From many hints in contemporary dramas, and from some clear passages in
'Hamlet' itself, it follows at the same time that the polemics carried
on by Shakspere in 'Hamlet' are in most intimate connection with a
controversy in which the public took a great interest, and which, in
the first years of the seventeenth century, was fought out with much
bitterness on the stage. The remarkable controversy is known, in
the literature of that age, under the designation of the dispute
between Ben Jonson and Dekker. A thorough examination of the dramas
referring to it shows that Shakspere was even more implicated in
this theatrical warfare than Dekker himself.
The latter wrote a satire entitled 'Satiromastix,' in which he replies
to Ben Jonson's coarse personal invectives with yet coarser abuse.
'Hamlet' was Shakspere's answer to the nagging hostilities of the
quarrelsome adversary, Ben Jonson, who belonged to the party which
had brought the philosophical work in question into publicity. And
the evident tendency of the innovations in the second quarto of
'Hamlet,' we make bold to say, convinces us that it must have been
far more Shakspere's object to oppose, in that masterly production
of his, the pernicious influence which the philosophy of the work
alluded to threatened to exercise on the better minds of his nation,
than to defend himself against the personal attacks of Ben Jonson.
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