Poetaster | The Cambridge Works of Ben Jonson

Edited by Gabriele Bernhard Jackson

INTRODUCTION

Place in Jonson’s development

Poetaster opened on the stage of the Blackfriars Theatre in 1601 already connected by threads of personal, literary, thematic, and political attachment to the current London scene and Jonson’s previous work. In a seeming paradox, the play’s topical focus and personal satire anchors the implicit claims to universality made by its classical Roman setting. The classical borrowing of Jonson’s earlier plays becomes a full-scale demonstration and justification of imitatio, the renovation of past artistic work by updated form and modern application. Poetaster is an imitatio about imitatio. In this governing trope, Rome and London constantly mimic, use, and signify each other in a formal experiment to generate meaning and judgement. For its original audience, Poetaster brought together apparently disparate foci of cultural restlessness such as the growing use of satire; governmental fear of treason; the social and political power of rapidly changing linguistic usage; and the rise of a new social medium, commercial theatre itself.

In Every Man Out of His Humour and Cynthia’s Revels Jonson had used a mythic version of Queen Elizabeth as a centre of value, but by the end of the politically stressful 1590s Elizabeth’s diminished mana could hardly have supported that kind of burden either in a public theatre or for the more sophisticated and politically aware Blackfriars audience. Jonson’s substitution of Augustus Caesar and a Roman scene grounds Poetaster instead in a continuous appeal to a stabilizing force firmly fixed in the structure of Elizabethan education. The gravitas this lends to Poetaster’s comedy differentiates the play decisively from its predecessors as much as from Jonson’s coming tragedy, Sejanus (1603). Even though Poetaster’s backbiting informers and trigger-happy magistrate foreshadow Sejanus, Poetaster filters its views of cultural unrest through the lens of Augustan ridicule and refracts it with multiple comic plots and language games. The play’s overall tone, strongly influenced by Jonson’s membership in a circle of friends at the Inns of Court – centres of legal activity, lively social life, theatre-going, and literary productivity – is full of the liberated wit and delight in absurdity characteristic of Jonson’s later comic masterpieces.

Early history: the quarto and folio texts

Poetaster was staged in 1601 by the misleadingly named Children of Queen Elizabeth’s Chapel, a commercial acting company of boys founded at the rebuilt Blackfriars Theatre in September 1600, for which Jonson had written Cynthia’s Revels (see Poetaster, title-page, 6–8n.). In December 1601 Henry Clifton, the father of a boy seized to act in the troupe, legally charged the company with conscripting schoolboys under colour of the managers' authorization to draft choristers as chapel singers. Among Clifton's examples were three St Paul's School pupils, including Poetaster's lead players Salomon Pavy and Nathan Field (I. Smith, 1964, 485), to both of whom Jonson was warmly attached. However, since the then High Master of St Paul's was known to augment his income by illegitimate uses of his position (see McDonnell, 1959, 167–9 and 174–6), it is tempting to speculate that the triple raid on St. Paul's was instead a private deal; cf. Poetaster, 3.4.227–8 and note.

Poetaster itself, which created an uproar with its topical satire, was suspected by officialdom of subversive intent but saved from suppression by the good offices of Richard Martin, later the dedicatee of Poetaster in folio. The play caricatured fellow playwrights John Marston and Thomas Dekker and was itself quickly parodied by the latter’s lampoon on Jonson, Satiromastix (‘Scourge of the Satirist’), staged by the Chamberlain’s Men and also by Paul’s Boys. Jonson retaliated in an ‘Apology’ (i.e. explanation and defence): an epilogue to Poetaster performed only once. In 1602 Poetaster and Satiromastix came out separately in quarto, Jonson’s play without his ‘Apology’, which he had been forced ‘by authority’ to omit (see collation for ‘To The Reader’, 2–9). Neither play was restaged before the twentieth century.

Poetaster next appeared in somewhat expanded form in the 1616 folio (F1) of Jonson's works. This folio version is the copy-text for the present edition. Although F1 omits one quarto passage and alters individual words, more important are its additions to Q: first, passages of satire on lawyers and theatre people, apparently deleted from the quarto (for details see Textual Essay, Electronic Edition; and Cain, ed., Poetaster, 278–81); second, new marginal descriptions of stage action; and third, an ‘Apologetical Dialogue’, Jonson’s new title for his F1 version of Q’s censored ‘Apology’ (never printed). This F1 ‘Dialogue’, possibly named to indicate a new format, is our main source for knowledge of Poetaster’s origin and of the violent reactions it provoked. Together these features of F1 to bring the reader closer than the quarto can to the experience of watching Poetaster and participating in its milieu.

Three literary additions to the folio are the play’s dedication, the genre designation ‘A comical satire’, and scene 3.5. The dedication’s reference to ‘the times then’ (8) was evidently written for the 1616 printing. Its word ‘undertaker’ (5), which came into politicized currency after the Addled Parliament of 1614 (Butler, 1993a, 384), supports this dating. Both the genre and term ‘comical satire’ were Jonson’s invention. The term was printed on the quarto title-pages of Every Man Out of His Humour in 1600 but not used again for the quarto printing of Cynthia’s Revels (entered for publication 23 May 1601) nor revived for the 1602 quarto of Poetaster, although added to the title-pages of both those plays in the 1616 folio. Unlike the quartos of Every Man Out of His Humour, those of Cynthia’s Revels and Poetaster were printed after the revolt and execution of the Earl of Essex in February 1601 had intensified official scrutiny of printed matter for violations of the 1599 ban on printed satire issued by the Bishops of London and Canterbury.

The abandonment of ‘comical satire’ increases the likelihood that Poetaster 3.5, translating Horace’s defence (Satires 2.1) of poetic satire, was not in the play’s original version either. Nonetheless, an overlap between lines 3.5.65–8 in Poetaster (see note) and lines 1.2.250–3 of Dekker’s parodic Satiromastix means that a 1601–2 staging (or circulating manuscript) of Poetaster 3.5 cannot be ruled out. Poetaster 3.5 advances a crucial theme: the difference between defamation and socially cauterizing satire. Since English libel law paralleled Roman law (see notes to 3.5.125–40), Jonson is obliquely arguing for his own satire’s legality. However, the static 3.5 does not match the active staging style of quarto Poetaster. The scene’s emphasis on legal dangers to satire sound more like a reaction to the quarto’s expurgation and the suppression of its ‘Apology’. There seems little incentive for Jonson to have created the scene over a decade later for the unendangered folio.

