From the above-mentioned passage in 'The Return from Parnassus' it would seem as if a 'pill' had been administered in the play to several poets. That is, however, not so. Then, as now, the plural form was a favourite one with writers afraid to attack openly. Horace administers a pill only to one poet—to Crispinus. And as Kemp says that Shakspere, thereupon, gave a 'purge,' the conclusion is obvious that he who took revenge by administering the purge, must have been the one to whom the pill had been given. 'Volpone,' a play directed against the 'purge'—that is, 'Hamlet'—will convince us that the chief controversy lay between Jonson and Shakspere, and not between Jonson and Dekker.
The following points will, we think, make it still clearer that we are warranted in believing that the figure of Crispinus was intended by Jonson for Shakspere.
When, in presence of Augustus, as well as of the high jurors Maecenas, Tibullus, and Virgil, the two poetasters have been heard; when Horace has forgiven Demetrius, [23] and Crispinus, under the sharp effects of the pill, has thrown up, amidst great pain, [24] the disgraceful words which he had used against Horace, he is dismissed by the latter with the admonition to observe, in future, a strict and wholesome diet; to take each morning something of Cato's principles; then taste a piece of Terence and suck his phrase; to shun Plautus and Ennius as meats too harsh for his weak stomach, and to read the best Greeks, 'but not without a tutor.'
This fits in with Shakspere's 'small Latin and less Greek'—a circumstance of which Jonson himself, in his poem in memory of Shakspere (1623), thought he should remind the coming generations.
It is, no doubt, a little revenge for the 'dark chamber' in which Malvolio [25] is imprisoned, that, after Horace has concluded his speech in which the study of Latin and Greek is recommended to Crispinus as something very necessary for him, Virgil should add the further advice:—
And for a week or two see him locked up
In some dark place, removed from company;
He will talk idly else after his physic.
The full name given by Jonson to Crispinus is—RUFUS LABERIUS CRISPINUS. John Marston already, in 1598, designates Shakspere with the nickname 'Rufus.' Everyone can convince himself of this by first reading Shakspere's 'Venus and Adonis,' and immediately afterwards John Marston's 'Metamorphosis of Pigmalion's Image.' [26] We do not know whether it has struck anyone as yet that this poem of Marston is a most evident satire, written even in the same metre as Shakspere's first, and at that time most popular, poem. [27] In his sixth satire of 'The Scourge of Villanie,' Marston explains why he had composed his 'Pigmalion's Image:'—
Yet deem'st that in sad seriousnesse I write such nasty stuff as in Pigmalion? Such maggot-tainted, lewd corruption! … Hence, thou misjudging censor: know I wrot Those idle rimes to note the odious spot and blemish that deformes the lineaments of modern poesies habiliments.
At the end of his satire ('Pigmalion's Image'), Marston self-complacently tacks on a concluding piece: 'The Author in Praise of his Precedent Poem.' Whom else does he address there than him whose poetical manner he wished to mock—namely, Shakspere's—when he begins with these words:—
Now, Rufus! by old Glebron's fearfull mace,
Hath not my Muse deserv'd a worthy place? …
Is not my pen compleate? Are not my lines
Right in the swaggering humour of these times?