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Charles Cathcart, Lampatho’s ‘Delicious Sweet’ in Marston’s What You Will, Notes and Queries, Volume 56, Issue 4, December 2009, Pages 610–612, https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjp159
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WHO, if anybody, is being satirized through the character Lampatho Doria in John Marston’s What You Will? Critics often take the play to have been a part of the literary dispute known as the ‘Poets’ War’. This confrontation came to a climax in Ben Jonson’s Poetaster and Thomas Dekker’s Satiromastix, opposing ventures in which Jonson, Dekker, and Marston were each depicted on stage. Both of these plays were written and staged in 1601 and critics assume that What You Will was composed in the same year, although it did not reach print publication until 1607.1
Lampatho Doria is a gallant who immerses himself in a series of intellectual or anti-intellectual fads. His principal rival, competitor, friend, and social peer is Quadratus. Aspects of Lampatho fit neatly with known characteristics of Ben Jonson and those commentators who choose to view the play in the light of the ‘Poets’ War’ most often see Jonson as Marston’s target and Lampatho as the vehicle for Marston’s satire upon Jonson.2 Some critics have disagreed and consider Lampatho to be a self-portrait: Quadratus calls Lampatho ‘you Don Kinsayder’ (531), using the name Marston adopted for the spokesman of his verse satires of 1598, and this allusion features in the arguments of those who take this view.3 Yet other readers detect in Marston a less straightforward aim, and Lampatho has been termed ‘a teasing anamorphic double-portrait’.4
