Prologue Jonson denounces the 'ill customs of the age' in And help of some few foot and half-foot words, With his usual complacency : 'He rather prays you will be pleas'd to see One such to-day, as other plays should be; Where neither chorus wafts you o'er the seas,' etc. etc. Without referring these two gibes specifically to Shakespeare's Henry VI. ii. and iii., and Henry V. (although the second describes what the chorus in Henry V. was actually doing at the time 1), or the remaining lines to other plays from his hand, it is clear that the whole tirade is an attack in set terms on the kind of play which Shakespeare wrote, and which the public preferred before Jonson's.2 The attack is in perfect accord with Jonson's reputation for militant self-sufficiency, and, if he made friends again with Shakespeare, he also made friends again with Marston. Dekker wrote thus of him :-"'Tis thy fashion to flirt ink in every man's face; and then to crawle into his bosome.' 8 1 Fleay, ibid. 2 * Cf. the copy of verse by Leonard Digges (floruit 1617-1635) 'evidently written,' says Halliwell-Phillipps, 'soon after the opening of the second Fortune Theatre in 1623 : : 'Then some new day they would not brooke a line, Of tedius (though well laboured) Catiline, Sejanus was too irksome; they prize the more He goes on to say that Jonson's other plays, The Fox and The Alchemist, even when acted at a friend's desire . . . have scarce defrai'd the seacole fire'; when 'let but Falstaffe come,' Hal, Poins, or 'Beatrice and Benedicke,' and 'loe, in a trice the cock-pit, galleries, boxes, all are full.' 3 Satiromastix. In the Poetomachia Dekker and Marston were the victims of Jonson's especial virulence, which spared neither the seaminess of an opposite's apparel nor the defects in his personal appearance; but it is hard to say whether they or he began it. Drummond in his Conversations attributes the beginning of Jonson's quarrel with Marston to Marston's having 'represented him on the stage in his youth given to venery'; and in Dekker's Patient Grissel (1599), in which Chettle had a hand, Emulo may be Jonson; for the taunt at his thin legs: :'What's here? laths! Where's the lime and hair, Emulo?' :— is of a piece with innumerable jests at the expense of Jonson's scragginess1 and his early work at bricklaying. Jonson, at any rate, did not reserve his fire till 1601, though in his apology to The Poetaster he suggests that he did :— 'Three years They did provoke me with their petulant styles On every stage.' It was in 1599 that he began the practice of staging himself and his fellows: himself as a high-souled critic, his fellows as poor illiterates whose foibles it was his duty to correct. As Asper in Every Man out of His Humour (1559), as Crites in Cynthia's Revels (1600), as Horace in The Poetaster (1601), he professes a lofty call to reform the art and manners of his age. This was too much for rivals in a profession in any case highly competitive, and rendered the more precarious by the capricious inhibition of the Companies for which its members wrote. was hard when their own men were 'travelling' or idle, on account of the Plague or for having offended the authorities, to be lampooned by the children of the Chapel' playing Jonson's pieces before the Queen. And at last in Satiro It 1 He got fat in later life. 2 Criticus in an earlier version. 3 E.g. Shakespeare's Company in 1601.-Fleay. mastix (1602), Dekker gave as good as he got, through the mouth of the Tucca he had borrowed from Jonson :-" -'No, you starv'd rascal, thou 't bite off mine eares then, thou must have three or foure suites of names, when like a lousie Pediculous vermin th'ast but one suite to thy backe; you must be call'd Asper, and Criticus, and Horace, thy tytle's longer in reading than the stile a the big Turkes: Asper, Criticus, Quintus, Horatius, Flaccus.' Between the opening in 1599 and the end in 1602, the wordy war never relaxes. Jonson staged Marston in Every Man out of His Humour (1599) as Carlo Buffone 1:- 'a public, scurrilous and profane jester a good feast-hound and banquet-beagle,' whose religion is railing and his discourse ribaldry'; and, in Satiromastix, Dekker suggests that JonsonHorace, if at a tavern supper he 'dips his manners in too much sauce,' shall sit for a penalty 'a th' left hand of Carlo Buffon.' Jonson-Crites in Cynthia's Revels (1600) attacks Hedon-Dekker and Anaides-Marston (iii. 2):: 'The one a light, voluptuous reveller, Dekker retorts by quoting the lines in Satiromastix; while Marston parodies them in What You Will. In The Poetaster (1601) Jonson-Horace administers pills to Demetrius Fannius-Dekker and Crispinus (or Cri-spinas or Crispin-ass)-Marston, so that they vomit on the stage such words in their vocabulary as offended his purist taste. Dekker in Satiromastix, untrusses the Humorous poet,' i.e. tries Horace-Jonson, and condemns him to wear a wreath of nettles until he swears, among other things, 1 Fleay rejects this attribution, but he is alone in his opinion. 