A ‘puzzling change’ to Jonson’s quarto text, as Tom Cain remarks in his 1995 edition (283), is the folio’s omission of all the quarto’s mentions of knights. Cain notes that, despite Jonson’s 1605 imprisonment for jests in Eastward Ho! about King James’s free-handed creation of knights, folio comedies other than Poetaster retained satire on knights. The same could be said of epigrams in the folio.

However, this puzzle disappears if the folio Poetaster is set beside Jonson’s other two Roman plays Sejanus and Catiline. Both of them painstakingly avoid the specious parallel between a Roman eques (lit. ‘horseman’) – member of a broad class of socially elite families – and an English knight, individual recipient of a non-heritable distinction in rank. Both plays consistently render eques/equites as ‘gentleman/-men’ and ‘gentry’, or else reconfigure or drop Jonson’s source phrase. In Sejanus (1603), just two years later than Poetaster, ‘knight’ never appears. Jonson’s new terminology is traceable to his use of Richard Grenewey’s 1598 translation of Tacitus’s Annales (Annals) in composing Sejanus. In the very first line of the Argument to Jonson’s play, Sejanus’s father changes from the Seio Strabone equite Romano of Tacitus (Annales, 4.1.2) into Grenewey’s ‘Seius Strabo, a gentleman of Rome’. Jonson retains this usage, which respects cultural equivalence rather than verbal correspondence, in Catiline (1611). It would appear that when Jonson subsequently carried over his ‘Roman’ vocabulary from the quarto texts of Sejanus and Catiline into their folio printings, he ‘translated’ Poetaster’s mentions of knights into English analogues just as he had eques and equites in the other two Roman plays. (See Textual Essay, Electronic Edition for Jonson’s relevant changes to Poetaster (Q) and to his sources for Sejanus and Catiline.)

The identical limitation of vocabulary in the folio’s Roman plays makes any alternative explanation of it in Poetaster unlikely, including the theory advanced by Cain that Jonson was eradicating reminders of an imputation in Satiromastix that he had betrayed a knightly patron, Sir John Salusbury (283–4). Revision to bring Poetaster into line with the other Roman plays better explains why Jonson excised even laudatory mentions of knights.

Date of the first production

Because in 1601–2 the topical satire both in and of Poetaster reflected partisan relationships in London’s theatrical and social worlds, the date of its first performance is of particular interest. If Jonson began writing when free of Cynthia’s Revels in January 1601, his ‘fifteen weeks’ of work (Induction, 14) could have ended in April when theatres reopened after Lent. Histrio’s complaint that ‘this winter has made us [actors] all poorer than . . . starved snakes. Nobody comes at us’ (Poetaster, 3.4.266–7), spoken as if during a protracted winter, could loosely fit a chilly spring. Nonetheless, the balance of evidence, including considerations additional to Cain’s wide-ranging discussion (28–9) favours a new date.

Cain (28) tentatively identifies Tucca’s threat in Poetaster to have Horace ‘whipped . . . for his satires and his humours’ (4.3.99–100) as an echo of John Weever’s attack on ‘the Satirist . . . and Humorist’ in his Whipping of the Satire (Stationers’ Register 14 August 1601). A sequel in Satiromastix (ed. Bowers, 1953, 5.2.241–3) confirms this (cf. H & S, 1.29n.). That play’s Tucca tells its Horace: ‘I owe thee a whipping still [i.e. as I said in Poetaster] . . . It shall not be the Whipping o’ the Satyre.’ The twin allusions date both plays to a time later than mid-August.

Moreover, in Satiromastix the phrase ‘Now at Christmas’ (4.1.190–1), spoken to Horace, implies a production on the boards in December or January (Parrott, 1911, 404). More significantly, the words witness that Dekker probably added the Horace plot to his pre-existing play (see below, xxx) late in the year, changing the setting from summer to winter; in Satiromastix, 1.1 and 4.3.5–7, flowers bloom, unnoticed and unremoved in Dekker’s hasty revision. Furthermore, Dekker’s Tucca taunts his Horace/Jonson with an old saw: ‘you . . . break out like Christmas, but once a year, and then you keep a revelling [Cynthia’s Revels] and arraigning [Poetaster, or The Arraignment]’ (Satiromastix, 5.2.202–3). This sally probably does allude to Poetaster’s date, since the saying was used in that semi-punning way elsewhere; Dekker worked in November 1602 on a play called Christmas Comes But Once a Year (Henslowe, Diary, 219–21).

A late date for Poetaster leaves little time for Dekker to have written Satiromastix before that parody of Jonson’s play was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 11 November, but Dekker wrote remarkably fast. He had a partially written framework ready for adaptation; Poetaster provided targets for satirical barbs; and precedents for these were in Marston’s previous plays (see below). Besides, Satiromastix was entered ‘Upon condition that it be licensed to be printed’. The Stationers’ Company issued its licence after a manuscript had been authorized by an examiner from the state’s censorship system (Chambers, ES, 3.172–3, 190, and 293; and Blayney, 1997, 398). Dekker’s play may well have been unexamined before its contingent registration on 11 November and therefore need not have been much more than recently begun. It could have opened as late as the first week in December and still have left Jonson, energized by rage, a fortnight to write the ‘Apology’ intended for inclusion in Poetaster’s quarto and submit the entire manuscript either before or after seeing the ‘Apology’ through its one performance (cf. ‘To the Reader’, 3).

On that hypothetical schedule, Dekker could have begun writing (with concurrent rehearsals) very soon after a Poetaster opening: in early November, or no earlier than the second half of October. Both dates are somewhat later than Cain’s but consonant with his proposal of ‘[a] series of performances over the Michaelmas/winter season of 1601–2’ (28). Just as Tucca’s phrase ‘break out like Christmas’ suggests an indefinite period around the holiday, so Histrio’s ‘this winter’ could have suggested an indefinite backward extension of that season once the year had clearly entered upon its long, cold decline.

