‘Private playes’ were plays acted by amateurs, with whom the ‘Children’ might well be classed.
[214a] All recent commentators follow Steevens in interpreting the ‘late innovation’ as the Order of the Privy Council of June 1600, restricting the number of the London playhouses to two; but that order, which was never put in force, in no way affected the actors’ fortunes. The First Quarto’s reference to the perils attaching to the ‘noveltie’ of the boys’ performances indicates the true meaning.
[214b] Hamlet, II. ii. 349-64.
[215] At the moment offensive personalities seemed to have infected all the London theatres. On May 10, 1601, the Privy Council called the attention of the Middlesex magistrates to the abuse covertly levelled by the actors of the ‘Curtain’ at gentlemen ‘of good desert and quality,’ and directed the magistrates to examine all plays before they were produced (Privy Council Register). Jonson subsequently issued an ‘apologetical dialogue’ (appended to printed copies of the Poetaster), in which he somewhat truculently qualified his hostility to the players:
‘Now for the players ’tis true I tax’d them
And yet but some, and those so sparingly
As all the rest might have sat still unquestioned,
Had they but had the wit or conscience
To think well of themselves. But impotent they
Thought each man’s vice belonged to their whole tribe;
And much good do it them. What they have done against me
I am not moved with, if it gave them meat
Or got them clothes, ’tis well; that was their end,
Only amongst them I am sorry for
Some better natures by the rest so drawn
To run in that vile line.’
[217] See p. 229, note I, ad fin.
[218] The proposed identification of Virgil in the ‘Poetaster’ with Chapman has little to recommend it. Chapman’s literary work did not justify the commendations which were bestowed on Virgil in the play.
[220] The most scornful criticism that Jonson is known to have passed on any composition by Shakespeare was aimed at a passage in Julius Cæsar, and as Jonson’s attack is barely justifiable on literary grounds, it is fair to assume that the play was distasteful to him from other considerations. ‘Many times,’ Jonson wrote of Shakespeare in his Timber, ‘hee fell into those things [which] could not escape laughter: As when hee said in the person of Cæsar, one speaking to him [i.e. Cæsar]; Cæsar, thou dost me wrong. Hee [i.e. Cæsar] replyed: Cæsar did never wrong, butt with just cause: and such like, which were ridiculous.’ Jonson derisively quoted the same passage in the induction to The Staple of News (1625): ‘Cry you mercy, you did not wrong but with just cause.’ Possibly the words that were ascribed by Jonson to Shakespeare’s character of Cæsar appeared in the original version of the play, but owing perhaps to Jonson’s captious criticism they do not figure in the Folio version, the sole version that has reached us. The only words there that correspond with Jonson’s quotation are Cæsar’s remark:
Know, Cæsar doth not wrong, nor without cause
Will he be satisfied
(III. i. 47-8). The rhythm and sense seem to require the reinsertion after the word ‘wrong’ of the phrase ‘but with just cause,’ which Jonson needlessly reprobated. Leonard Digges (1588-1635), one of Shakespeare’s admiring critics, emphasises the superior popularity of Shakespeare’s Julius Cæsar in the theatre to Ben Jonson’s Roman play of Catiline, in his eulogistic lines on Shakespeare (published after Digges’s death in the 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s Poems):