p. 209.

53 William Arrowsmith, intro. to The Satyricon of Petronius (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1959), pp. xi-xii.

54 Jean Giraudoux, La Guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu, Théâtre Complet, vi (Paris, 1946), 131.

55 Robert J. Nelson, Play within a Play (New Haven, 1958), pp. 1–35.

56 Hamish F. G. Swanston, “The Baroque Element in Troilus and Cressida,” Durham University Journal, n.s. xix (Dec. 1957), 14–23.

57 John Simon, “Theatre Chronicle,” HudR, xiii (Winter, 1960–61), 588.

58 Wylie Sypher, Rococo to Cubism in Art & Literature (New York, 1960), p. 286.