"Honesty and vulgar praise": the Poet's War and the literary field

Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Annual, 2006 by Edward Gieskes

IN works such as Distinction, The Field of Cultural Production, and The Rules of Art, Pierre Bourdieu argues that the determination of the value of an artwork is structured by a series of paired oppositions--high, low; avant-garde, bourgeois; popular, elite; interested, disinterested; vulgar, refined--and that in the literary field the shape of these oppositions and the value attached to one or another pole emerges in the context of historical struggles between writers, between writers and their audiences, between writers and publishers (however defined), and between publishers and audiences. (1) The structure of the field is therefore a product of these struggles over the right to determine the principles by which works will be judged. The specific content of these oppositions vary over time, but struggle over that content remains a more or less constant feature of the literary field and the field of cultural production more generally. At the same time, the field depends on the development of a relative autonomy from external categories of evaluation--in other words, in order for the literary field to exist as a field it must develop its own canons of judgment. (2) Conflict over canons of judgment thus play two roles--they determine the shape of the literary field, its hierarchies and terms of evaluation, and they declare the independence of the field from categories that do not derive from within the field. (3) Bourdieu's ideas suggest ways to historicize the development of a recognizably modern literary field over the course of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

I

Early modern professional writing developed in a social world characterized by conflict and dissension between writers and stationers, writers and dramatic companies, writers and audiences, and writers and writers--as well as all the permutations of these groups--and those conflicts defined the shape and structure of the emerging literary field. (4) The Parnassus plays (performed at Cambridge between 1598 and 1601) and the roughly contemporaneous Poetomachia are only two manifestations of this larger conflict; however, I will argue that the terms they put into play are terms important to the subsequent structuring of the literary field. (5) As a final statement in the Poetomachia, Ben Jonson's Poetaster (1601) takes as its central subject the nature and function of the writer and makes an argument for the ascendancy of a particular kind of writer and writing--conveniently, one represented by Jonson himself. As such, the play is not only an intervention in the Poetomachia, but also functions as an attempt to shape the developing field of professional writing. The Parnassus plays lament the passing of an older, patronage-based model of the writer's social role because of the rise of the professional writers who Jonson strives to shape in his own image. (6) This group of plays provide particularly vivid examples of an ongoing conflict, a conflict that structures both the literary field and the profession of writing.

As has often been noted, professional writing developed in the wake of the printing press during the slow transition from a feudal to a capitalist economic order. (7) However, the profession of writer did not take shape solely or even primarily as a result of the development of print and a market for b, nor did it arise from more or less purely "literary" pressures. Neither did the profession develop from some simple combination of the two, as a blend of literary and economic concerns, but it also developed in the context of a more general movement toward professionalization in early modern culture. (8) The transformation in the literary field in early modern England occurred in tandem with economic and social transformations. The ranking of genres shifted decisively and drama took a new position outside of the civic and liturgical context of its early history. The social composition of the population of writers changed dramatically at the same time as the audience for plays, poems, and literary prose grew immensely. The populations of producers and consumers changed in the course of the sixteenth century as humanist educational ideals spread through English society, as literacy rates rose, and, perhaps most importantly, as the business of printing made "learning" accessible to a much wider public. (9) As the market for cultural products broadened, so did access to a formerly more restricted literary culture. This broadening enabled new categories of producers to develop and find an audience for their writing. (10) The primary site of this development was the theater, which saw the advent of explicitly professional writers who came into competition with university-trained writers who had been supplying much of the demand for new scripts. (11)

The anonymous Parnassus plays (The Pilgrimage to Parnassus, 1 and 2 Return From Parnassus) were performed at Cambridge between 1598 and 1601. These student plays depict a world in which the skills gained at Mount Parnassus (Cambridge) find no recognized outlet in the world--characters complain about their lack of opportunity, the travails of competition for patrons, and their conflicts with the emerging professional writers associated with the presses and theaters in London. The plays lament the passing of an always at least somewhat imaginary patronage system that, to the characters' minds, ought to have provided places for university-educated men. The student-playwrights nervously depict the advent of a commercial system that does not value the cultural capital represented by a Cambridge MA as much as did the patronage system whose passing the plays lament. (12) Characters such as Ingenioso, Furor Poeticus, Phantasma, Philomusus, and Studioso recognize the advent of a system that fails to recognize them and retreat from it--leaving the field, in a sense, to the writers they criticize.