Origin of the play

In 3.4 of Poetaster a hack writer named Demetrius appears, commissioned by an unnamed Bankside acting company to write a drama vilifying Horace, Poetaster’s idealized satirist. Demetrius is a version of Thomas Dekker, who subsequently did attack Jonson in Satiromastix just as 3.4 predicts and had his play acted on the south bank of the Thames, at the Globe by the Chamberlain’s Men (and across the river by Paul’s Boys). Jonson’s accurate anticipation of Dekker’s satire, taken with Envy’s statement (Induction, 14–15) that Poetaster was prepared in fifteen weeks – considered an unusually short time for Jonson – appears to show that Jonson composed the play at crisis speed after hearing of Dekker’s coming attack, in a successful effort to be first to reach the stage.

This is the account widely accepted by scholars (see Cain, 3.4.322–4n.), but its narrative is less than completely satisfying. Steggle (1998b), 48–9, and in part Gair (1982), 134 are previous sceptics. In addition to their objections (see below) we should observe first that Livor or Envy, who speaks Poetaster’s Induction, does not present the play as having been written quickly: ‘this, this is it / That our sunk eyes have waked for all this while’ (3–4), he explains; ‘these fifteen weeks / . . . Have I with burning lights mixed vigilant thoughts / In expectation of this hated play, / To which at last I am arrived as Prologue’ (14–18). All the emphasis falls on fifteen weeks as a long period. Secondly, Jonson was plainly not in a writing race. If Dekker had already agreed to satirize Jonson as the Roman poet Horace, he almost certainly would have created some context for the lampoon other than the two plots Satiromastix sets in the reign of the English King Rufus II (AD 1087–1100). Obviously, too, the characters and actions Dekker imported from Poetaster were not available until after Jonson’s play was written (Steggle, 1998b, 48–9), nor were the minutiae of wording and imagery Dekker lifted from Poetaster to scatter through his own play. Also surprising is Dekker’s access to Poetaster over enough time to blend his large selection from its vocabulary into Satiromastix. The materials taken from Poetaster raise the question whether, without Jonson’s play, a Dekkerian lampoon on Jonson would ever have materialized (or ever was intended to materialize). In 1619 Jonson told the poet Drummond of Hawthornden that he ‘wrote his Poetaster on’ Marston, and he gave the beginning of their ‘many quarrels’ as Marston’s representation of him on stage (Informations, 216–18). As in Poetaster’s ‘Apologetical Dialogue’ (80–7), Jonson identified his play as a response to the past, not to an anticipated assault. Although for Drummond Jonson included Dekker in a list of ‘rogues’ (Informations, 35), he did not connect Dekker to Poetaster.

What really happened? Dekker may have been too busy to fulfil his commission until his hand was forced by Poetaster; he was working collaboratively in spring 1601 (Henslowe, Diary, 168–70) and maybe on Blurt, Master Constable in autumn (Hoy, 1978–80, 1.179–80 and Chambers, ES, 3.439). Arguably the fastest playwright in London, however (see Henslowe, Diary, General Index), Dekker is not likely to have deferred so juicy a commission for four months (cf. Steggle, 1998b, 48). Yet if Dekker had no such commission, it seems an odd coincidence that the Chamberlain’s Men did stage Satiromastix very soon after Poetaster appeared. Alternatively, Dekker and Jonson, recent co-authors for the Admiral’s Men, might have colluded in their satires, each playwright giving the other access to his work in manuscript. Such co-operation might have allowed a winter opening date in November for Poetaster, quickly followed by the already prepared Satiromastix and Jonson’s ‘Apology’; but a collaborative scenario would not account for Dekker’s use of his incongruous pre-existing play or for Jonson’s virulent ‘Apologetical Dialogue’. Gair suggests that Dekker, Marston (then the director of Paul’s Boys), and the Chamberlain’s Men tricked Jonson with a false rumour into a public attack, both troupes standing to reap box office benefits from their ‘defence’ against him if he took the bait (Gair, 1982, 134). But was there ever a rumour? Or was it Jonson who baited Dekker with Demetrius’s plans in Poetaster? Because hypothesis easily hardens into fact and creates history despite visible lacunae and self-contradictions, we need to recognize that we do not yet have a persuasive narrative about Poetaster’s origin.

Sources

Jonson from the start links ‘comical satire’ to the Greek Old Comedy. In Every Man Out of His Humour, Jonson’s spokesman Cordatus explains that Aristophanes was Old Comedy’s most perfect exponent, but reserves to modern dramatists the right to ‘heighten our invention’ (Induction, 225–6, 247–54). Of formal Aristophanic structure all that remains in Poetaster is the parabasis imitated in the folio text’s ‘Apologetical Dialogue’; in its Greek form, this was a choric interlude addressed to the audience, in which the lead speaker represented the poet defending himself (see headnote to the ‘Apologetical Dialogue’). In Poetaster Jonson dropped the chorus (retained as the Grex in Every Man Out of His Humour and the godlings in Cynthia’s Revels) and apparently meant to eschew the structure of Old Comedy entirely, until the furore aroused by Poetaster recalled him to Aristophanism. Still, the anonymous play Lingua, alluding to the year 1602 and therefore to Poetaster in quarto, published without the ‘Apology’ Jonson had intended for it, nevertheless called Jonson ‘too-too satirical . . . like his great grandfather Aristophanes’ (Bradley and Adams, 1922). Tonal though not structural reminiscences of that playwright do remain. Tucca certainly incarnates the aggressive Aristophanic mode: ‘urban, unromantic, flamboyantly scoffing, and reductively earthy’ (Ostovich, EMO, Intro. 18); but against Tucca the play balances Horace, the ‘poet useful to the city’ (Horace, Epistulae 2.1.124; cf. 4.6.43n. below), an aspect of Aristophanes without the bludgeon. And although Poetaster’s stylistic parodies of Marston and Dekker recall the hilarity of Aristophanes’ contest between tragedians in The Frogs, the climactic vocabulary-vomiting scene in Poetaster is based firmly on Lexiphanes (The Style-Flaunter) by Lucian.

