It is a pity to curtail this splendid passage, both for its lofty ideal of poetry, and for its corroboration of the Puritan complaints against the stage; but a few lines on a still stronger sentence occurs:—
‘The increase of which lust in liberty, together with the present trade of the stage, in all their masculine interludes, what liberal soul doth not abhor? Where nothing but filth of the mire is uttered, and that with such impropriety of phrase, such plenty of solecisms, such dearth of sense, so bold prolepses, such racked metaphors, with (indecency) able to violate the ear of a Pagan, and blasphemy to turn the blood of a Christian to water.’
So speaks Ben Jonson in 1605, not finding, it seems, play-writing a peaceful trade, or play-poets and play-hearers improving company. After him we should say no further testimony on this unpleasant matter ought to be necessary. He may have been morose, fanatical, exaggerative; but his bitter words suggest at least this dilemma. Either they are true, and the play-house atmosphere (as Prynne says it was) that of Gehenna: or they are untrue, and the mere fruits of spite and envy against more successful poets. And what does that latter prove, but that the greatest poet of his age (after Shakspeare has gone) was not as much esteemed as some poets whom we know to have been more filthy and more horrible than he? which, indeed, is the main complaint of Jonson himself. It will be rejoined, of course, that he was an altogether envious man; that he envied Shakspeare, girded at his York and Lancaster plays, at ‘The Winter’s Tale’ and ‘The Tempest,’ in the prologue to ‘Every Man in his Humour’; and, indeed, Jonson’s writings, and those of many other playwrights, leave little doubt that stage rivalry called out the bitterest hatred and the basest vanity; and that, perhaps, Shakspeare’s great soul was giving way to the pettiest passions, when in ‘Hamlet’ he had his fling at the ‘aiery of children, little eyases, that cry out on the top of question, and are most tyrannically clapped for ’t.’ It may be that he was girding in return at Jonson, when he complained that ‘their writer did them wrong to make them complain against their own succession,’ _i.e._ against themselves, when ‘grown to common players.’ Be that as it may. Great Shakspeare may have been unjust to only less great Jonson, as Jonson was to Shakspeare: but Jonson certainly is not so in all his charges. Some of the faults which he attributes to Shakspeare are really faults.