With regard to the “Poetaster,” it is now generally admitted that there is no evidence to support the assertion that, at the time this satirical play was written, its author was on bad terms with Shakespeare. In it Jonson announced his next production to be a tragedy, and in 1603 “Sejanus” followed at the Globe; Shakespeare was in the cast, and may have been also a collaborator. But the failure of this tragedy to please the patrons of the Globe may have led to a temporary estrangement from that theatre, for Jonson did not undervalue himself or forget that Chapman, as Mr. Acheson has clearly shown, was always a bitter opponent of Shakespeare, while it was characteristic of Jonson himself to be equally ready to defend or to quarrel with friends. Now in the “Poetaster” Jonson refers to Chapman and to his “divine” Homer, as, for instance, when he makes the father of Ovid say: “Ay, your god of poets there, whom all of you admire and reverence so much, Homer, he whose worm-eaten statue must not be spewed against but with hallowed lips and grovelling adoration, what was he? What was he?... You’ll tell me his name shall live; and that, now being dead, his works have eternized him and made him divine” (Act I., Scene 1.) Again, the incident of the gods’ banquet, although it is modelled by Ben Jonson upon the synod of the Iliad, is obviously a satire upon Chapman’s ecstatic admiration for Homer’s heroes. It may also refer to Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida,” for if this comedy was acted in 1598 it might well have been suppressed after its first performance, since to the groundlings it must have been “caviare,” and to Chapman’s allies, the scholars, a malicious piece of “ignorance and impiety,” while the Court would have been sure to take offence at the Essex incidents. Besides Jonson, in the “Poetaster,” seems to be defending someone from attacks who has dared to laugh at Chapman’s idol. This appears in such witty expressions as “Gods may grow impudent in iniquity, and they must not be told of it” ... “So now we may play the fool by authority” ... “What, shall the king of gods turn the king of good fellows, and have no fellow in wickedness? This makes our poets that know our profaneness live as profane as we” (Act IV., Scene 3.) Continually in this play is Jonson attacking Chapman for the same reason that Shakespeare did, and, more than this, Jonson proclaims that the poet Virgil is as much entitled to be regarded “divine” as Homer, while the word “divine” is seized hold of for further satire in the remark, “Well said, my divine deft Horace.”
Jonson says he wrote his “Poetaster” to ridicule Marston, the dramatist, who previously had libelled him on the stage. In addition to Marston, Jonson appeared himself in the play as Horace, together with Dekker and other men in the theatre. It was but natural, then, for commentators to centre their attention on those parts of the play where Marston and Horace were prominent. But there is an underplot to which very little attention hitherto has been given, and it is hardly likely, if Jonson was writing a comedy in order to satirize living persons and contemporary events, that his underplot would be altogether free from topical allusions. It may be well, then, to relate the story of the underplot, and, if possible, to try to show its significance. Julia, who is Cæsar’s daughter, lives at Court, and she invites to the palace her lover, Ovid, a merchant’s son, and some tradesmen of the town, with their wives; then she contrives, unknown to her father, for these plebeians to counterfeit the gods at a banquet prepared for them. An actor of the Globe reports to one of Cæsar’s spies that Julia has sent to the playhouse to borrow suitable properties for this “divine” masquerade, so that while the sham gods are in the midst of their licentious convivialities Cæsar suddenly appears, led there by his spy, and is horrified at the daring act of profanity perpetrated by his daughter. “Be they the gods!” he exclaims,
“Oh impious sight!...
Profaning thus their dignities in their forms,
And making them like you but counterfeits.”
Then he goes on to say:
“If you think gods but feigned and virtue painted,
Know we sustain our actual residence,
And with the title of our emperor
Retain his spirit and imperial power.”
And then, with correct imperial conventionality, he proceeds to punish the offenders, locking up his daughter behind “iron doors” and exiling her lover. Now, Horace—that is to say, Jonson—is supposed by the revellers to be responsible for having betrayed the inspirer of these antics. But this implication Jonson indignantly repudiates in a scene between Horace, the spy, and the Globe player, in which Horace severely upbraids them for their malice:
“To prey upon the life of innocent mirth
And harmless pleasures bred of noble wit,”
a rebuke that found expression in almost similar words in the 1609 preface to Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida”: “For it is a birth of (that) brain that never undertook anything comical vainly: and were but the vain names of comedies changed for titles of commodities or of plays for pleas, you should see all those grand censors that now style them such vanities flock to them for the main grace of their gravities.” Now Jonson, if he, indeed, intended to defend the attacks made on his friend Shakespeare’s play, has shown considerable adroitness in the delicate task he undertook, for since the “Poetaster” was written to be acted at the Blackfriars, a theatre under Court patronage, Jonson could not there abuse “the grand censors,” and this he avoids doing by making Cæsar justly incensed at the impudence of the citizens in daring to counterfeit the divine gods, while Horace, out of reach of Cæsar’s ear, soundly rates the police spy and the actor for mistaking the shadow for the substance and regarding playacting as if it were political conspiracy. But what, it may be contended, connects the underplot in the “Poetaster” directly with Shakespeare’s play is the speech of citizen Mercury and its satirical insistence that immorality may be tolerated by the gods:
“The great god Jupiter, of his licentious goodness, willing to make this feast no fast from any manner of pleasure, nor to bind any god or goddess to be anything the more god or goddess for their names, he gives them all free licence to speak no wiser than persons of baser titles; and to be nothing better than common men or women. And, therefore, no god shall need to keep himself more strictly to his goddess than any man does to his wife; nor any goddess shall need to keep herself more strictly to her god than any woman does to her husband. But since it is no part of wisdom in these days to come into bonds, it should be lawful for every lover to break loving oaths, to change their lovers, and make love to others, as the heat of everyone’s blood and the spirit of our nectar shall inspire. And Jupiter save Jupiter!”
Now this speech, it may be contended, is but a good-natured parody of Shakespeare’s travesty of the Iliad story, as he wrote it in answer to Chapman’s absurd claim for the sanctity of Homer’s characters. Shakespeare’s consciousness of power might naturally have incited him to place himself immediately by the side of Homer, but it is more likely that he was interested in the ethical than in the personal point of view. Unlike most of his plays, as Dr. Ward has pointed out, this comedy follows no single original source accurately, because the author’s satire was more topical than anything he had previously attempted, except, perhaps, in “Love’s Labour’s Lost.” But Shakespeare for once had miscalculated not his own powers, but the powers of the “grand censors,” who could suppress plays which reflected upon the morality or politics of those who moved in high places; nor had he sufficiently allowed for the hostility of the “sinners who lived in the suburbs.” Shakespeare, indeed, found one of the most striking compositions of his genius disliked and condemned not from its lack of merit, but for reasons that Jonson so forcibly points out in words put into the mouth of Virgil: