Hamlet. What are they children? Who maintains ’em? how are they escoted [i.e. paid]? Will they pursue the quality [i.e. the actor’s profession] no longer than they can sing? Will they not say afterwards, if they should grow themselves to common players—as it is most like, if their means are no better—their writers do them wrong to make them exclaim against their own succession?
Rosencrantz. Faith, there has been much to do on both sides, and the nation holds it no sin to tarre [i.e. incite] them to controversy: there was for a while no money bid for argument, unless the poet and the player went to cuffs in the question.
Hamlet. Is it possible?
Guildenstern. O, there has been much throwing about of brains!
Shakespeare clearly favoured the adult actors in their rivalry with the boys, but he wrote more like a disinterested spectator than an active partisan when he made specific reference to the strife between the poet Ben Jonson and the players. In the prologue to ‘Troilus and Cressida’ which he penned in 1603, he warned his hearers, with obvious allusion to Ben Jonson’s battles, that he hesitated to identify himself with either actor or poet. [217] Passages in Ben Jonson’s ‘Poetaster,’ moreover, pointedly suggest that Shakespeare cultivated so assiduously an attitude of neutrality that Jonson acknowledged him to be qualified for the role of peacemaker. The gentleness of disposition with which Shakespeare was invariably credited by his friends would have well fitted him for such an office.
Jonson’s ‘Poetaster.’
Jonson figures personally in the ‘Poetaster’ under the name of Horace. Episodically Horace and his friends, Tibullus and Gallus, eulogise the work and genius of another character, Virgil, in terms so closely resembling those which Jonson is known to have applied to Shakespeare that they may be regarded as intended to apply to him (act v. sc. i.) Jonson points out that Virgil, by his penetrating intuition, achieved the great effects which others laboriously sought to reach through rules of art.
His learning labours not the school-like gloss
That most consists of echoing words and terms . . .
Nor any long or far-fetched circumstance—
Wrapt in the curious generalities of arts—
But a direct and analytic sum
Of all the worth and first effects of arts.
And for his poesy, ’tis so rammed with life
That it shall gather strength of life with being,
And live hereafter, more admired than now.
Tibullus gives Virgil equal credit for having in his writings touched with telling truth upon every vicissitude of human existence.
That which he hath writ
Is with such judgment laboured and distilled
Through all the needful uses of our lives
That, could a man remember but his lines,
He should not touch at any serious point
But he might breathe his spirit out of him.
Finally, Virgil in the play is nominated by Cæsar to act as judge between Horace and his libellers, and he advises the administration of purging pills to the offenders. That course of treatment is adopted with satisfactory results. [218]
Shakespeare’s alleged partisanship.
As against this interpretation, one contemporary witness has been held to testify that Shakespeare stemmed the tide of Jonson’s embittered activity by no peace-making interposition, but by joining his foes, and by administering to him, with their aid, the identical course of medicine which in the ‘Poetaster’ is meted out to his enemies. In the same year (1601) as the ‘Poetaster’ was produced, ‘The Return from Parnassus’—a third piece in a trilogy of plays—was ‘acted