Introduction

In 1630, a battle erupted in print between James Shirley, the principal dramatist associated with Drury Lane's Cockpit theatre, and William Davenant, whose The Just Italian was staged at Blackfriars the year before. Davenant's play had been a flop, and in the commendatory verses that accompanied it into print his supporters blamed its failure on audiences’ preference for ‘bad’ plays on offer elsewhere – for choosing ‘the untun'd pipe’ of Pan over Apollo's lyre. The Cockpit came in for their sharpest criticism. Its actors were accused of braying like an ‘untun'd Kennell’, and its ‘adulterate stage’ was pointed to as a place where ‘Now noyse prevayles’. The language Davenant's supporters used could be borrowed directly from Ben Jonson's turn-of-the-century comedies, and Shirley and his supporters responded in kind. In the commendatory verses for his The Grateful Servant (1630), it is Shirley's language, not Davenant's, that is likened to Apollo's (‘So smooth, and so sweet, that Apollo might rehearse / To his own lute’), and it is his rivals who are accused of writing unintelligible noise: their lines ‘like Nile-cataracts do fall / With a huge noise, and yet not heard at all’.

This back-and-forth between Davenant, Shirley and their respective supporters has been credited with starting a ‘second poets’ war’, one which pitted the amateur gentleman dramatists of Blackfriars against the professional playwrights associated with the Cockpit. Since several of these men wrote on occasion for both theatres, and since the line between professional and gentleman-amateur was at best a blurry one, such distinctions seem more manufactured than genuine. The battle, however, shows the extent to which the theatre of the 1630s was talked about as an aural phenomenon, even as it also became more visually spectacular. It also suggests that the dramatists associated with these two playhouses understood them as existing in competition with one another. Distinguishing each theatre's repertoire from the other's seems therefore to have been considered a competitive necessity, and one of the ways in which Shirley sought to do so was by celebrating the dramatic variety on offer at the Cockpit, as opposed to at Blackfriars.