Shakespeare’s alleged partisanship.
As against this interpretation, one contemporary witness has been held to testify that Shakespeare stemmed the tide of Jonson’s embittered activity by no peace-making interposition, but by joining his foes, and by administering to him, with their aid, the identical course of medicine which in the ‘Poetaster’ is meted out to his enemies. In the same year (1601) as the ‘Poetaster’ was produced, ‘The Return from Parnassus’—a third piece in a trilogy of plays—was ‘acted
by the students in St. John’s College, Cambridge.’ In this piece, as in its two predecessors, Shakespeare received, both as a playwright and a poet, high commendation, although his poems were judged to reflect somewhat too largely ‘love’s lazy foolish languishment.’ The actor Burbage was introduced in his own name instructing an aspirant to the actor’s profession in the part of Richard the Third, and the familiar lines from Shakespeare’s play—
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York—
are recited by the pupil as part of his lesson. Subsequently in a prose dialogue between Shakespeare’s fellow-actors Burbage and Kempe, Kempe remarks of university dramatists, ‘Why, here’s our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down; aye, and Ben Jonson, too. O! that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow. He brought up Horace, giving the poets a pill; but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him bewray his credit.’ Burbage adds: ‘He is a shrewd fellow indeed.’ This perplexing passage has been held to mean that Shakespeare took a decisive part against Jonson in the controversy with Dekker and Dekker’s actor friends. But such a conclusion is nowhere corroborated, and seems to be confuted by the eulogies of Virgil in the ‘Poetaster’ and by the general handling of the theme in ‘Hamlet.’ The words quoted from ‘The Return from Parnassus’ hardly admit of a literal interpretation. Probably the ‘purge’ that Shakespeare was alleged by the author
of ‘The Return from Parnassus’ to have given Jonson meant no more than that Shakespeare had signally outstripped Jonson in popular esteem. As the author of ‘Julius Cæsar,’ he had just proved his command of topics that were peculiarly suited to Jonson’s vein, [220] and had in fact outrun his churlish comrade on his own ground.