This writer, handed down to Elizabethan literati by Erasmus and Thomas More as ‘a “festive” example of the liberated intellect’, claimed to have united the ‘serious connotations of philosophical dialectic with the wit and fantasy of Aristophanic comedy’ (Duncan, 1979, 77 and 10). It is his spirit, in which philosophy and ideology feed on the fantastic, that often dominates in Poetaster. His ‘Carousal’ – the locus classicus for the debased ‘festive ideal’ (Duncan, 1979, 132–3) – hangs over the deteriorating banquet of 4.5, supported by parody of The Iliad and by Plutarch’s Moralia but inspiring no overt onstage judgement, since the scene’s ‘effectiveness . . . depends absolutely on the non-expression of the author’s viewpoint’, Lucian’s typical technique. Even after Caesar condemns the banquet in 4.6, Horace’s palliative comment on it in 4.7 is ‘allowed to complicate a moral issue by making a case for Lucianic wit on non-moral grounds’ (Duncan, 1979, 14 and 132).

Selections from Horace, primarily from the satires, make up the source most frequently quoted in Poetaster, although the histories of Suetonius and Dio Cassius, combined with the Aeneid and with the life of Virgil by the rhetorician Aelius Donatus, are a near second in the scenes involving Caesar. In creating the character Horace, Jonson stays close to that poet’s self-presentation and tone: both his mildness (3.1–2) and his outburst at those who sabotage the state’s harmony (5.3.281–95 and notes). Jonson keeps similarly to his biographical and fictional sources to represent Caesar. He builds on Caesar’s words about his daughter, Julia (see 4.6), as well as his known distaste for informers (see 5.3). In 5.1.1, before Caesar has had access to the as yet unfinished Aeneid, Jonson has him describe a principle of his sovereign rule in words spoken in that epic by Aeneas’s father – as though Jonson’s Caesar had already heard across past centuries his forebear speaking words of counsel that Virgil had yet to write. Jonson surely knew that James VI of Scotland, in 1601 the likely next sovereign of England, had used these same words in 1599 to conclude Basilikon Doron (‘A Royal Gift’), his ‘instructions to his dearest son’, in a similar imitatio reaching backwards into time and fiction and forward into the real future. (Jonson refers to this in his marginal note to Haddington, 1608, 178 (see p. 43n. 12). cf. Poetaster, 5.1.1n.)

Such conflations in Poetaster of literature and history with fictions of past life, and of past life with present time, generate a temporal palimpsest that is comic and sobering by turns. By ‘being there’ in ancient Rome, the audience gets the surprise of finding out that the bore who pestered Horace was all along John Marston. But they must also listen as the fate of the present fictional Ovid unravels into the past poet’s real sorrows in extracts from Ovid’s Elegiae, Fasti, and Tristia. A different transhistorical effect opens up the play’s whole method at its start. When Jonson’s Ovid in 1.1 recites Marlowe’s emended translation of the poet Ovid’s narrative of literary continuity from Greece to his own lifetime, the principle of poetic continuity extends itself into Elizabethan England by way of Marlowe and Jonson. A growing crowd of excerpts from other classics and from mythographers adds continually to the ancient presence in London.

Contemporary sources in English mingle on an equal footing with the Latin and Greek. In 3.1, Donne’s Satire 4 enriches Horace’s Satires 1.9. Chapman’s eroto-philosophical poem Ovid’s Banquet of Sense joins Lucian in shaping the banquet of 4.5 and inspires the content of 4.9 alongside Shakespeare and Aristotle. Details of the mock trials traditional at the Inns of Court mingle with Lucianic phrases in 5.3. Altogether, Poetaster draws from over seventy writers, about half English and half Greek and Latin, and a much greater number of works. All the English works were current in 1601; almost half of these are plays, seven of them older dramas newly slated for revival.

Multiplying sources is in part a Lucianic game played with the Blackfriars audience, especially its Inns of Court men. Like Lucian, Jonson in Poetaster ‘carried . . . literary allusion to quite extraordinary lengths’, creating ‘a diversion in which the writer not only displays his own wit but also tests and invigorates the wit of his readers’ (Duncan, 1979, 22 and 25). Since many of Jonson’s extracts were from either popular literature or school texts, his audience was well equipped to enjoy playing the Poetaster game.

Theatrical rivalry

In the ‘Apologetical Dialogue’, 83–5, Jonson’s Author declares: ‘Three years / They did provoke me [challenge me to a fight] . . . / On every stage.’ Despite uncertainties about a widespread ‘War of the Theatres’ or ‘Poets’ War’ (variously defined, e.g. by Shapiro, 1991; Bednarz, 2001; and Cathcart, 2008), it is safe to say that Marston, abetted in spirit by Dekker, did mount a high-level heckling campaign against Jonson in plays written from 1599 through the first part of 1601. Not content with near-farcical incarnations of Jonson’s personal traits, Marston integrated these caricatures first into comedic objections against what he considered Jonson’s satirically arrogant work and then into purpose-designed plot structures directly opposed to those of Jonson (see also Hoy, 1978–80; Steggle, 1998b; and Bednarz, 2001). Jonson, deeply resentful (cf. above), triumphed in Poetaster partly by adapting his bosom adversary’s best techniques.

Histriomastix (c. 1599), an anonymous morality drama, contains patches of Marston’s characteristic vocabulary and is probably his revision of an older play, into which he fits intermittent satire of the sometimes Jonsonian character Chrisoganus. This name, meaning ‘born or descended of gold’, was originated by Marston’s cousin Everard Guilpin in a 1598 epigram apparently mocking Jonson’s complexion – later called ‘saffron-cheek sunburnt’ in Satiromastix, 1.2.367–8 (cf. Finkelpearl, 1969, 121 and n.53). A soliloquy by Marston’s Chrisoganus in Act 4 that pits lesser men’s ‘shining gloss’ and ‘unworthy shine of eminence’ against the ‘dusky fortune’ of his ‘soul’s bright gem’ (The Plays of John Marston, ed. Wood, 1934–9, 3.281) reads suspiciously like Marston’s exploitation of his cousin’s lampoon, perhaps enlivened on stage by face make-up. Marston also satirizes Chrisoganus’s contempt for others’ work and his harsh corrective satire. Adept at ‘[a] stabbing satire or an epigram’ (3.257), he is a prideful playwright who calls the world ‘idiot’ when his drama is rejected (3.281).

