of Villainy. “Monsieur Orange,” whispers Clove to his companion, as they are walking in the middle aisle of Paul’s, “yon gallants observe us; prithee let’s talk fustian a little and gull them; make them believe we are great scholars.” Presently we have the passage containing the Marstonian words (which I have printed in italics):—
“Now, sirs, whereas the ingenuity of the time and the soul’s synderisis are but embryons in nature, added to the paunch of Esquiline,[16] and the intervallum of the zodiac, besides the ecliptic line being optic and not mental, but by the contemplative and theoric part thereof doth demonstrate to us the vegetable circumference and the ventosity of the tropics, and whereas our intellectual, or mincing capreal (according to the metaphysics) as you may read in Plato’s Histriomastix.[17] You conceive me, sir?"
In the first scene of the second act, Puntarvolo addresses Carlo Buffone as “thou Grand Scourge, or Second Untruss of the time,” in allusion to Marston’s Scourge of Villainy.
Cynthia’s Revels was produced in 1600 and printed in 1601. In this play, Anaides and Hedon are represented as being jealous of Crites, and as seeking by underhand
means to bring him into discredit. It is certain that Jonson was glancing particularly at Marston and Dekker. In the second scene of the third act, Crites, defending himself against his two traducers, observes:—
“If good Chrestus,
Euthus, or Phronimus, had spoke the words,
They would have moved me, and I should have call’d
My thoughts and actions to a strict account
Upon the hearing; but when I remember
’Tis Hedon and Anaides, alas, then
I think but what they are, and am not stirr’d.
The one a light voluptuous reveller,
The other a strange arrogating puff,
Both impudent and arrogant enough;
That talk as they are wont, not as I merit;
Traduce by custom, as most dogs do bark;
Do nothing out of judgment, but disease;
Speak ill because they never could speak well:
And who’d be angry with this race of creatures?”
Dekker in Satiromastix[18] puts four of these lines (“I think but what they are ... arrogant enough”) into the mouth of Horace (Jonson), plainly assuming that the abuse was intended for Marston and himself. Marston, too, in What You Will (p. xlviii.), fastens on this speech of Crites and uses it as a weapon against Jonson. Cynthia’s Revels was quickly followed by The Poetaster, which was produced in 1601 by the Children of the Queen’s Chapel. Hitherto, Jonson had merely skirmished with his adversaries; in The Poetaster he assails them might and main with all the artillery of invective. Marston
is ridiculed as Crispinus, and Dekker as Demetrius Fannius. Crispinus is represented as a coarse-minded, ill-conditioned fellow, albeit of gentle parentage, who, like the bore encountered by Horace in the Via Sacra, is prepared to adopt the meanest stratagems in order to gain admittance to the society of courtiers and wits. He plots with the shifty out-at-elbows Demetrius (a witless “dresser of plays about the town here,” to wit, Thomas Dekker), and a huffing Captain Tucca, to disgrace Horace (Ben Jonson). But the attempt results in a ludicrous failure; Crispinus and Demetrius are arraigned at a session of the poets, and, after receiving a severe rebuke for their calumnies, are contemptuously dismissed on taking oath for their future good behaviours. In court a dose of hellebore is administered to Crispinus, who thereupon proceeds to vomit up gobbets of Marston’s fustian vocabulary. When the physic has worked its effect Virgil gives Crispinus such advice as Lycinus gave to Lexiphanes in Lucian’s dialogue; bidding him form his style on classical models and not
“hunt for wild outlandish terms
To stuff out a peculiar dialect.”
The Poetaster was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 21st December 1601, and Satiromastix had already been entered on the 11th of the preceding month. The title-page of Satiromastix bears only Dekker’s name, and to Dekker the play is attributed in the Stationers’ Register. It was doubtless with Marston’s approval that Dekker took up the cudgels against the truculent