(mounted on the stage of arrogance) think to outbrave better pens with the swelling bombast of a bragging blank verse.' 'Players avant'1 was their war-cry; and, when Greene himself utters it, he does not leave the reference in doubt. In a Groat's Worth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance (1592) he warns Marlowe, Peele, and Lodge, his particular friends in the fraternity of 'ballet makers, pamphleteers, press-haunters, boon pot-poets, and such like,' 2 to beware of players :-'Those puppets, who speak from our mouths, those anticks garnisht in our colours. . . . Yes,' he goes on, 'trust them not; for there is an upstart crow, beautified in our feathers, that, with his tiger's heart wrapt in a player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you, and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is, in his own conceit, the only Shakescene in a country.' 4 You find the same attitude towards players in The Return from Parnassus. Acting is the 'basest trade,' (iv. 5), and again (v. 1):- 6 Better it is mongst fiddlers to be chiefe, Such is the conclusion of the two Scholars in the play after exhausting every expedient to win a livelihood by their learning. They go on to attack 'those glorious vagabonds,' 'That carried earst their fardels on their backes,' 1 From a poem by Thomas Brabine, gent.; also appended to Greene's Menaphon. 2 Lodge: cf. W. Raleigh, The English Novel. A line parodied from the 3rd Henry VI.: 'Recently revised, if not originally written, by Shakespeare.'—Baynes, 105. • Acted by the students of St. John's College, Cambridge. grudging them their 'coursers,' and 'Sattan sutes'1 'and pages,' since 'With mouthing words that better wits had framed, The last shot must surely have been aimed at Shakespeare, who had procured a grant of arms for his father in 1599, and had purchased 107 acres of arable for £320 in 1602. But the date of this Play is uncertain: Mr. Arber argues for January in that year, and this would cast doubt on the reference. On the other hand, Burbage and Kempe, Shakespeare's colleagues, are introduced in their own persons (iv. 5), when Kempe thus trolls it off:-' Few of the University pen plaies well, they smell too much of that writer Ovid, and that writer Metamorphosis, and talke too much of Proserpina and Juppiter. Why, heres our fellow Shakespeare puts them all downe, I and Ben Jonson too. O, that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow, he brought up Horace giving the Poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him beray his credit.' Controversy has raged round this passage; but it seems certain (a) that, in common with the whole scene, it is an ironical reflection on the ignorance and the social success of the players; and (b) that it refers to Dekker's Satiromastix or The Untrussing of the Humorous Poet. This play, in which Dekker retorted upon The Poetaster, was published in 1602; but, of course, it had before been presented 'publickly by the Lord Chamberlaine his servants, and privately by the Children of Paules.' 3 2 VIII Of more importance than all the 'paper warres in Paules Church-yard' was this famous campaign fought out upon the 1 'Satin suits' is one of the catchwords in the duel between Jonson and Dekker.-Infra. 2 Viz., in The Poetaster, v. i. 3 Title-page. stage-the Poetomachia1 in which Dekker and Jonson were protagonists. As distinguished from the onslaught of the 'university pens,' it was a civil war, involving most of the leading playwrights and actors. It raged for years; 2 we know that Shakespeare must have been in the thick of it; and if it be impossible to say for certain on which side he was ranged, it is easy to hazard a guess. Of his attitude towards Jonson we know little. There is the tradition that he introduced him to the stage; there is the fact that he acted in his plays-in Every Man in His Humour, 1598, immediately before the Poetomachia, and in Sejanus, 1604, soon after it; there is Fuller's account of the 'wit combats' between them; there is the tradition that Shakespeare enter 3 1 Dekker's address To the World' prefixed to Satiromastix. 2 Jonson, as the Author, in the 'Apology,' appended to The Poetaster :— 'Three years They did provoke me with their petulant styles On every stage.' 3 The History of the Worthies of England, endeavoured by Thomas Fuller, D.D. Published, unfinished, by the author's orphan, John Fuller,' in 1662. From its bulk we may judge that it occupied many years of Thomas Fuller's life, so that it brings his account of Shakespeare fairly close to the date of his death (1616), and well within the range of plausible tradition. I quote the whole passage for its quaintness :-' William Shakespeare was born at Stratford on Avon in this county (Warwick) in whom three eminent Poets may seem in some sort to be compounded. 1. Martial in the warlike sound of his Sur-name (whence some may conjecture him of a Military extraction), Hasti-vibrans or Shake-speare. 