Against this towering
rival, Jonson directed a hail of satirical arrows. Only take, for
instance, the prologue to 'Every Man in his Humour.' [18] There, Jonson,
with the most arrogant conceit, tries to make short work of various
dramas of Shakspere's--for instance, of his historical plays, in which
he dared--
... with three rusty swords,
And help of some few foot and half-foot words,
Fight over York and Lancaster's long jars,
And in the tyring-house bring wounds to scars.
In 'The Poetaster,' which in 1601 was acted by the children of the Queen's
Chapel, Jonson made an attack upon three poets. We hope to be able to
prove that the one most bitterly abused, and who is bidden to swallow
the 'pill,' is no other than Shakspere, whilst the two remaining ones
are John Marston and Thomas Dekker. From the 'Apologetical Dialogue'
which Jonson wrote after 'The Poetaster' had already passed over the
stage, we see that this satire had excited the greatest indignation
and sensation in the dramatic world. It was a new manner of falling
out with a colleague before the public. The conceited presumption
of the author, who in the play itself assumes the part of Horace,
seriously proclaiming himself as the poet of poets, as the worthiest
of the worthy, is not less enormous and repulsive than the way in
which he proceeds against his rivals.
Quite innocently, Jonson asks in that dialogue (which was spoken on the
stage after 'The Poetaster' had given rise to a general squabble), how
it came about that such a hubbub was made of that play, seeing that it
was free from insults, only containing 'some salt' but 'neither tooth,
nor gall,' whilst his antagonists, after all, had been the cause of
whatever remarks he himself had made:--
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