Publisher's Synopsis
The Poetaster is a late Elizabethan stage play, a satire written by Ben Jonson, and first performed in 1601. 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 of 1599-1601. It is widely accepted among scholars and critics that the character of Horace in The 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 and Shakespeare - 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 The 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 The Poetaster, other Jonson works, and plays by other authors in the first years of the 17th century.
