truth but a reproach upon Venus and Adonis, he says, and the accent is familiar :

'Think'st thou that genius that attends my soul,

And guides my fist to scourge magnificos,

Will deign my mind be rank'd in Paphian shows?' :Indeed, when we remember the wit combats' at the Mermaid, in which these pot companions and public antagonists-Carlo Buffone cheek by jowl with Asper-rallied each other on their failings, and Jonson's anecdote1 that he had once 'beaten Marston and taken his pistol from him,' it is pleasant to imagine that the name of Shakespeare's scurrilous puff was the nickname of Jonson's shifty ally. For in considering this wordy war, it is necessary to remember that the fight was, in the main, a pantomime rally,' in which bigsounding blows were given and returned for the amusement of the gallery. Captain Tucca, the character borrowed from The Poetaster to set an edge on Dekker's retort, speaks the Epilogue to Satiromastix, and begs the audience to applaud the piece in order that Horace (Jonson) may be obliged to reply once again. Half in fun and half in earnest did these ink-horn swash-bucklers gibe each other over their cups, and trounce each other on the boards. Yet behind all the chaff and bustle ' of that terrible Poetomachia lately commenced between 1 Drummond's Conversations.

2 Jonson comments on some such adventure in his Epigrams, LXVIII.—On Playwright :

'Playwrit convict of public wrongs to men,
Takes private beatings, and begins again.
Two kinds of valour he doth shew at once;
Active in's brain, and passive in his bones.'

The Quarto of Shakespeare's Henry V. was published in 1600. Pistol is beaten in it, as Thersites is beaten in Troilus. Pistol uses the fustian word 'exhale'; so does Crispinus in Poetaster (noted by Fleay). Pistol's 'Fetch forth the lazar kite of Cresides kinde' is reminiscent of Troilus, produced the year before. Pistol's 'What, have we Hiren here' is a mock quotation from an early play of which Marston makes use more than once.

1

Horace the Second and a band of lean-witted poetasters,' there was a real conflict of literary aims; and in that conflict Shakespeare took the part of the Romantics, upon whose ultimate success the odds were, in Dekker's nervous phraseology, 'all Mount Helicon to Bun-hill.' Without seeking further

2

to distinguish the champions, it is sufficient to know that Shakespeare was an actor and a playwright throughout the alarums and excursions of these paste-board hostilities, whose casualties, after all, amounted but to the lamentable merry murdering of Innocent Poetry.' 3

'3

IX

In examining the relation between the lyrics which Shakespeare wrote and the environment of his life, it was impossible to overlook this controversy which must have lasted longer and bulked larger than any other feature in that life. For Shakespeare, the man, was in the first place an actor and a playwright bound up in the corporate life of the Company to which he belonged. We are apt to reconstruct this theatric world, in which he had his being, fancifully from his Plays rather than from the Plays of his contemporaries, and from the few among his Plays which are our favourites, just because they differ most widely from theirs. But his world of everyday effort and experience was not altogether, as at such times

:

1 Address 'To the World' prefixed to Satiromastix. The author thanks Venusian Horace for the 'good words '-detraction, envy, snakes, adders, stings, etc.-which he gives him. They are taken from the Prologue to The Poetaster.

2 To the World' prefixed to Satiromastix.

3 Dekker, Epilogue to Satiromastix. In the thick of the fray, 1601, Jonson, Chapman, Marston, and Shakespeare each contributed a poem on The Phonix and the Turtle to Robert Chester's Love's Martyr!

4 The Venus and Lucrece were written, of course, years before the Poetomachia; but, unless we accept the improbable view that Shakespeare brought his Venus with him from Stratford, both were written under conditions to which the Poetomachia gives a clue.

it may seem to us, a garden of fair flowers and softly sighing winds and delicate perfumes, nor altogether a gorgeous gallery of gallant inventions: it was also garish, strident, pungent; a Donnybrook Fair of society journalists, a nightmare of Gillray caricature. 'A Gentleman,' you read, or an honest Citizen, shall not sit in your pennie-bench Theatres with his squirrel by his side cracking nuttes; nor sneake into a Taverne with his Mermaid; but he shall be satyr'd, and epigram'd upon, and his humour must run upo' the Stage: you'll ha Every Gentleman in's humour, and Every Gentleman out on's humour.'1 Shakespeare tells the same story, when he makes Hamlet say of the players:-They are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time after your death you were better to have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.'2 Note that he speaks of the actors, not the playwrights: though much of their satire turned on size of leg, scantness of hair, pretensions to gentility and seediness of apparel in well-known individuals veiled under transparent disguises. Far more obvious even than such lampooning was the actors' 'guying' of persons and types which we see reflected in Troilus 3 and enacted in Cynthia's Revels. The actor playing Crites (v. 3) takes off every trick of speech and gesture in the person whom he caricatures, for, says Hedon:'Slight, Anaides, you are mocked'; and again, in the Induction, one of the three children who play it borrows the Prologue's

