ORSINO. What’s her history?

VIOLA. A blank, my lord.

(Twelfth Night, 2.4.109-10)

Poetaster was entered on the Stationers’ Register on 21 December 1601 and published the following year by Matthew Lownes, having been performed in 1601 (probably in October or early November) at the Blackfriars Theatre near St Paul’s cathedral. The 1602 title-page offered the play to readers ‘As it hath beene sundry times priuately acted in the Blacke Friers, by the children of her Maiesties Chappell’. ‘Priuately’ means that it was acted at one of the ‘private’ theatres, so called to distinguish them from the ‘public’ theatres of the adult companies like the Chamberlain’s Men (soon to be the King’s Men) and the Lord Admiral’s men. The ‘private’ theatres were open to those who could afford to pay the price of admission, usually six times that of the ‘public’ theatres, and thereby more select and courtly in their clientele. (OED 4 records ‘private’ as distinguished from ‘public’ in the sense of ‘restricted or intended only for the use or enjoyment of particular and privileged persons’ from 1398 onwards.)

Poetaster's 1616 folio title-page provides the further information that the play was ‘Acted, in the yeere 1601. By the then Children of Queene ELIZABETHS Chappell’. This misleadingly named company of boy actors had been founded at the rebuilt Blackfriars Theatre in 1600, as Gabriele Bernhard Jackson points out in her Introduction to the play. Jonson’s The Fountain of Self-Love [i.e. Cynthia’s Revels] in 1600 had been one of their first performances. They were variously known as the children of the Chapel Royal, or, after the death of Queen Elizabeth, as the children of the Queen’s Revels (Queen Anne) and as the Children of Blackfriars. The references in their titles to ‘Queen Elizabeth’s Chapel’ and ‘Chapel Royal’ are owing to the fact that one of the troupe's three directors was in fact the music master of the Chapel Royal boys’ choir and had directed performances by them in the 1580s in the old Blackfriars building – though, in point of fact, no known evidence indicates that any choristers of the Chapel Royal were members of the new troupe.

Unlike the boy chorister-actors of St Paul’s Cathedral, who had turned to social and religious satire in the later 1580s and been closed down in the early 1590s, the genuine Chapel Children of the 1580s seem to have kept to safe subjects. Even so, they faded from the theatrical scene at much the same time as the Paul’s Boys, perhaps displaced by the rising adult troupes and their great popularity in the 1590s. The situation was then quite suddenly reversed around 1600 by the resurrection of Paul’s Boys and establishment of the faux ‘Chapel Children’, the latter now as precociously ready as their rivals to adopt saucy ways of flirting with controversy. Hamlet’s folio-added passage about ‘an eyrie of children, little ayases, that cry out on top of question and are most tyrannically clapped for’t’, proving themselves to be so adept at berattling ‘the common stages’ – i.e. the adult players – that many men of fashion avoid going to plays for fear of becoming the targets of saucy satire (2.2.337-62), seems to indicate how much the rivalry of juvenile and adult companies was the talk of London’s theatre-going set around the time of Cynthia’s Revels and Poetaster.

The kind of satire on view in many of these plays was, to be sure, not the kind of controversy that worried London and courtly authorities most, since it did not venture into potentially seditious views on international relations or religious differences or royal prerogative. Still, one can well imagine the Master of the Revels, who had control over all acting troupes except those of the boys, shaking his head along with his acquaintances at the predictable result of allowing the boys to reopen. As Rosencrantz observes, in Hamlet (2.2.354-6), ‘There was for a while no money bid for argument unless the poet and the player went to cuff in the question’; that is, no company would pay for a new theatrical script unless it pitted the writers for the boys’ companies against the adult actors. See the play introductions to Poetaster and Cynthia’s Revels for information on the notorious Poetomachia or War of the Theatres among Jonson, Dekker, and Marston particularly, and on Henry Clifton’s law suit against the Children of Queen Elizabeth’s Chapel for allegedly having conscripted his son to be a juvenile player under the pretext of royal authorization to draft choristers to be chapel singers.