Yet in Act 1 Histriomastix seems to endorse Chrisoganus, who there delivers lectures imbued with philosophical idealism, perhaps survivals from the play’s older version. This grandiloquence moved Jonson to dub the play ‘Plato’s Histriomastix’ in Every Man Out of His Humour, 3.1.147–8; in 3.1.142–55, two characters intermix Chrisoganus’s language with vocabulary from Marston’s 1598–9 satires. Some scholars identify these characters with Marston and Dekker.

Although Every Man Out of His Humour ignores Marston’s pointed caricature of Chrisoganus, two years later Jonson’s exact memory of it enriches Poetaster to devastating effect. Jonson turns the colour joke back upon its deviser: Marston, whose hair seems to have been reddish, or rufous, emerges in Poetaster as the would-be poet Rufus Crispinus, almost certainly in a closely curled (crisp-ed) red wig. Crispinus’s slander of Horace, whom he declares a ‘puffed-up lump of barmy froth’ (5.3.241), repeats the words of Chrisoganus in Histriomastix, who damns his rivals as ‘huge fat lumps’ that ‘fill . . . with froth’ and become ‘puffed up’ (Marston ed. Wood, 3.274 and 282). In short, the futile malevolence Marston attributes to his Jonson figure rebounds into the mouth of Crispinus/Marston himself, who is forced to expel it as ‘[b]army froth’, ‘puffy’ (5.3.439) before he can achieve mental health.

By the time he wrote Poetaster, Jonson had endured Marston’s second assault, Jack Drum’s Entertainment (1600). In its subplot the character Brabant Sr, a type of the Jonsonian comical satirist in Every Man Out of His Humour, manoeuvres to expose and eradicate the obsessive idiosyncrasies or ‘humours’ of fools (cf. Cain, 33–4 and Bednarz, 2001, 138 and 140–4). Like Jonson’s satirist, he delights to ‘grope a gull’ (handle a foolish dupe; cf. Cynthia (Q), 4.3.281) by inviting others to ‘see his humour’ (Marston, ed. Wood, 3.190, 191). Brabant Sr orders up ‘a quart of Canary’, Jonson’s preferred wine (EMO, Ind. 302–03), and similarly disparages ‘our modern wits’ (226 and 221; cf. Informations, 12–38). Like Horace/Jonson in Satiromastix (1.2.36 and 4.3.98–9), Brabant Sr applauds his own jokes and wears a ‘perpetual grin’ (ed. Wood, 190).

In addition, Marston’s new caricature functions as centre of a revisionist version of comical satire: a critique by form. Brabant Sr ‘gropes’ gulls until his master trick to cure a priapic Frenchman boomerangs and Brabant Sr finds that he has arranged his own cuckolding. He himself is the one gull whose obsessive delusion – of curing humours – he has managed to dissipate. Unlike the satirist or gulls in Every Man Out of His Humour, however, Brabant Sr is both chastised and initiated into his community. Crowned with cuckold’s horns – a customary ceremony of welcome to Highgate, where the play is set (Finkelpearl, 1969, 137n.18) – he will ‘triumph [prevail and rejoice] in the horn’ (Marston, ed. Wood, 3.240). Marston thereby proclaims literary triumph over the impotent genre of punitive comical satire and its proxy author, to whom Marston kindly offers social space for reformation.

Jonson returns this compliment with interest at the end of Poetaster. He crowns his Demetrius (Dekker) with a fool’s cap, which like Brabant Sr’s horns signifies both an offence and a ‘satisfaction’ (atonement) to ‘every fair and generous assembly’ (Poetaster, 5.3.513–18). Crispinus (Marston), too, receives emblematic garb, as well as an opportunity to become ‘more sound and clear’ (5.3.496). But given their literary and human defects, their social acceptance remains far in the future – and merely conditional (5.3.513–17, 523–39).

A year earlier, Jonson’s own Cynthia’s Revels (1600) had already modified his genre by making his comical satire less exultantly ‘stabbing’ and more ultimately corrective. The scholar-satirist Criticus is a parodist of society who nonetheless sees potential for curing foolish ‘offenders’ (Cynthia (Q), 5.5.221) at the court of Cynthia and proceeds to do so. For Cynthia Criticus composes first a didactic court masque, then a final comic ritual to reform court society. Jonson’s less malevolent but more effective satirist and integrative conclusion revise just those features of comical satire that Marston attacked. At the same time, Jonson fictionalizes Marston’s attacks on him as slanders about Criticus, uttered by Jonson’s characters Hedon (‘Voluptuary’) and Anaides (‘Impudence’).

Marston and Dekker saw Hedon and Anaides as lampoons on them; Dekker later made his vainglorious Horace/Jonson in Satiromastix (1.2.149–5 and 153–6) dismiss its Crispinus and Demetrius (i.e. Marston and Dekker) using the very words of Criticus about Hedon and Anaides (Cynthia (Q), 3.3.24–7). Marston retaliated more quickly in a new comedy, What You Will (1601).

Evidently responding to the name Hedon, Marston personates himself in What You Will as a sardonic hedonist, Quadratus (= square: right and honest; also divergent: OED, Square adj. 6c and 10c). His philosophy pro tem is simple epicureanism, to which the Jonson character, Lampatho Doria, finally succumbs after his wealthy new lady-love describes him in a speech (Marston, ed. Wood, 2.280) parodying that of the character Money (Argurion) about Prodigal (Asotus) in Cynthia (Q), 4.1.75–7. Lampatho Doria is a scholarly dor (fool) who smells of lamp oil (cf. Cynthia (Q), 3.2.9): a caricature of both Criticus and Jonson, as scholars have recognized; Quadratus condescends to him. He wears ‘sullen black’ like Jonson and Criticus (Marston, ed. Wood, 2.277; cf. 246). Indigent like both, he welcomes a loan (2.251; cf. 265). Like Jonson, he is Catholic (‘this Jebusite’, 2.248; cf. ‘he and I are of two faiths’, 277). His poetry gets soaked in wine to ‘make it sweet’ (2.278; cf. the joke on ‘Drink to me only’, 246). Marston ceaselessly executes mocking intertextual riffs on Cynthia’s Revels up to its end: ‘Lampatho spits, / And says “Faith, ’tis good”’ (2.246; cf. Poetaster, Prologue, 76–7n.).

