_Sly_. What are your additions? _Burbadge_. Sooth, not greatly needefull, only as your sallet (salad) to your greate feast--to entertaine a little more time, and to abridge the not received custome of musicke in our theater. I must leave you, Sir. [_Exit_ Burbadge. _Sinklow_. Doth he play _The Malcontent_? _Condell_. Yes, Sir.
Our explanation of the Induction is this: Marston has committed satirical trespass upon _Hamlet_. Shakspere, on his part, made use of the chief action and the chief characters of _The Malcontent_ in his _Measure for Measure_ ('One for Another'); but he did so in his own nobler manner. From the wildly confused material before him he composed a magnificent drama. Once more, in the very beginning of act i. sc. I, Shakspere makes the Duke utter words, each of which is directed against the inactive nature of Montaigne:--
Thyself and thy belongings Are not thine own so proper as to waste Thyself upon thy virtues, them on thee. ...For if our virtues Did not go forth of us, 't were all alike As if we had them not.
Shakspere's contemporaries were not over careful as regards style. 'With the additions played by the Kings Maiesties Servants, written by John Webster,' means that the additions, in which the servants of His Majesty, in the 'Induction,' are brought on the stage, were written by John Webster.
Read the 'Extempore Prologue' which Sly speaks at the conclusion of the Induction--a shameless travesty of the Epilogue in _As You Like It_. Read the beginning of act iii. sc. 2 of _The Malcontent_, where Malevole ('in some freeze gown') burlesques the splendid monologue in King Henry the Fourth (Part 11. act iv. sc. I). Read act iii. sc. 3 of _The Malcontent_, where Marston sneers at the scene in act iv. of _King Richard the Second_ when Richard says:--
Now is this golden crown like a deep well, That owes two buckets filling one another.
50: Is it imaginable that Shakspere could have allowed his own most beautiful productions to be thus leered at, and mocked, in his own theatre? Our feeling rebels against the thought.
Beniamini Jonsonio Poetae Elegantissimo Gravissimo Amico Suo Candido et Cordato Johannes Marston, Musarum Alumnus, Asperam Hanc Suam Thaliam DD.