There remain, then, in reality, only one or two passages in Bartholomew Fair, dating from 1614. We have already seen (ante, p. 337) that there may possibly be a satirical allusion to the Sonnets in the introduced puppet-play, The Touchstone of True Love. The Induction contains an unquestionable jibe, both at The Tempest and The Winter's Tale, whose airy poetry the downright Ben was unable to appreciate.[3] Neither Caliban nor the element of enchantment in The Tempest appealed to him, and in The Winters Tale, as in Pericles, it offended his classic taste and his Aristotelian theories that the action should extend over a score of years, so that we see infants in one act reappear in the next as grown-up young women.
But these trifling intolerances and impertinences must not tempt us to forget that it was Ben Jonson who wrote of Shakespeare those great and passionate lines:—
"Triumph, my Britain! thou hast one to show
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time!"
[1] "Observe him as his watch observes his clock."—Sejanus, i. I.
[2] He says of Jonson in The Times Displayed in Six Sesfyads:—
"So His, that Divine Plautus equalled,
Whose Commick vain Menander nere could hit,
Whose tragic sceans shal be with wonder Read
By after ages, for unto his wit
My selfe gave personal ayd, I dictated
To him when as Sejanus fall he writ,
And yet on earth some foolish sots there bee
That dare make Randolph his Rival in degree."
[3] "If there be never a servant-monster in the fair, who can help it, he says, nor a nest of antiques? He is loth to make Nature afraid in his plays, like those that beget tales, tempests, and such-like drolleries."