Under these circumstances, Poetaster predictably created an uproar with its perceived stinging satire on undereducated lawyers, loose-moraled actors, paranoid magistrates, and self-aggrandizing military leaders, to such an extent that it escaped being suppressed solely by the good offices of the barrister Richard Martin, to whom a ‘thankful’ Jonson would dedicate Poetaster in the 1616 folio, insisting as he did so that he was innocent of the charges levelled against him (CWBJ, 2.21). Martin became a member of the Mitre Tavern group of writers and wits to which Jonson also belonged, and had taken charge of the 1597-8 Revels at the Middle Temple, to which Jonson was indebted in writing 5.3 of Poetaster.

The cast list printed in the 1616 folio at the very end of Poetaster speaks of the presenters as ‘the then Children of Queene ELIZABETHS Chappell’, noting further that the ‘principall Comoedians’ were

NAT. FIELD.	IOH. VNDERWOOD.
SAL. PAVY.	WILL. OSTLER.
THO. DAY.	THO. MARTON.

For information on these six boy actors and their subsequent careers on the Elizabethan stage, all of whom but Ostler and Marton had appeared the previous year in Cynthia’s Revels, see the notes to the colophon of Poetaster (CWBJ, 2.180) and ‘Actors, Companies, and Playhouses’ in CWBJ, 1.cxvi-cxxx. The demand for singing roles in Poetaster is fairly extensive, especially for the boys presenting Hermogenes and Crispinus, the latter of whom needed to be able to play a musical instrument as well.

The Apologetical Dialogue printed at the end of the folio text of Poetaster, just before the casting list, was, Jonson informs us, ‘only once spoken upon the stage, and all the answer I ever gave to sundry impotent libels then cast out (and yet some remaining) against me and this play’ (CWBJ, 2.168). The implication is that he had also been forbidden to print this manifesto of self-justification in the 1602 quarto. Indeed, in the space where the ‘Apologetical Dialogue’ would have appeared, the quarto provides the following explanation and complaint:

Here, reader, in place of the epilogue, was meant to thee an apology from the author, with his reasons for the publishing of this book; but, since he is no less restrained than thou deprived of it by authority, he prays thee to think charitably of what thou hast read, till thou mayst hear him speak what he hath written.

The Apologetical Dialogue itself, finally appearing in print in 1616, presents the author on stage, ’discovered at his desk amongst books and papers’, complaining to himself and then to two friends about the malice of his attackers, and insisting that he has used no names in his satirical protest against law, lawyers, actors, and the rest. Whether Jonson might have played the part of the author cannot be known, of course, since a run of stage performances (of which we have no description) took place only once, in 1601-2; but he was not without theatrical experience, and might well have wished to defend himself as dramatist in his own person.

Perhaps nothing is destined to fade into obscurity so quickly as gossip about feisty personal rivalries. Of course, Poetaster has much else to recommend it to Jonson readers, but the play’s reputation is nevertheless inevitably tied to its role in the War of the Theatres. As such, it was destined to receive little subsequent attention on stage. Whereas Every Man In His Humour, Every Man Out of His Humour, and some of Jonson’s other early plays lived on theatrically into succeeding centuries, Poetaster disappeared from the record of performances until 26-7 April of 1916, when William Poel, visionary antiquarian of the English stage, mounted three performances in two venues. The first performance took place on 26 April in the Apothecaries’ Hall, located in Water Lane, Blackfriars, quite close to the original location of the Blackfriars playhouse. Originally a priory for the Dominicans (or Black Friars), the hall served for a time as a residence for Henry Brooke, Lord Cobham until it passed to the crown on his conviction in 1603 for his complicity in a plot to place Arabella Stuart on the English throne. The hall then seems to have been Esmé Stuart's town house, where Jonson himself had lodged, more or less next door to the Blackfriars playhouse. Lady Frances Howard stayed there under house arrest during her trial in 1616 for the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury. After having been destroyed in the Great London Fire of 1666, the hall was rebuilt in 1672 and remains standing today.