Most of these slurs Jonson retaliates upon in Poetaster. The clothing jest inspires Crispinus’s stained overskirt and Demetrius’s ‘decayed’ doublet (3.1.51–3 and 3.4.260–1); Lampatho’s soused poem engenders Crispinus’s vapid doggerel (3.1.67–70); the loan promised to Lampatho becomes a proposed collection for Demetrius (3.4.277–8). But Marston’s larger purpose is to deride the scholarship, moral scruples, and contribution to the state valued in Cynthia, by promoting instead his own play’s elevation of free-floating fantasy (Steggle, 1998b, 43–8; see below). Cynthia’s Revels, it should be added, rests on Sidney’s distinction between morally illuminating fantasy (with which Criticus serves Cynthia) and degrading illusion (the courtiers’ misperceptions of value): ‘Man’s wit may make poesy (which should be eikastike, which some learned have defined: figuring forth good things), to be phantastike: which doth contrariwise infect the fancy with unworthy objects’ (Apology for Poetry, ed. Shepherd, rev. Maslen, 2002, 104). Jonson’s use of Lucian in 1.1 perhaps underlines the controlled fantasy in Cynthia (cf. Lucian above). When Quadratus claims, contrariwise, that without ‘Phantusia [sic] incomplexa’ (autonomous and uninfluenced fantasy) men are beasts, Lampatho retorts: ‘[a] fantastical protection of fantastickness’ (Marston, ed. Wood, 2.250; cf. Steggle, 1998b, 44 and Bednarz, 2001, 173–4).

What You Will’s structure contests that of comical satire with a ‘fantastic’ counter-form: a no-genre farrago of action, loose, arbitrary, impulsive, and capricious – ‘lightly composed, too swiftly finished, ill plotted . . . indeed What You Will’ (Marston, ed. Wood, Induction, 2.233). Self-satirizing and self-contradictory, the play is hardly a proto-Romantic manifesto for imagination (despite Bednarz, 2001, 172–4); but its references to Aretine and Epicureans do point back to the Greek ‘joco-serious’ fantasy of Lucian (Duncan, 1979, 10–11 and 84–5), whose brief presence in Cynthia’s Revels Marston may have observed. ‘When thou hast means, be fantastical,’ Quadratus advises Lampatho (2.251).

Jonson answers in Poetaster by literally forcing Lucian down Marston’s throat. Classicism itself, without repudiating morality or the state, becomes the wellspring of a tour de force of fantasy, a dream of time-travel fluid enough to embrace even a love story and a stage ‘fantastic’, Captain Tucca, in its flow of apparently spontaneous events and cross-interruptions – giving comical satire its final dramatic form. Caesar, Horace’s admirer as he historically was, metes out harsher penalties than the peaceable satirist, as he historically did. In Poetaster (though not the ‘Apologetical Dialogue’), Jonson’s scholarship recreates as historical truth the fantastic alliance between satire and government.

The temper of the times

In 1601, however, satire was an issue of current controversy. O. J. Campbell long ago proposed that Jonson’s comical satires originated in a reaction against the bishops’ 1599 ban on non-dramatic satire. Poetaster was a belated product of that reaction, however diminished in harshness and modified by the fantastic. The 1590s had seen a rise in personal and political unrest as Elizabeth’s reign drew towards its close (see Baskervill, 1911, 21; and Campbell, 1938, 21). A number of well-educated men – most young, and many with insufficient prospect of employment or reward – had turned their talents to depicting a corrupt society in the manner of classical Roman satire and epigram. Given the social status of the 1590s satirists, the affiliation of Jonson’s mode with theirs was a class marker that may well have smoothed his entrée into the circle of writers and wits at the Inns of Court. Like them, he reproduced Roman conventions: cover names for those satirized, thumbnail character sketches, threats to whip malefactors. In the non-dramatic satires, intertextuality was already a weapon against rival writers; by 1601, it was so well developed on stage that Poetaster could make it a central motif, encompassing not only Marston’s idiosyncratic language but the whole risible linguistic world of turn-of-the-century London, set against the very words of ancient Rome.

Disagreement over ‘the moral responsibility of the satirist’ (Hoy, 1978–80, 1.194–5) – the question whether satire is corrective and promotes a well-ordered state, or destructive and arises from malice, or is simply useless – was widespread. The dispute between Marston and Jonson in 1599–1601 formed part of a much wider discussion covering the rhetoric of satire and its poetic theory (see Baumlin, 1986). The belief that ‘fear . . . would reconcile men’s minds to virtue and restore them to socially beneficent living’ (J. C. Scaliger, Poetices, as rendered in Campbell, 1938, 5–6) was well established in literature (cf. Sidney, Apology, ed. Shepherd, rev. Maslen 2002, 98; and Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, ed. Whigham and Rebhorn, 120–1). Yet to the English authorities satire was obviously a threat against social well-being.

The three ‘Whipper’ pamphlets of 1601, printed without their authors’ names and indirectly singling out Marston, his cousin Everard Guilpin (cf. above), and Jonson, showed the poles of the broader argument in a verse dispute fuelled by political, religious, and psychological principles. John Weever’s The Whipping of the Satyre (Stationers’ Register, 14 August; cf. above) rebuked the Satirist (Marston), the Epigrammatist (Guilpin), and the Humourist (Jonson) on the grounds that all satire is a misappropriation of the state’s authority to keep order: satire constitutes ‘petty treason’ (Weever, Whipping of the Satyre, 577–87). Weever’s pamphlet was immediately countered (anonymously) by Nicholas Breton in No Whipping, Nor Tripping: But a Kind Friendly Snipping (registered on 16 September), which chided the same three writers, as well as the then unknown author of The Whipping of the Satyre, alleging that the poet ‘who another’s office enters in [i.e. that of a religious counsellor] shall be sure of hate’, and that reform is achieved ‘[i]n hearty prayer; not in poetry’ (Breton, No Whipping, Nor Tripping, 43–6 and 605–9).

The ‘humour of charity’ with which Breton claimed to expose the uselessness of satire (No Whipping, Nor Tripping, p. 4) was attacked anonymously by Guilpin in The Whipper of the Satyre his Penance (registered 6 November). Guilpin defended satires and epigrams (that is, his cousin Marston and himself) by opposing both previous ‘Whipper’ pamphlets. He claimed that satire, necessary to the state, accomplished the objectives of the Elizabethan church (‘Under the sceptre of Virginity’) better than the church itself; for satire begets ‘timorous fear in all, / And that same fear deep thoughts angelical’ (Guilpin, The Whipper . . . his Penance, 190 and 245–6).

