ABSTRACT
The exact dimensions of this quarrel are never likely to be known. Several scholars at the end of the nineteenth century, notably Small and Penniman, attempted to tease from the plays of Jonson and Marston supposed portraits of each other and of their contemporaries, but the process is an unsatisfactory one. 1 Read today, the plays rarely seem as preoccupied with the quarrel as these critics were. In assessing the
value of each play as evidence of contemporary stage practice or attitudes to playing, it is difficult to determine how far the individual dramatist is concerned to pillory particular opponents, and how far his interest is rather in traditional forms of invective and in loyalty to his own imaginative fiction.