The second and third performances of Poel’s production took place on 27 April in the Small Theatre of the Royal Albert Hall. (See Child, 1927, 177, and Donaldson, 2011, 184, 319, 470 n.20.) The actors were mostly young amateurs, recruited by Poel, who had founded the Elizabethan Stage Society in 1894-5; it had been dissolved in 1905. Previously Poel had attempted to recover original conditions of performance in Hamlet (1881, at St George’s Hall) and Measure for Measure (1893), along with plays by Marlowe and Jonson. He staged The Two Gentlemen of Verona for his Society in 1910. His 1899 production of The Alchemist at the Apothecaries' Hall was the first significant modern revival of that play (see O'Connor, 1987).

Two notices appeared in the London Times for 31 March 1916. The first, entitled ‘Shakespeare as Character in a Play’, described the production as Poel’s contribution to a celebration of the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death in 1616, noting that in the previous ten or twelve years, the play had attracted a good deal of attention from Shakespeare scholars, including a 1905 edition from Yale by Herbert Mallory and research by R. A. Small, Maurice Castelain, and M. Jusserand. What particularly caught the reviewer’s eye was the putative identification of Virgil with Shakespeare, along with other topical associations, especially Horace with Jonson himself, Crispinus with Marston, Demetrius with Dekker, and Histrio and his players with the Lord Chamberlain’s acting company. The reviewer noted with scholarly satisfaction that ‘Mr Poel’s performance will reproduce the conditions that prevailed when the play was first produced by the Children of the Chapel Royal in 1601’, thus underscoring the appropriateness of Hamlet’s alluding to ‘an eyrie of children, little ayases’, etc.

The second notice, in the same issue of The Times, entitled ‘An Elizabethan Revue of Ben Jonson’s Poetaster’, noted that the presentation before the Shakespeare League took place on ‘almost the same spot’ as that of the 1601 first performance, in ‘the fine Jacobean Hall of the Apothecaries’ Society in Water-lane, Blackfriars, which stands close to Playhouse-yard at the back of The Times Office, where once was the famous Blackfriars playhouse’. As in the other review notice, this one seems most fascinated by the question, ‘Where does Shakespeare come in?’ Virgil, as the ‘almost more than human poet whom the Emperor Augustus sat at his right hand’, seemed to the reviewer the most appropriate choice. In the performance itself, we are told, Virgil was ‘“made up” as Shakespeare, so that there could be no mistake’. Horace was no less visually presented as Jonson, together with the ‘scoundrelly Poetasters’, Crispinus and Demetrius, as Marston and Dekker. Still, reports the reviewer, Poel wisely decided not to overemphasize the details of a literary quarrel that early twentieth-century viewers could not be expected to care much about. Once the Poetomachia had been pared down, the reviewer decided, the play itself was not much more than an ‘exhibition of known types’ episodically displayed, including the city wife, the needy poet, and the swaggering captain, along with ‘a very beautiful love-scene’ between Ovid and Julia. The performance began, in imitation of the invariable custom at the Blackfriars, with Tudor music performed by 'Chapel Children', in this case three choristers from Westminster Cathedral, accompanied by Mr Arnold Dolmetsch. The play itself was ‘briskly and agreeably’ performed on a high stage ‘plausibly draped’, and was acted by ‘young people, mostly female, in Elizabethan costume’. In the interval, ‘Mr Fletcher White appeared as Ben Jonson to speak part of one of Jonson’s many vociferous assurances that his detractors were beneath his notice’.

