So have I seen when Cæsar would appear,
And on the stage at half-sword parley were
Brutus and Cassius—oh, how the audience
Were ravish’d, with what wonder they went thence
When some new day they would not brook a line
Of tedious, though well laboured, Catiline.
[221] I wrote on this point in the article on Thomas Kyd in the Dictionary of National Biography (vol. xxxi.): ‘The argument in favour of Kyd’s authorship of a pre-Shakespearean play (now lost) on the subject of Hamlet deserves attention. Nash in 1589, when describing [in his preface to Menaphon] the typical literary hack, who at almost every point suggests Kyd, notices that in addition to his other accomplishments “he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragical speeches.” Other references in popular tracts and plays of like date prove that in an early tragedy concerning Hamlet there was a ghost who cried repeatedly, “Hamlet, revenge!” and that this expression took rank in Elizabethan slang beside the vernacular quotations from [Kyd’s sanguinary tragedy of] Jeronimo, such as “What outcry calls me from my naked bed,” and “Beware, Hieronimo, go by, go by.” The resemblance between the stories of Hamlet and Jeronimo suggests that the former would have supplied Kyd with a congenial plot. In Jeronimo a father seeks to avenge his son’s murder; in Hamlet the theme is the same with the position of father and son reversed. In Jeronimo the avenging father resolves to reach his end by arranging for the performance of a play in the presence of those whom he suspects of the murder of his son, and there is good ground for crediting the lost tragedy of Hamlet with a similar play-scene. Shakespeare’s debt to the lost tragedy is a matter of conjecture, but the stilted speeches of the play-scene in his Hamlet read like intentional parodies of Kyd’s bombastic efforts in The Spanish Tragedy, and it is quite possible that they were directly suggested by an almost identical episode in a lost Hamlet by the same author.’ Shakespeare elsewhere shows acquaintance with Kyd’s work. He places in the mouth of Kit Sly in the Taming of the Shrew the current phrase ‘Go by, Jeronimy,’ from The Spanish Tragedy. Shakespeare quotes verbatim a line from the same piece in Much Ado about Nothing (I. i. 271): ‘In time the savage bull doth bear the yoke;’ but Kyd practically borrowed that line from Watson’s Passionate Centurie (No. xlvii.), where Shakespeare may have met it.
[222] Cf. Gericke and Max Moltke, Hamlet-Quellen, Leipzig, 1881. The story was absorbed into Scandinavian mythology: cf. Ambales-Saga, edited by Mr. Israel Gollancz, 1898.
[224] Cf. Hamlet—parallel texts of the first and second quarto, and first folio—ed. Wilhelm Vietor, Marburg, 1891; The Devonshire Hamlets, 1860, parallel texts of the two quartos edited by Mr. Sam Timmins; Hamlet, ed. George Macdonald, 1885, a study with the text of the folio.
[226a] Arber’s Transcript of the Stationers’ Registers, iii. 226.
[226b] Ib. iii. 400.
[228] Less satisfactory is the endeavour that has been made by Mr. F. G. Fleay and Mr. George Wyndham to treat Troilus and Cressida as Shakespeare’s contribution to the embittered controversy of 1601-2, between Jonson on the one hand and Marston and Dekker and their actor friends on the other hand, and to represent the play as a pronouncement against Jonson. According to this fanciful view, Shakespeare held up Jonson to savage ridicule in Ajax, while in Thersites he denounced Marston, despite Marston’s intermittent antagonism to Jonson, which entitled him to freedom from attack by Jonson’s foes. The appearance of the word ‘mastic’ in the line (1. iii. 73) ‘When rank Thersites opes his mastic jaws’ is treated as proof of Shakespeare’s identification of Thersites with Marston, who used the pseudonym ‘Therio-mastix’ in his Scourge of Villainy. It would be as reasonable to identify him with Dekker, who wrote the greater part of Satiro-mastix. ‘Mastic’ is doubtless an adjective formed without recondite significance from the substantive ‘mastic,’ i.e. the gum commonly used at the time for stopping decayed teeth. No hypothesis of a polemical intention is needed to account for Shakespeare’s conception of Ajax or Thersites. There is no trait in either character as depicted by Shakespeare which a reading of Chapman’s Homer would fail to suggest. The controversial interpretation of the play is in conflict with chronology (for Troilus cannot, on any showing, be assigned to the period of the war between Jonson and Dekker, in 1601-2), and it seems confuted by the facts and arguments already adduced in the discussion of the theatrical conflict (see pp. 213-219). If more direct disproof be needed, it may be found in Shakespeare’s prologue to Troilus, where there is a good-humoured and expressly pacific allusion to the polemical aims of Jonson’s Poetaster. Jonson had introduced into his play ‘an armed prologue’ on account, he asserted, of his enemies’ menaces. Shakespeare, after describing in his prologue to Troilus the progress of the Trojan war before his story opened, added that his ‘prologue’ presented itself ‘arm’d,’ not to champion ‘author’s pen or actor’s voice,’ but simply to announce in a guise befitting the warlike subject-matter that the play began in the middle of the conflict between Greek and Trojan, and not at the beginning. These words of Shakespeare put out of court any interpretation of Shakespeare’s play that would represent it as a contribution to the theatrical controversy.
[230] England’s Mourning Garment, 1603, sign. D. 3.
[231] At the same time the Earl of Worcester’s company was taken into the Queen’s patronage, and its members were known as ‘the Queen’s servants,’ while the Earl of Nottingham’s company was taken into the patronage of the Prince of Wales, and its members were known as the Prince’s servants. This extended patronage of actors by the royal family was noticed as especially honourable to the King by one of his contemporary panegyrists, Gilbert Dugdale, in his Time Triumphant, 1604, sig. B.
[232a] The entry, which appears in the accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber, was first printed in 1842 in Cunningham’s Extracts from the Accounts of the Revels at Court, p. xxxiv. A comparison of Cunningham’s transcript with the original in the Public Record Office (Audit Office—Declared Accounts—Treasurer of the Chamber, bundle 388, roll 41) shows that it is accurate. The Earl of Pembroke was in no way responsible for the performance at Wilton House. At the time, the Court was formally installed in his house (cf. Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1603-10) pp. 47-59), and the Court officers commissioned the players to perform there, and paid all their expenses. The alleged tradition, recently promulgated for the first time by the owners of Wilton, that As You Like It was performed on the occasion, is unsupported by contemporary evidence.