Poetaster makes use of all these views of satire in its action, even the warning with which No Whipping, Nor Tripping put satire at risk of futility: ‘who can make an ape to leave his mowes [mocking grimaces] / Although he call him twenty times an ape?’ (Breton, No Whipping, Nor Tripping, 589–90). The rhetorical question is recalled in Poetaster’s final lines: ‘Detraction is but baseness’ varlet [servant], / And apes are apes, though clothed in scarlet’ (5.3.558–9). That fatalistic conclusion does not tally with the folio’s newly added scene 3.5, which credits the satires of Horace’s forerunner and model, Lucilius, with super-governmental efficacy: ‘Rulers and subjects by whole tribes he checked’ (111). And the fine line separating governmentally useful satire from politically dangerous slander, which 3.5 and the play as a whole depict as a chasm between the satirist and his offending targets, dwindles under the invective of the ‘Apologetical Dialogue’, although the Author does conclude: ‘I leave the monsters / To their own fate’ (208–9). Poetaster in folio enacts the alternative views of satire current in its milieu as it moves among parallel alternatives in Horace, Lucilius, Juvenal, Martial, and Lucian.

A contemporary issue central to Poetaster and almost as contentious as satire was the vocabulary of the English language. The victorious sixteenth-century battle for an enhanced English vernacular was assisted by ‘thousands of new and strange words’, many from Romance European vernaculars and Greek, but even more new imports and coinages from Latin (Baugh, 1935, 262–6 and 274–5; quotation, 266). While translations and foreign-language dictionaries multiplied and some writers hailed the expansion of English, the new words also ‘led to extensive debates about the presence of foreign and “barbaric” elements’ in the language. ‘The range of responses to new words . . . dramatizes fears about linguistic, cultural, and national stability’ (Mazzio, 1998, 207–8), especially acute as the impending change of regime and real threats of violent religious and political dissent made themselves felt at the turn of the century. In Poetaster, the presence in Crispinus’s slanderous poetry of words like ‘glibbery’ (Dutch), or ‘lubrical’ (French updated with a Latin ending) and ‘cothurnal’ (similarly modernized Greek), not only reveals his affectation and faux scholarship but sets up peripheral connections between his vocabulary and danger to the state. His verbal choices harmonize with what Jonson presents as alien values and modes of thought, which both Virgil and Caesar note (5.3.252–4): ‘caesar Excellently well threatened! virgil Ay, and as strangely worded, Caesar. caesar We observe it.’ ‘Strangely’ – both extraordinarily and in the manner of a foreigner – is the key to Crispinus’s need for re-education in an English school curriculum (see notes to 5.3.472–84). But Poetaster also ridicules the fashionable language attendant on turn-of-the-century English attempts at upward social mobility or, conversely, maintenance of social and intellectual distinction, including claims to literary elegance and falls into current cliché, many of which Jonson’s fellow dramatists and other writers also satirized. Arthur H. King, more familiar with the play’s language than any other scholar, has called Poetaster ‘a philological document of the first importance’ (1941a, 218).

Poetaster registers the social and intellectual issues of its moment so vividly and with such gusto that an absence from it of political awareness would be surprising. Jonson must have reacted feelingly to the trial and execution of the second Earl of Essex for treason in February 1601. Jonson’s former colleagues the Chamberlain’s Men found themselves implicated because, on what turned into the eve of Essex’s mistimed revolt, they had acted a play about Richard II’s deposition (probably Shakespeare’s Richard II) for some of Essex’s followers. A representative of the Chamberlain’s Men, Augustine Phillips, was questioned on the subject in February by three judges, including Chief Justice Popham. Poetaster 4.4, in which a foolish tribune questions an actor, bears some likeness to the official examination of Phillips (Chambers, ES, 1.385n.1; cf. 4.4.18n.).

However, an ‘obvious and unmistakable allusion’ (Cain, 1998, 54) to the Phillips incident would have been exceptionally reckless in later 1601, when punishments for sympathizers with the rebellion, temporarily left pending, were being publicly enforced. The diplomat and courtier Sir Henry Neville, already imprisoned in the Tower despite having revealed Essex’s plot to the government, was arraigned in July and assessed a fine that would keep him in prison for almost another year to negotiate manageable payments (J. Chamberlain, Letters, 1939, 1.119, 122–3, and 127). In mid-August one John Littleton, condemned in February alongside others of the lesser conspirators, was executed, despite ‘the general opinion’ that ‘there will be no great executions’ (Chamberlain, Letters, 1.121 and 129). Even Jonson must have noticed that this was not a propitious time for satire on governmental interrogations, especially for an ‘allegory [of Phillips’s questioning] . . . particularly obvious’ to members of the Middle Temple (Cain, 1998, 64) – with which Chief Justice Popham was in active contact (Cain, 1995 edn, 58n.103). That Poetaster 4.4, unlike other satirical passages, passed unmolested into Jonson’s quarto strongly suggests that it was not an obvious topical allusion.

Although Cynthia’s Revels obliquely conveyed sympathy for Essex before the Earl’s revolt, I am not convinced that Poetaster offers parallels to the Earl’s trial afterwards. Deceits allegedly practised on Essex, such as letters forged in his name, are not mentioned in Poetaster, although stupid misunderstandings are. Horace’s private writing is stolen and used against him, as happened to Essex at his trial, but this was standard treatment for suspects (as witness Thomas Kyd’s imprisonment in 1593) – and it is used to general satisfaction in Poetaster against Crispinus and Demetrius (see 5.3.37–9n. and 5.3.224–31). Even slanderous rumour was a topos popular at least since Shakespeare’s 2 Henry 4 had opened in 1597–8 with a soliloquy by Rumour, which could serve as a topical allusion to the Essex affair if its date did not make that impossible: ‘Upon my tongue continual slanders ride, / Stuffing the ears of men with false reports: / I speak of peace while covert enmity, / Under the smile of safety, wounds the world’ (6–10). Persistent truths can be hard to distinguish from specific allusions. That Jonson expanded the scope of malice and slander from mainly personal and literary in Cynthia’s Revels to overtly political in Poetaster shows the form and body of the time in 1601, but a network of particular references is more dubious.

