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.
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 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.
Famous quotes containing the words what, you and/or will:
“Films can only be made by by-passing the will of those who appear in them, using not what they do, but what they are.”
—Robert Bresson (b. 1907)
“The best part of myself, that’s what you are. Do you think I’m going to leave it to the vulgar pawing of a second-rate detective who thinks you’re a “dame”? Do you think I could bear the thought of him holding you in his arms, kissing you, loving you?”
—Jay Dratler, U.S. screenwriter, Samuel Hoffenstein (1889–1947)
“Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark what discord follows!
...
Force should be right, or, rather, right and wrong—
Between whose endless jar justice resides—
Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
Then everything includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)