Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 1.djvu/350

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NOTES AND QUERIES. [9* s. i. APRIL 30, m

But the context is Jaques's request of the Duke for leave to wear motley, so that he may rail with licence. When we take into consideration the dates of the respective plays, it is impossible to miss the innuendo here. But the rebuke is delicately turned, and does not overstep the limits of admis- sible allusion. It would be ridiculous to suggest that Jaques is a caricature of Jonson; but it is possible that Jonson's enemies so regarded it. Contemporaries must at any rate have noted the mock-echo. If stress was laid upon it "by any indirection," this was one of the literary attacks of which Jonson complained in the ' Apolpgetical Dialogue ' appended to ' Poetaster ' in 1601, when he says of some contemporary play- wrights :

Three years

They did provoke me with their petulant styles

On every stage.

The part of Chrysoganus in ' Histriomastix ' is the only instance which can be traced with certainty. But a similar attack is attributed to Shakespeare in a well-known passage of ' The Returne from Parnassus,' Act III. sc.iii.:

' ' Few of the vniuersity men pen plaies well,

Why heres our fellow Shakespeare puts them all downe, I and Ben lonson too. O that Ben lonson is a pestilent fellow, he brought yp Horace gluing the Poets a pill [the reference here is to ' Poetaster'], but our fellow Shakespeare hath giuen him a purge that made him beray nis credit."

The speaker here is the actor Kemp, a member of the Chamberlain's company, for which " our fellow Shakespeare " wrote from 1599 to 1603, and 'As You Like It' was written in this period. ' The Returne from Parnassus ' was acted at St. John's College, Cambridge, in January, 1603 (Fleay, * Chro- nicle of the English Drama,' ii. p. 354), though the prologue says it had been written twelve months before, i. e., when ' Poetaster ' was still running, or had just left the stage.* The coincidence of date makes it certain that Shakespeare was glanced at in a further passage of the ' Apologetical Dialogue,' where Jonson ends his comments upon hostile play- wrights with the significant words :

Only amongst them I am sorry for

Some better natures, by the rest so drawn

To run in that vile line.

It is, perhaps, even possible that a con- temporary misreading of the part of Jaques saw in it the "purge" referred to by the Cambridge playwright. Such suggestions are, of course, pure con-

words in Act III. sc. i., " This winter has made us all poorer than so many starv'd snakes,"
 * * Poetaster ' was acted late in 1601 : cf. Histrio's

jecture, and " the best in this kind are but shadows " ; but it is worth noting that some perplexing points in the careers of Shake- speare and of Ben Jonson may be solved by the aid of existing data. PERCY SIMPSON.

THE BULGARIAN LANGUAGE.

THE learned Reader in the Slavonic Lan- guages at Oxford University, Mr. W. R. Morfill, considers the old Bulgarian language to be identical with the Palaeoslavonic, a point upon which eminent authorities differ. Bulgarian has probably been less studied in England than its Slavonic sisters, even than Czech and Servian. Mr. Morfill's simplified Bulgarian grammar gives a fuller insight into the principles of the language than his similar grammars of Servian and Polish, and possesses the additional advantage of inter- esting literary extracts for reading practice, including the charming ballads 'Where is Bulgaria 1 ? ' by Vasov, ' The Janissary and the Fair Dragana,' and ' The Farewell of Liben.'*

The variations of Bulgarian from its sister tongues are numerous and striking. The postponement of the definite article is derived from non-Slavonic tongues. The declensions of substantives have undergone phonetic decay, the preposition na(i. e. Russian on, upon) being frequently employed to form the geni- tive and dative. The Slavonic az (I, ego) survives in Bulgarian, the Russian ya being an interjection. There is no regular form for the Bulgarian infinitive, as in Russian and Servian the latter preserving the Slavonic termination it being expressed by means of the preposition da. The Bulgarian verb is richer in tenses than the Russian, possessing an aorist and an imperfect. The future, as in Servian, is formed with the auxiliary stche (khotieti\ a verb expressing desire in Russian. Bulgarian orthography is as com- plete as Russian, the Servian, like Italian, having a tendency to soften and elide con- sonants. A peculiarity of Servian may be i mentioned: the feminine instrumental case of substantives resembles the Russian instru- mental masculine, the words mat (mother), riba (fish), and volia (will) becoming materom, ribom, and voliom. The comparative of adjec- tives is formed in Bulgarian and Servian by means of the preposition ot (od), i.e. Russian from.

The assimilative character of Bulgarian is best illustrated by its vocabulary. The pages of Duvernois's Bulgaro-Russian dictionary

cluded in Mr. Morfill's manual of early Slavonic literature.
 * Pretty translations of the latter two are in-