It is apparent that he again echoes Nashe's and Greene's attacks upon Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd, all of which, however, he appears to have thought (as have later critics) were directed against Shakespeare.
The lines quoted above evidently reflect Chapman's knowledge of Nashe's preface to Greene's Menaphon in the expressions "Scriveners boy," "artist prentice," and "ballad-monger," while the words
"shall dippe
Profaning quills into Thessalies spring"
refer to Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, and the lines from Ovid with which he heads that poem.
In 1593 when, as I have indicated, Histriomastix in its early form was written, Shakespeare had published Venus and Adonis and dedicated it to the Earl of Southampton. In the composition of this poem Shakespeare undoubtedly worked from Arthur Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. He prefixed to the poem two lines from Ovid's fifteenth Elegy:
"Vilia miretur vulgus; mihi flavus Apollo
Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua";
which are rendered in Marlowe's translation:
"Let base conceited wits admire vile things,
Fair Phœbus lead me to the Muses springs."
In The Shadow of Night, published in the following year, Chapman again resents the fact that one of Shakespeare's "small Latin and less Greek" should invade the classical preserves of the scholars for his poetical and dramatic subjects:
"Then you that exercise the virgin court
Of peaceful Thespia, my muse consort,
Making her drunken with Gorgonean dews,
And therewith all your ecstasies infuse,
That she may reach the topless starry brows
Of steep Olympus, crown'd with freshest boughs
Of Daphnean laurel, and the praises sing
Of mighty Cynthia: truly figuring
(As she is Hecate) her sovereign kind,
And in her force, the forces of the mind:
An argument to ravish and refine
An earthly soul and make it more devine.
Sing then with all, her palace brightness bright,
The dazzle-sun perfection of her light;
Circling her face with glories, sing the walks,
Where in her heavenly magic mood she stalks,
Her arbours, thickets, and her wondrous game,
(A huntress being never match'd in fame,)
Presume not then ye flesh-confounded souls,
That cannot bear the full Castalian bowls,
Which sever mounting spirits from the senses,
To look into this deep fount for thy pretenses."