958 Reviews Shakespeare & the Poets' War. By James P. Bednarz. New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press. 2001. X+ 334PP. $49.50 (pbk $19). ISBN 0-23112242 -x (pbk 0-231-12243-8). The year 2001 witnessed the 400th anniversary of the 'terrible Poetomachia', in which Jonson, Marston, and Dekker were supposed to have satirically 'berayed' each other, and Shakespeare is said by the Cambridge students to have given Jon? son a purge. Opinions on the 'war' differsharply today. While Bednarz devotes this book to its importance, Rosalynd Lander Knudson exhorted scholars to regard the war against satirism as a myth (Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare's Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)). Are we witnessing a terrible 'scholastomachia'? Bednarz is convinced that the Poets' War began in 1599 with Jonson defining him? self as Shakespeare's opposite and ended two years later with Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, in which the 'purge' was the depiction of Ajax as Jonson. Hence, he also takes the view that Elizabethan theatre was highly competitive (p. 2), instead of being based on guild-inspired fraternity(Knudson's view) The aim of the author is to present 'the firstcomprehensive account' of the Poets' War 'as a crisis of legitimation, a literary civil war during which Jonson's vanguard project clashed with the skepticism of Marston, Shakespeare, and Dekker, who lit? erally laughed him offthe stage' (p. 3). Jonson's project was the claim 'that he alone possessed a credible form of poetic authority, based on neoclassical standards that demolished his rivals' literary pretensions' (p. 2). It led him to mock competitors. Bednarz follows Bevington's view of the Poets' War being 'primarily focussed on the writer's responsibility to society' (p. 4), but he goes further.He aims also to show that the views of Foucault and the new historicists with respect to 'collective authorship' are misconceived, and that the traditional 'myth' of the Jonson-Shakespeare contests is essentially true. Bednarz's method is 'structural morphology', or the process through which Jonson suddenly changed the field through a new type of comedy. It consists of interpreting drama from the point of view of propositions set out beforehand, and asks the reader to suspend historical criticism. It offers an often interesting reading of texts, but rather poor history, even deficient scholarship. Scholars ought to account forthe uncertainties in their views and test them. This account does neither and the relationship between textual analysis and textual history is at best circular. Bednarz's chronology of the plays is conceived in order to buttress his main arguments, which themselves refer to the chronological sketch forcredibility. He dates Histriomastix (which he sometimes partly, sometimes wholly, assigns to Marston) before Every Man Out of his Humour and Troilus and Cressida before II Return from Parnassus, not because there is good evidence forsuch dates, but because itbest fitshis proposition. The recurring solution for chronological problems is asserting insertions. No tangible evidence is given for such claims, nor are alternatives made explicit. Take the case for Marston's Antonio and Mellida. Here the reference to the additions to The Spanish Tragedy 'must' have been inserted later (although the play needs a scene there, to enable the actor playing Andrugio to dress as Alberto, so that speculation is piled upon speculation), in order to ridicule Jonson (whose authorship of the additions is disputed), so that the armed epilogue 'must' imitate Jonson and Shakespeare (even though the intertextual basis is shallow). In addition, references are given a certainty which is not obvious, such as Guilpin's verse on Chrisoganus referringto Jonson, or the case is made for personal allusion in Brabant Sr by way ofthe much later and confused Drummond Conversa? tion (quoted, moreover, out of context). The comic device here is traditional and can also be found in Don Quichote as 'the curious impertinent'. With respect to such devices in Poets' War comedies, Bednarz is surprisingly silent on Satiromastix's Adam MLRy 98.4, 2003 959 Prickshaft (alluding to Shakespeare). The approach to personal reference follows the nineteenth-century tradition of prosopographia instead of analysing the 'dispute' by way of ideas, organized in character configurations, which only can be taken as 'por...