Poel also directed a production of Poetaster in the fall of November, 1916, in Pittsburgh and Detroit by students of the Carnegie Institute of Technology. The cast performed in Pittsburgh on 25, 26, and 27 October. They then took the production to Detroit, where they performed the play at the Museum of Art, once on Friday, 1 December, and twice on Saturday. The show was reprised in Pittsburgh on Monday and Tuesday, 4 and 5 December. It featured the following cast: Irene Greenleaf as Augustus Caesar, S. Geoffries as Maecenas, G. Rees as Ovid, Y. Pienne as Ovid’s father, Marcus Ovid, C. H. Morgan as Tibullus, M. James as Cornelius Gallus, E. D. Rees as Virgil, F. Allardy as Horace, G. Brunswick as Lupus, B. Dyne as Tucca, C. Telford as Luscus, Mary Carey as Crispinus, I. Hearne as Hermogenes, A. Lubimoff as Albius, W. Fairbairn as Minos, K. Harrison as Histrio, C. Renaud and L. Simpson as Lictors, V. Foucheux as Julia, O. A. Jettley as Cytheris, P. Bryan as Plautia, and I. Hayter as Chloe. J. Fisher White, who impersonated Jonson in the Apologetical Dialogue, was a professional actor who would work with Poel again in the 1920s. Irene Greenleaf had worked with Poel before, in 1916, as had Mary Carey, who would work with him again in 1920. (This information is from the production’s programme in London’s Theatre Museum, and from Marion O'Connor.)

The production embodied essentially the same staging concept as that of Poel’s London show earlier that same year. A review of the Pittsburgh performance appeared in the Boston Evening Transcript on 4 November, by H. K. M., entitled ‘The Noted English Iconoclast of the Theatre Pays a Little-Heralded Visit to the Carnegie Institute and Sets on Its Stage in His Own Mannner Ben Jonson’s Classic Comedy’. The thrust of the review was to castigate the ‘crushing conventionalism’ of the nineteenth-century stage and to laud Poel as chief among the ‘Boldest of the revivers’. This show was presented under the aegis of Thomas Wood Stevens, director of dramatic arts at the Carnegie Institute, who had invited Poel to come. The performance was ‘straight’, in period costuming, with young actors, and an emphasis mainly on clear delivery of Jonson’s lines. Despite some ‘aging details’ and incomprehensible business in a play that was so much a product of its own day, the reviewer found the evening to be lively and entertaining. To him it offered a gratifying blend of learning and imagination, painstakingly reconstructing Jonson’s original as much as could be hoped without the actual use of pre-adolescent boy actors. Black draperies and a simple stage were bathed in the undifferentiated lighting effect of diffused daylight.

I am indebted to Dr Marion O'Connor, of the University of Kent, Canterbury, for the following information:

The Theatre Museum, London, has an advertisement for the Detroit performances and three copies of the programme (THM/40/1/9), a letter dated 4 Dec. 1916 from Poel to his wife (THM/40/3/2/4/9), and a typescript list of contents and costs of shipment of his ‘Second Hand Theatrical Wardrobe’ to Pittsburgh (TH HM/40/3/1/64). The Kenneth Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas has correspondence in which Poel negotiates with Carnegie Tech for this 1916 visit, seeks assistance from Ben Iden Payne, then in New York, on locating Elizabethan accoutrements, and chases Poetaster costumes that strayed from the return shipment (MS 31).

Dr O'Connor finds the following additional reviews of the American performances: Stephen Allard, ‘William Poel in America’, Theatre Arts, 1.1 (Nov. 1916), 24-26; ‘First Purely Elizabethan Production in US’, New York Times, 31 Dec. 1916; and The Gazette Times, Pittsburgh, for 26 October. Poel himself issued newsheets called Monthly Letters, between July 1915 and October 1919. Monthly Letter 11, for May 1916, includes an account of the London productions by T. Fairman Ordish. Nos. 18 (Dec. 1916), 19 (Jan. 1917), and 20 (Feb. 1917) reprint the New York Times review and undated extracts from the Pittsburgh Dispatch and Pittsburgh Chronicle commenting on the staging, music, and costumes of the American production. (The complete Monthly Letters can be found in the Poel Collection at the University of Kansas; the selections printed by T. Werner Laurie in 1929 do not include the Poetaster pieces.) A further exchange between Poel and O. W. F. Lodge in the Shakespeare League Journal, 4.7 (July 1918), discusses Poel's bowdlerization of the text and his relegation of the vomiting sequence to off-stage noises.

Since Poel’s productions there have been no further revivals. The play is long overdue for reappraisal in today’s theatre.