ABSTRACT
Every Man out of his Humour had been designed to elevate Jonson's claim to high seriousness as both writer and thinker. But received by his fellow dramatists on an altogether more personal level, it had triggered off the sequence of satiric assault and retaliation which literary historians have come to call the 'War of the Theatres' or the 'Stage Quarrel' . 1 In the blast and counter-blast of insulting dramatic caricatures, Jonson found himself isolated and quite literally outplayed. His defeat in the 'War' was therefore nothing less than a stinging humiliation. But it was not experienced as an artistic rebuff. On the contrary it intensified his determination, expressed in the Apologetical Dialogue, 'to come forth worth the ivy, or the bays', to rise like the phoenix and confound his scoffing enemies and unappreciative public with the skill of his craft and the might of his art. For Jonson continued to see himself both as the guardian of the highest traditional standards, and as a pioneer of all that was new in the drama, unaware or unheedful of the inherent contradictions between these two positions. But he accepted that he had taken his programme of reform as far as it could proceed through 'comical satire' . The withdrawal from the public stage to sing 'high and aloof' after the completion of Poetaster ushered in a sabbatical of rest and retrenchment-apart from the play Richard Crookback, proposed to Henslowe in 1602 but otherwise unknown and either lost, unfinished, or unwritten, Jonson wrote nothing of substance for upwards of two years.
