What You Will is a late Elizabethan comedy by John Marston, written in 1601 and probably performed by the Children of Paul's, one of the companies of boy actors popular in that period.
John Marston was an English poet, playwright and satirist during the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods. His career as a writer lasted a decade, and his work is remembered for its energetic and often obscure style, its contributions to the development of a distinctively Jacobean style in poetry, and its idiosyncratic vocabulary.
This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1601.
The Children of Paul's was the name of a troupe of boy actors in Elizabethan and Jacobean London. Along with the Children of the Chapel, they were the most important of the companies of boy players that constituted a distinctive feature of English Renaissance theatre.
The play was entered into the Stationers' Register on 6 August 1607, and was published later that year in a quarto printed by George Eld for the bookseller Thomas Thorpe. Inconsistencies in the names of the characters suggest that the play was revised between its stage premier in 1601 and its publication in 1607. The Induction that precedes the text mentions a small sized stage and candles for illumination, details that verify that the play was acted in a smaller "private" theatre rather than a large "public" one like the Globe or the Fortune.
The Stationers’ Register was a record book maintained by the Stationers' Company of London. The company is a trade guild given a royal charter in 1557 to regulate the various professions associated with the publishing industry, including printers, bookbinders, booksellers, and publishers in England. The Register itself allowed publishers to document their right to produce a particular printed work, and constituted an early form of copyright law. The Company's charter gave it the right to seize illicit editions and bar the publication of unlicensed books.
This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1607.
The size of a book is generally measured by the height against the width of a leaf, or sometimes the height and width of its cover. A series of terms is commonly used by libraries and publishers for the general sizes of modern books, ranging from folio, to quarto (smaller) and octavo. Historically, these terms referred to the format of the book, a technical term used by printers and bibliographers to indicate the size of a leaf in terms of the size of the original sheet. For example, a quarto historically was a book printed on a sheet of paper folded twice to produce four leaves, each leaf one fourth the size of the original sheet printed. Because the actual format of many modern books cannot be determined from examination of the books, bibliographers may not use these terms in scholarly descriptions.
The play focuses on the relationship between two rival poets: the bitter, misanthropic satirist Lampatho Doria and the generous, lighthearted epicurean Quadratus. The play itself hardly has a plot, being more a series of comic vignettes and debates between characters. It criticizes the satirist as a mean-spirited, envious man, and celebrates good humor, merriment and "play." The subplot involves the tricking and humiliation of various fools by a group of boy pages.
What You Will was one of the plays involved in the War of the Theatres in 1599–1601. The character Lampatho Doria is generally thought to represent Ben Jonson, Marston's opponent in the controversy, while Quadratus may stand in for Marston himself. [1]
The War of the Theatres is the name commonly applied to a controversy from the later Elizabethan theatre; Thomas Dekker termed it the Poetomachia.
Benjamin Jonson was an English playwright, poet, actor, and literary critic, whose artistry exerted a lasting impact upon English poetry and stage comedy. He popularised the comedy of humours. He is best known for the satirical plays Every Man in His Humour (1598), Volpone, or The Fox, The Alchemist (1610) and Bartholomew Fair (1614) and for his lyric and epigrammatic poetry. "He is generally regarded as the second most important English dramatist, after William Shakespeare, during the reign of James I."
