THEATRES, WAR OF THE

in English literary history, conflict involving the Elizabethan playwrights Ben Jonson, John Marston, and Thomas Dekker. It covered a period when Jonson was writing for one children's company of players and Marston for another, rival group. In 1599 Marston presented a mildly satirical portrait of Jonson in his Histrio-mastix. In 1599 Jonson replied in Every Man Out of His Humour, ridiculing Marston's style as fustian. The same year, Marston's Jack Drum's Entertainment presented Jonson, thinly disguised, as a cuckold. The quarrel reached its height about 1600: Jonson wrote Cynthia's Revels (performed c. 1600), satirizing Marston and Thomas Dekker; Marston satirized Jonson in What You Will; Jonson, anticipating Marston's attack, wrote Poetaster, representing Marston as a poetaster and plagiarist and Dekker as a playdresser and plagiarist; Dekker and Marston then lampooned Jonson as the laborious poet. The quarrel had been patched up by 1604, when Marston dedicated The Malcontent to Jonson. Some scholars have seen the quarrel as based on a difference of opinion about the nature of drama; it was certainly sharpened by the intense competition that existed between children's companies at the time, which were so popular that in Hamlet Shakespeare refers to the fact that adult actors were forced to undertake provincial tours because of the boys' popularity.