27: 'His golden thigh.' The shape of the legs, the 'yellow cross-gartered stockings' of poor Malvolio in Twelfth Night are here ridiculed.
28: Malvolio says to his friends:—'I am not of your element.' In
the same play, great sport is made of this word, until the Fool himself
at last gets weary of it, when he says (act iii. sc. i):—'You are
out of my welkin—I might say element, but the word is overworn.'
29: Blackfriars, where Shakspere first acted, was a former cloister.
'On fish, when first a Carthusian I entered,' no doubt means that
from the beginning he had preferred keeping mute as a fish, in regard
to forbidden matters of the Church.
30: I.e., Christmas-pie. In the Prologue of The Return from Parnassus, this comedy is called a Christmas Toy. Shakspere is therein lavishly praised by his brother actors, whereas Jonson is spoken of as 'a bold whoreson, as confident now in making of a book, as he was in times past in laying of a brick.' A veritable libel!
31: Hamlet (act v. sc. 2):—
Methought, I lay
Worse than the mutines in the bilboes
32: Through Jonson's satire we always see the sanctimonious Jesuit
peering out.
33: These are the parables in which Hamlet speaks. Many a reader will
understand why Shakspere could not use more explicit language.
34: So the envious Jonson calls Shakspere's public who are satisfied with 'salad;' that is, with patchy compositions, pieced together from all kinds of material.
35: Jonson had Scottish ancestry.