ABSTRACT
Jay Simons characterizes the ‘War of the Theatres’, or ‘Poetomachia’ as Thomas Dekker called it, as a display of “personal attacks and professional criticism that Ben Jonson, John Marston, and Dekker levelled against each other”. The first Parnassus play, The Pilgrimage to Parnassus, appears to have been written in three days before being performed at the Christmas or New Year’s revels 1598–1599. The second play, The Return from Parnassus, Pt. 1, picks up the story seven years later with Philomusus and Studioso, now as scholars, fortuitously meeting Ingenioso again. In October 1598, “William Shakespeare” was named on a certificate compiled by the London tax commissioners as living in St. Helens Bishopsgate, near Shoreditch, while having defaulted on paying 13 shillings and four pence in tax. Ben Jonson’s Epigrams were largely written between 1598 and 1601 while the ‘War of the Theatres’ was still raging.
