In the second ‘Returne,’ Burbage and Kemp, the noted morrice dancer and clown of Shakespeare’s company, are introduced. ‘Few of the University men pen plays well,’ says Kemp; ‘they smack too much of that writer Ovid, and that writer Metamorphosis, and talke too much of Proserpina and Jupiter. Why here’s our fellow Shakespeare’ (fellow is used in the sense of companion), ‘puts them all downe, ay, and Ben Jonson too. O that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow; he brought up Horace giving the Poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him bewray his credit.’ At Burbage’s request, one of the University men then recites two lines of ‘Richard III.,’ by the poet of his company.
Ben, according to Judge Webb, ‘bewrayed his credit’ in ‘The Poetaster,’ 1601-1602, where Pantalabus ‘was meant for Shakspere.’* If so, Pantalabus is described as one who ‘pens high, lofty, and in a new stalking strain,’ and if Shakespeare is the Poet Ape of Jonson’s epigram, why then Jonson regards him as a writer, not merely as an actor. No amount of evil that angry Ben could utter about the plays, while Shakespeare lived, and, perhaps, was for a time at odds with him, can obliterate the praises which the same Ben wrote in his milder mood. The charge against Poet Ape is a charge of plagiarism, such as unpopular authors usually make against those who are popular. Judge Webb has to suppose that Jonson, when he storms, raves against some ‘works’ at that time somehow associated with Shakespeare; and that, when he praises, he praises the divine masterpieces of Bacon. But we know what plays really were attributed to Shakespeare, then as now, while no other ‘works’ of a contemptible character, attributed to Shakespeare, are to be heard of anywhere. Judge Webb does not pretend to know what the things were to which the angry Jonson referred.** If he really aimed his stupid epigram at Shakespeare, he obviously alluded to the works which were then, and now are, recognised as Shakespeare’s; but in his wrath he denounced them. ‘Potter is jealous of potter, poet of poet’--it is an old saying of the Greek. There was perhaps some bitterness between Jonson and Shakespeare about 1601; Ben made an angry epigram, perhaps against Shakespeare, and thought it good enough to appear in his collected epigrams in 1616, the year of Shakespeare’s death. By that time the application to Shakespeare, if to him the epigram applied, might, in Ben’s opinion perhaps, be forgotten by readers. In any case, Ben, according to Drummond of Hawthornden, was one who preferred his jest to his friend.