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Four the Theaters, hundred a years markedly after similar the curious phenomenon skirmish has known taken as hold the War of the of the Th aters, a markedly si ilar phenom non has taken hold of t cinema, emerging in films that purport to represent the Renaissance and, particularly, its bankside beacon, Shakespeare. Revolving around a fundamental division, as Richard Helgerson has persuasively argued, between a "players' theater" and an "authors' theater," the war was really a bid for social preferment and economic survival in a culture making an uneven transition from patronage to market forces.1 On one side, the proponents of the authors' theater strove to distinguish the singularity of their poetry from its debased embodiment on stage, catering to a privileged clientele through learned plays performed by elite children's companies, whose combined objective was to disparage the unsophisticated audiences and common players associated with the public amphitheaters. On the other side, the players' theater remained the "caviar" of "the general."2 Refusing the lure of more privatized venues such as Blackfriars and St. Paul's, as well as the social division of labor between players and "authors" which, for figures like Shakespeare, proved a paradox, advocates of the players' theater continued to rely on collaborative authorship, adult actors, and popular themes for their plays but not without leaving scathing rejoinders in their wake.3 Nevertheless, what distinguished the war as a bizarre interlude in the English theater's ongoing struggle for respectability was the way in which children came to mediate this debate. As the most