"Honesty and Vulgar Praise": The Poet's War and the Literary Field

Abstract

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 prose grew immensely. …

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