Jonson, Marston, Shakespeare and the Rhetoric of Topicality

The revival of commercial “private” theater by the Children of Paul's in 1599 and the Children of the Chapel in 1600 transformed the culture of playgoing in London at the end of the sixteenth century. It was during this period that John Marston at Paul's and Ben Jonson at Blackfriars attracted attention at these theaters by ridiculing each other personally and denigrating each other's work. In doing so they converted these playhouses into forums for staging ideologically opposed interpretations of drama. Rather than aligning themselves with each other against the “public” theater, as Alfred Harbage had assumed in his influential chapter on “The Rival Repertories” in Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions, Jonson and Marston's satire of each other's work used Paul's and Blackfriars to debate the question of the legitimacy of the drama they staged and the status of the writers who composed it. Their debate on what drama should and should not be constitutes one of the most significant critical controversies in early modern English theater. It constitutes part of the first significant criticism of contemporary drama in English. The point of this essay is to account for how, when Jonson began writing for the Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars in 1600, Marston at Paul's became one of his principal targets through personal invective framed as a series of generalized strictures excoriating the obscenity and plagiarism of contemporary private theater.