2. Ovid, the most naturall and witty of all Poets, and hence it was that Queen Elizabeth coming into a Grammar-school made this extempore verse : 'Persias a Crab-staffe, Bawdy Martial, Ovid a fine wag.' 3. Plautus, who was an exact Comedian, yet never any scholar, as our Shakespeare (if alive) would confess himself. Adde to all these, that though his Genius generally was jocular, and inclining him to festivity, yet he could (when so disposed) be solemn and serious, as appears by his tragedies, so that Heraclitus himself (I mean if secret and unseen) might afford to smile at his Comedies, they were so merry, and Democritus scarce forbear to smile at his Tragedies, they were so mournfull. 'He was an eminent instance of the truth of that Rule, Poeta non fit, sed tained Jonson and Drayton at Stratford on the eve of his death.1 Against these proofs of good-fellowship there is the conjecture, founded on Kempe's speech quoted above, that Shakespeare had a hand in the production of Dekker's Satiromastix and, perhaps, played William Rufus in it. Of Jonson's attitude towards Shakespeare we know more, but the result is ambiguous. We have the two poems in Underwoods—the second, surely, the most splendid tribute ever paid by one poet to another? But, then, we have Jonson's conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden, in which he spared Shakespeare as little as any, laying down that he wanted art and sometimes sense.' We have, also, the strong tradition that Jonson treated Shakespeare with ingratitude. This may have sprung from the charge of malevolence preferred against Jonson, so he tells us himself, by Shakespeare's comrades (Discoveries: 'De Shakspeare nostrat.'). 'I remember,' he says, 'the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakspeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, Would he had blotted a thousand, which they thought a malevolent speech.' In this passage we nascitur, one is not made, but born a Poet. Indeed, his learning was very little, so that as Cornish diamonds are not polished by any lapidary, but are pointed and smoothed even as they are taken out of the Earth, so Nature itself was all the art which was used upon him. 'Many were the wit-combates betwixt him and Ben Jonson, which two I behold like a Spanish Great Gallion, and an English Man of War; Master Jonson (like the former) was built far higher in learning, solid, but slow in his performances. Shake-spear with the English Man of War, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his Wit and Invention. He died Anno Domini 16. . and was buried at Stratford upon Avon, the Town of His Nativity.' 1 'Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting, and itt seems drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a feaver there contracted.'— Diary of Ward, Vicar of Stratford, bearing the date 1662. 2 T. Tyler and R. Simpson. 3 Acted by his Company, the Lord Chamberlain's. probably have Jonson's settled opinion of Shakespeare, the artist and the man. He allows his excellent phantasy, brave notions and gentle expressions wherein he flowed,' but, he qualifies, with that facility, that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped.' He admits that his wit was in his own power,' but adds :-'Would the rule of it had been so too, many times he fell into those things could not escape laughter.' As arrogant as men (and scholars) are made, Jonson found some of Shakespeare's work 'ridiculous'; but he was honest, and when he says, 'I loved the man, and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any,' we must believe him. But we are not to infer with Gifford that Drummond misrepresented Jonson, or that Jonson, during the Poetomachia, did not trounce Shakespeare for rejecting, with success, the Jonsonian theory of the Drama. Gifford, to minimise the authority of Drummond's report, denounces that Petrarchan for a 'bird of prey'; but his whole apology for Ben Jonson is a piece of special pleading too violent and too acerb to command much confidence. He is very wroth with the critics of the eighteenth century, who had scented an attack on Shakespeare in the Prologue to Jonson's Every Man in His Humour. But what are the facts? The Play, in which Shakespeare had acted (1598), is published (1600) without the Prologue. A revised version is published with the Prologue in 1616, but, as Mr. Fleay has proved from internal references to the Queen' and 'Her Majesty,' that version must also have been acted before Elizabeth's death (1603), and he adds an ingenious argument for assigning its production to the April of 1601.2 In the added 1 The English Drama, vol. i. p. 358. 2 iii. 2, Bobadil says:-" -To-morrow's St. Mark's day.' It appears from Cob's complaint that the play was acted on a Friday. Cf. Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, 1614:—' Tales, Tempests and such like drolleries.' |