Jonson, in most cynical manner, means to say that
Hamlet had been impotent as regards his _innamorata_. Though
'for the nones' may be taken as 'for the nonce,' it yet comes close
enough to a _double-entendre_--namely, 'for the _nuns_.'
37: _Dramatic versus Wit Combats_. London, 1864. Ed. John Russell
Smith.
38: To mount a bank = mountebank.
39: From one of them poor Ben received a _vile medicine_: a _purge_.
40: 'Lewd'=unlearned.
41: Shakspere's _Autobiographical Poems_.
42: Karl Elze (_Essays on Shakespeare_; London 1874) thinks this passage
is intended against Shakespeare's alleged theft committed in the
_Tempest_, the composition of which he, therefore, places in the year
1604-5, while most critics assign it to a much later period. It must
also be mentioned that Karl Elze draws attention to the more friendly
words with which Jonson, in his own handwriting, dedicates his _Volpone_
to Florio.
In the opinion of the German critic, it is not difficult to gather from
this Dedication the desire of the meanly quarrelsome scholar Jonson
to give his friend Florio to understand that, among other things, he
would read with considerable satisfaction how he (Jonson) had made short
work with this 'Shake-scene' and this 'upstart Crow.'
43: Dekker tells Horace that his--Johnson's--plays are misliked at Court.
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