Wither, moreover, quarrelled with the Stationers’ Company and the printers (who disapproved of his independent method of business), which also was a subject for Jonson’s ridicule in the Masque:
One is his Printer in disguise, and keepes
His presse in a hollow tree, where to conceale him,
He workes by glow-worme light, the moon’s too open, etc., etc.
In the Dict: of National Biography we are told that “Jonson quarrelled with Alex. Gill the elder for having quoted Wither’s work with approval in his ‘Logonomia Anglica’ (1619), and Jonson revenged himself by caricaturing Wither under the title of ‘Chronomastix’ in the Masque of Time Vindicated presented at Court 1623-4,” and allusion is made to Jonson’s sarcasm with regard to Wither’s quarrel with his printers.
Further, we find John Chamberlain writing to Sir Dudley Carleton, on January 25, 1622-3, as follows with reference to the Masque of Time Vindicated: “Ben Jonson they say is like to hear of it on both sides of the head for personating George Withers, a poet or poetaster he terms him, as hunting after some, by being a Chronomastix, or whipper of the time, which is become so tender an argument that it must not be admitted either in jest or earnest.” (The Court and Times of James the First. Ed. 1848. Vol. II, p. 356.)
These facts seem to have been well known to Mr. Smithson, for not only does he quote John Chamberlain’s letter in his Nineteenth Century article, where he expresses the opinion that “Chronomastix” is “a caricature compounded in unequal proportions of George Wither and the Ovid Junior of Jonson’s Poetaster (as to which see an interesting chapter in Shakespeare-Bacon, headed “A Caricature of some Notable Elizabethan Poet,” together with the chapter following), but among his manuscripts were found certain Notes with reference to George Wither which I cite lower down. It will be seen, however, that he was convinced that Jonson, while lampooning and ridiculing Wither, the scourger of the time, had for his main object the glorification of the Shakespearean drama under cover of a Masque—those glorious works wherein “Time,” which had been vilified by Wither, found its all-sufficient and splendid “Vindication.”[35]]
The following are Mr. Smithson’s Notes to which I have made reference:
“Wither sends
Abroad a Satyr with a scourge;
That to their shame for this abuse shall strip them,
And being naked in their vices whip them.
(Abuses Stript and Whipt. Ed. 1622, p. 305.)
He gives Justices of Peace a warning lest they be put out of the Commission for partiality (p. 318). Ruffling Cavaliars also are touched (p. 320).
In the address to the reader of Shepheard’s Hunting, Wither to some extent recants his disgust at Time—says he has been ‘persuaded to entertain a better opinion of the Times than I lately conceived, and assured myself, that Virtue had far more followers than I supposed.’ Curiously enough, therefore, Wither’s frame of mind in 1622[36] seems to have been similar to that of Jonson in Time Vindicated. The coincidence would help perhaps to mislead the judgment of the time, and may have so commended itself to Jonson.