Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/113

Rh would seem, savage hits at individuals, the sacrifice of interest to satiric purpose and pedantic display was carried still further. Allegory, to which Jonson returned in his last plays, is added to the other elements of tediousness—foolish gulling and diffuse dialogue. The play was acted by the children of the Queen's Chapel, a fact significant of the terms on which the author stood with his fellow-actors and playwrights, and the scornful closing words betray a consciousness of fighting a difficult battle—

"I'll only speak what I have heard him say,          'By God! 'tis good; and if you like it you may.'"

They were long remembered against him. All the incidents of the quarrel we shall never know—whether, for example, Shakespeare took part in it. He certainly refers to it in Hamlet; and The Return from Parnassus seems to imply that he had taken a leading part, although the words are ambiguous. It culminated in the production of The Poetaster and Dekker's Satiromastix. The Poetaster stands alone among Jonson's comedies, not only in its personal intention, but in virtue of its general plan. Jonson's conception of a comedy as the careful weaving of a plot in which folly is exposed, is here crossed by another idea of the duty of a dramatist, which appears most fully in his tragedies—namely, that in dealing with history he must be faithful to his authorities. The result in Jonson's work is a complete violation of Aristotle's rule that a play should not be episodic. In The Poetaster, Ovid's amour with