' From all the characteristic
qualities of Crispinus we draw the conclusion that this figure
represented SHAKSPERE.
From the above-mentioned passage in 'The Return from Parnassus' it would
seem as if a '_pill_' had been administered in the play to several poets.
That is, however, not so. Then, as now, the plural form was a favourite
one with writers afraid to attack openly. Horace administers a pill
only to one poet--to Crispinus. And as Kemp says that Shakspere,
thereupon, gave a '_purge_,' the conclusion is obvious that he who took
revenge by administering the purge, must have been the one to whom
the pill had been given. 'Volpone,' a play directed against the
'purge'--that is, 'Hamlet'--will convince us that the chief controversy
lay between Jonson and Shakspere, and not between Jonson and Dekker.
The following points will, we think, make it still clearer that we are
warranted in believing that the figure of Crispinus was intended by
Jonson for Shakspere.
When, in presence of Augustus, as well as of the high jurors Maecenas,
Tibullus, and Virgil, the two poetasters have been heard; when Horace
has forgiven Demetrius, [23] and Crispinus, under the sharp effects of
the pill, has thrown up, amidst great pain, [24] the disgraceful
words which he had used against Horace, he is dismissed by the latter
with the admonition to observe, in future, a strict and wholesome diet;
to take each morning something of Cato's principles; then taste a
piece of Terence and suck his phrase; to shun Plautus and Ennius as
meats too harsh for his weak stomach, and to read the best Greeks,
'but not without a tutor.
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