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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 March 2011
JONSON AND HORACE
In Poetaster, or The Arraignment (1602), Jonson satirizes his own society in a setting that is simultaneously Augustan Rome and contemporary London. As he explains in an ‘Apologetical Dialogue’ appended to the play in the 1616 Folio:
[I] therefore chose Augustus Caesar's times,
When wit and arts were at their height in Rome,
To show that Virgil, Horace, and the rest
Of those great master spirits did not want
Detractors then, or practicers against them.
And by this line (although no parallel)
I hoped at last they would sit down and blush.
The characters include Augustus Caesar, Maecenas, the poets Horace, Virgil, Ovid, Tibullus, and Propertius, and the emperor's daughter Julia, all historical figures, together with a number of invented characters, objects of satire, who despite their Roman names, are plainly Londoners: the malicious informer Lupus, the parasite Captain Tucca, and Chloe, the social-climbing wife of the city merchant Albius. Crispinus and Demetrius, the bad poets or poetasters of the title, are both generic, representative figures and, more specifically, Jonson's contemporaries and rivals Marston and Dekker. These two writers saw the play as slanderous and responded by attacking Jonson in what has come to be known as ‘the War of the Theatres’.
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