1 Dekker's Satiromastix. In his address 'To the World' he instances Captain Hannam as the living prototype taken for Tucca by Jonson. In the earlier Marprelate plays (circa 1589) Nash's antagonist, Gabriel Harvey, was put on the stage. Aubrey, before 1680, wrote that 'Ben Jonson and he (Shakespeare) did gather humour of men dayly wherever they came.'

2 Hamlet, II. ii. 501. Fleay, History of the Stage, p. 160:—' 1601, May 10, the Council writes to the Middlesex Justices complaining that the players at the Curtain represent on the stage 'under obscure manner, but yet in such sort as all the hearers may take notice both of the matter and the persons that are meant thereby': certain gentlemen that are yet alive. 3 1. iii. 140-196. III. iii. 266-292. Cf. supra.

f

cloak, and mimics, one after another, the gallants who frequent the theatre; so that here is the 'genteel auditor' to the life, with his three sorts of tobacco in his pocket,' swearing-' By this light' as he strikes his flint, that the players 'act like so many wrens,' and, as for the poets-' By this vapour-that 'an 'twere not for tobacco the very stench of them would poison' him.

We can picture from other sources both the conditions of Shakespeare's auditors and the upholstering of his stage. Dekker,' describing how a gallant should behave himself at a playhouse,' writes of the groundling who masked the view of the 'prentices :-' But on the very rushes where the comedy is to dance, yea, under the state of Cambyses himself, must our feathered estridge, like a piece of ordnance, be planted valiantly (because impudently) beating down the mews and hisses of the opposed rascality.' The dignity of Cambyses state' may be guessed from Henslowe's list of grotesque properties-Serberosse (Cerberus') three heads; Ierosses (Iris') head and rainbow; 1 tomb of Dido; 1 pair of stairs for Fayeton (Phaethon) and his 2 leather antic's coats' and 'the city of Rome(!). The galant in gorgeous apparel, his jerkin 'frotted' with perfumes, spikenard, opoponax, ænanthe,' the 'Courtmistress' in 'Satin cut upon six taffetaes,' the 'prentice and harlot viewed these plays, farced with scurrilous lampoons, and rudely staged on rushes, through an atmosphere laden with tobacco and to an accompaniment of nut-cracking and spitting. This was Shakespeare's shop, the 'Wooden O' into which he crammed 'the very casques

That did affright the air at Agincourt,' 4

and in which, year after year, he won fame and wealth and rancorous envy from defeated rivals.

We catch a last note of detraction, in Ratseis' Ghost (1605-6),

1 Gull's Horn-Book.

2 Quoted by Fleay, History of the Stage, 114.

3 Cynthia's Revels.

4 Chorus to Henry V. i.

wherein the phantom hightobyman advises a strolling Player to repair to London :-'There thou shalt learn to be frugal (for players were never so thrifty as they are now about London), and to feed upon all men; to let none feed upon thee; to make thy hand a stranger to thy pocket, thy heart slow to perform thy tongue's promise; and when thou feelest thy purse well lined, buy thee some place of lordship in the country, that, growing weary of playing, thy money may then bring thee to dignity and reputation: then thou needest care for no man; no, not for them that before made thee proud with speaking their words on the stage.' 'Sir, I thank you,' quoth the Player, 'for this good council: I promise you I will make use of it, for I have heard, indeed, of some that have gone to London very meanly and have come in time to be exceeding wealthy.' It is significant, almost conclusive, to know that Shakespeare's name appeared on the roll of the King's Players for the last time in 1604 and that in 1605 he purchased an unexpired term (thirty years) in the lease of tithes, both great and small, in Stratford: thus securing an addition to his income equal to at least £3501 a year of our money.

X

Behind this life of business, on and for the stage, Shakespeare, as the friend of young noblemen, saw something of the Court with its gaiety and learning and display, ever undermined by intrigue, and sometimes eclipsed by tragedy. He was impeded in his art by controversies between puritans, churchmen, and precisians, and exercised in his affection for those who to their own ruin championed the old nobility against the growing power of the Crown. As a loyal citizen of London, he must have grieved at her sins and diseases, over which even Dekker, the railing ruffler of Satiromastix, wailed at last in the 1 Baynes.