2 Published 1607, written shortly after the appearance of Cynthia's Revels. A. H. Bullen. Introduction to Works of John Marston, 1887. Acted 1601.-Fleay. " Juvenal's 'Ecce iterum Crispinus-a notorious favourite of Domitian. not to protest that he would hang himself if he thought any man could write Plays as well as he; not to exchange compliments with Gallants in the Lordes roomes, to make all the house rise up in Armes, and to cry that's Horace, that's he, that's he, that's he, that pennes and purges Humours and diseases'; nor, when his 'playes are misse-likt at Court,' to 'crye Mew like a Pussecat,' and say he is glad to write out of the Courtier's Element.' In all these Plays acute literary criticism is mingled with brutal personal abuse. Thus, for sneering at seedy clothes and bald or singular heads,1 Horace is countered with his bricklaying and his coppered 'face puncht full of oylet-holes, like the cover of a warming pan.' One might hastily infer that Jonson was the life-long enemy at least of Dekker and Marston. Yet it was not so. Dekker had collaborated with him on the eve of these hostilities,2 though for the last time. Marston's shifting alliances are merely bewildering: the very man whom he libels at one time he assists, at another, in libelling a third. Outraged (you would think) by Jonson's reiterated onslaughts, and conscious of equally outrageous provocation and retort, in 1604 he plasters Sejanus with praise; but next year, after the failure of that Play, he hits it, so to say, when it is down.3 1 Tucca. 'Thou wrongst heere a good honest rascall Crispinus, and a poor varlet Demetrius Fannius (brethren in thine owne trade of Poetry); thou sayst Crispinus' sattin dublet is reveal'd out heere, and that this penurious sneaker is out of elboes.'-Satiromastix. Sir Vaughan. 'Master Horace, Master Horace . . . then begin to make your railes at the povertie and beggerly want of hair.' Follows a mock heroic eulogy of hair by Horace, thirty-nine lines in length.—Ibid. Tucca. They have sowed up that broken seame-rent lye of thine that Demetrius is out at Elbowes, and Crispinus is out with sattin.'—Ibid. 2 Dekker and Jonson are paid for 'Page of Plymouth, Aug. 20 and Sept. 2, 1599. Dekker, Jonson, and Chettle for Robert 2, King of Scots,' Sept. 3, 15, 16, 27, 1599.-Henslowe's Diary, quoted by Fleay. 3 Preface to Sophonisba :-' Know that I have not laboured in this poem to tie myself to relate anything as an historian, but to enlarge everything as a poet. To transcribe authors, quote authorities and translate Latin prose Between the two pieces of attention he collaborates with Jonson and Chapman in producing Eastward Ho.1 He, certainly, was no friend to Shakespeare; 2 for when The Metamorphosis of Pigmalion, his nasty' copy of Venus and Adonis the epithet is his own-failed as a plagiarism, he had the impudence (Scourge of Villainy, vi.) to declare it a parody, written to note "The odious spot And blemish that deforms the lineaments Yet he must have sided with Shakespeare now and then. As we shall see. But amidst the welter and confusion of this embroilment, it is possible to discern, if not a clear-cut line between opposed forces, at least a general grouping about two standards. There was the tribe of Ben, with Jonson for leader, and Chapman for his constant,3 Marston for his occasional, ally. And, to borrow the war-cries of 1830, there was opposed to this Classical army a Romantic levy, with Shakespeare, Dekker, and Chettle among orations into English blank verse, hath, in this subject, been the least aim of my studies':-an obvious blow at Sejanus. 1 In which Warton (History of English Poetry, iv. 276, ed. 1824) discovers many 'satirical parodies' of Shakespeare. Gifford replies; but Gertrude's parody of Ophelia's song, iii. 2, is a hard nut for the apologist, not to insist on the name-Hamlet-given to a footman who is accosted by Potkins with a 'S'foot, Hamlet, are you mad?' He harps on one of Shakespeare's lines, 'A man, a man, a kingdom for a man.' The first line of Sat. vii. The Scourge of Villainy (1598). 'A fool, a fool, a fool, my coxcomb for a fool.' Parasitaster. 'A boat, a boat, a full hundred marks for a boat.' Eastward Ho. 3 Jonson in his Conversations with Drummond said that 'he loved Chapman.' They were imprisoned together for satirising James First's Scotch Knights in Eastward Ho, but Chapman turned in his old age. One of his latest poems arraigns Ben for his overweening arrogance. |