26: The y, in Pygmalion, seems to us not without cause to be changed
by Marston into an i.
27: The number of metaphors used by Shakspere in 'Venus and Adonis,'
which Marston travesties, is strikingly large.
28: A few instances may here be given of the coarseness with which Dekker pays back Jonson for his personal allusions. In The Poetaster, Crispinus is told that his 'satin-sleeve begins to fret at the rug that is underneath it.' In Satiromastix, Tucca cries out against Horace (Jonson):—'Thou never yet fel'st into the hands of sattin.' And again:—'Thou borrowedst a gowne of Roscius the stager, and sentest it home lousie.' Crispinus, in The Poetaster, is derided on account of his short legs. In Satiromastix, Horace is laughed at for his 'ambling' walk; wherefore he had so badly played mad Jeronimo's part. Jonson is reproached with all his sins: that he had killed a player; that he had not thought it necessary to keep his word to those whom he held to be heretics and infidels, and so forth. His face, which, as above mentioned, had scorbutic marks, is stated to be 'like a rotten russet apple when it is bruiz'd'; or, like the cover of a warming-pan, 'full of oylet-holes.' He is called an 'uglie Pope Bonifacius;' also a 'bricklayer;' and he is asked why, instead of building chimneys and laying down bricks, he makes 'nothing but railes'—'filthy rotten railes'—upon which alone his Muse leans. ('Railes' has a double meaning here: rails for fencing in a house; and gibes.) He is told that his feet stamp as if he had mortar under them—an allusion to his metrics, as well as to his ambling walk.
29: Shakspere was already then the proprietor of a house—New Place, in Stratford. In this scene Horace also asks Crispinus:—'You have much of the mother in you, sir? Your father is dead?' John Shakspere, the father, died in the year when The Poetaster was first performed—in September, 1601.
30: Twelfth Night, act iii. sc. 2. Sir Toby:—'Let there be gall in thy ink, though thou write with a goose-pen.'
31: Here Crispinus threatens Horace with the 'purge' (a word that may be used as a noun or a verb), which, in The Return from Parnassus, is mentioned as having been administered by Shakspere to Jonson. It is highly probable that the reconciliation between Crispinus and Horace, which is described in the beginning of Satiromastix, had taken place between Shakspere and Ben Jonson, and that, during this period of peace, the performance of Sejanus occurred, in which Shakspere actively co-operated. After that, traces of hostility only are to be discovered between the two poets.
Even when Horace, in the 'Satiromastix,' has again broken the peace,
the gentle Crispinus says to him:—
Were thy warpt soule put in a new molde,
I'd weare thee as a jewell set in golde.
32: The Satiromastix was performed in 1602, probably in the beginning of the year, as the Epilogue speaks of cold weather, and Dekker scarcely would have waited a year with his answer to The Poetaster. Queen Elizabeth died in 1603. Another decennium had to pass (Shakspere had long since withdrawn to his Stratford) before the taste of Whitehall had been so much lowered that Jonson could become a favourite of the courtly element.
33: In such type it is printed in the original.