The play is admittedly an attack upon the poetaster represented as Crispinus, and his identity is clear from Jonson’s own statement to Drummond (Laing, 20) that ‘he had many quarrells with Marston, beat him, and took his pistol from him, wrote his Poetaster on him’. Marston’s vocabulary is elaborately ridiculed in V. iii. Nor is there any reason to doubt that Demetrius Fannius, ‘a dresser of plaies about the towne, here’, who has been ‘hir’d to abuse Horace, and bring him in, in a play’ (III. iv. 367), is Dekker, who certainly associated himself with Marston as a victim of Jonson’s arraignment, and wrote Satiromastix (q.v.) in reply. At the same time these characters continue the types of Hedon and Anaides from Cynthia’s Revels, although these were not literary men. Horace is Jonson himself, as the rival portrait of Horace in Satiromastix shows, while Dekker tells us that Tucca is ‘honest Capten Hannam’, doubtless the Jack Hannam traceable as a Captain under Drake in 1585; cf. the reference to him in a letter of that year printed by F. P. Wilson in M. L. R. xv. 81. Fleay, i. 367, has a long list of identifications of minor personages, Ovid with Donne, Tibullus with Daniel, and so forth, all of which may safely be laid aside, and in particular I do not think that the fine eulogies of Virgil (V. i) are meant for Chapman, or for Shakespeare, applicable as some of them are to him, or for any one but Virgil. On the matter of identifications there is little to add to the admirable treatment of Small, 25. But in addition to the personal attacks, the play clearly contains a more generalized criticism of actors, the challenge of which seems to have been specially taken up by the Chamberlain’s men (cf. ch. xi), while there is evidence that Tucca and, I suppose, Lupus were taken amiss by the soldiers and the lawyers respectively. The latter at least were powerful, and in the epistle to Martin Jonson speaks of the play as one ‘for whose innocence, as for the Authors, you were once a noble and timely undertaker, to the greatest Iustice of this Kingdome’, and on behalf of posterity acknowledges a debt for ‘the reading of that ... which so much ignorance, and malice of the times, then conspir’d to haue supprest’. Evidently Jonson had not made matters better by his Apologetical Dialogue, the printing of which with the play was restrained. In this he denies that he
tax’d
The Law, and Lawyers; Captaines; and the Players
By their particular names;
but admits his intention to try and shame the
Fellowes of practis’d and most laxative tongues,
of whom he says, that during
three yeeres,
They did provoke me with their petulant stiles
On every stage.