Moreover, Poetaster’s satire on stupid and ugly politics does not reveal Jonson’s position on the Essex uprising. An indirect search for Jonson’s probable views by way of his milieu is a thankless task, since no evidence exists for most of his associates’ judgements concerning the revolt. Whether Essexians like Sir Henry Neville and Lord Monteagle – each later the subject of a single epigram by Jonson (109 and 60) – had any contact with him in 1601 is unknown. His two patrons Lady Bedford and Lady Rutland were not necessarily of one mind with their conspirator husbands, who for their part did not necessarily endorse their wives’ patronage; the Earl of Rutland, we know, insulted his wife for sharing a meal with Jonson (Informations, 277–9). Given such difficulties, Jonson’s opinion on Essex’s undertaking is probably destined to remain private.

This lack of demonstrable political allusion extends to the snippets in Poetaster, 3.1.9, from Jonson’s ode to the imprisoned Earl of Desmond, the first stanza of which Dekker duly parodied in Satiromastix, 1.2.7–26. Although his act has been interpreted as implying covert knowledge that the poem’s true addressee was Essex, or that Desmond was the focal point of an Essexian circle around Jonson’s friend and patron Sir John Salusbury, among whose papers a holograph of the ode survives (see Bland, 2000), no credibly significant link to Essex turns up. In fact, Jonson seems to have been spreading the Desmond ode around in 1600–1. Not only did Dekker know it and Salusbury own a personal copy; a stanza was anthologized in England’s Parnassus (1600). Jonson and Dekker expected audiences to recognize the ode; it was probably one of those that Jonson ‘spake by word o’ mouth at th’ordinary [tavern]’ (Satiromastix, 1.2.93–4). Its snippets in Poetaster contributed one more small laugh to the play’s distinctive interaction among playwright, audience, and cultural milieu.

Appreciation of Poetaster’s quality, and critical attention to the play, has accelerated over the last century, stimulated by the 1905 and 1922 editions prepared respectively by Herbert S. Mallory and Josiah H. Penniman, and spurred especially by Tom Cain’s probing revaluation in his edition of 1995. Modern critics have found the play’s concerns surprisingly rich and rewarding. It has been seen as an equivalent of Horace’s Ars Poetica or ‘art of poetry’ (Platz, 1973), while its poet-characters constitute a moral hierarchy from the ‘rectified spirit’ of Virgil (Poet., 5.1.100) down to the sensualist Ovid (Waith, 1951). More recently, critics have illuminated Jonson’s ‘Roman frame of mind’ and introduction of a programmatic Augustanism to English literature (Maus, 1984; Erskine-Hill, 1983); the play has been situated within early modern England’s ‘culture of slander’ (M. Kaplan, 1997); and its classicism has been newly explicated (Moul, 2006).

The questions raised by this integrated variety of themes are as meaningful today as they were for its early modern audience. The play depicts a rapidly changing society in which values often seem to be splintering and deteriorating, and figures of law and order can be oppressive. Satire may be punishable or ineffectual. Language is distorted to augment personal prestige. At such a time, what is the role of the public intellectual and the artist? Is long-cherished intellectual tradition still valid? Is imitatio still viable? Do people still understand comical satire?

Of course in Poetaster the final answers are all reassuring because the questions ultimately dissolve in laughter. The play does bring before us genuine threats offered to the social fabric by falsehood and malevolence, by stupidity and ignorance, by insensibility to knowledge or beauty; but its ridicule encompasses these traits as special benefits meant for our entertainment. Modern commentary recognizes Poetaster as a work of intricate complexity embedded in its culture, throwing out lines towards past and future musings on the exercise of state power and survival of an intellectual class – the most profound and funniest drama of imitation between Aristophanes and Tom Stoppard. (For more information on Poetaster’s critical fortunes and its historic productions in 1916, see the Stage History essay in the Electronic Edition.)

To the Virtuous, and My Worthy Friend, Master
Richard Martin

Sir,

A thankful man owes a courtesy ever; the unthankful, but when he needs it.

To make mine own mark appear, and show by which of these seals I am known,

I send you this piece of what may live of mine; for whose innocence, as for the

author’s, you were once a noble and timely undertaker to the greatest justice 5

of this kingdom. Enjoy now the delight of your goodness, which is to see that

prosper you preserved, and posterity to owe the reading of that, without offence,

to your name, which so much ignorance and malice of the times then conspired

to have suppressed.

Your true lover, 10

Ben. Jonson

The Persons of the Play

AUGUSTUS CAESAR: [Emperor of Rome]
MAECENAS: [poet and patron; counsellor to augustus caesar]
MARCUS OVID: [father to PUBLIUS OVID]
[LUSCUS,: servant to MARCUS and PUBLIUS OVID]
[TIBULLUS,: elegiac poet] 5
CORNELIUS GALLUS: [elegiac poet]
PROPERTIUS: [elegiac poet]
FUSCUS ARISTIUS: [scholar and writer, friend of HORACE]
PUBLIUS OVID: [Publius Ovidius Naso, elegiac poet]
VIRGIL: [Publius Virgilius Maro, epic poet] 10
HORACE: [Quintus Horatius Flaccus, satirical poet]
TREBATIUS: [lawyer, friend of HORACE]
LUPUS: [tribune]
TUCCA: [military man]
CRISPINUS: [the Poetaster] 15
HERMOGENES: [musician]
DEMETRIUS FANNIUS: [hack writer]
ALBIUS: [tradesman, husband to CHLOE]
MINOS: [apothecary]
HISTRIO: [actor] 20
[AESOP: actor]
PYRGI: [pages to TUCCA]
LICTORS
[EQUITES ROMANI]
JULIA: [daughter to AUGUSTUS CAESAR] 25
CYTHERIS: [PROPERTIUS'S love]
PLAUTIA: [TIBULLUS’s love]
CHLOE: [wife to ALBIUS]
MAIDS

[In the Induction:

ENVY: 30
PROLOGUE: (Heroic Virtue)]

THE SCENE: ROME

POETASTER, OR HIS ARRAIGNMENT

[The Induction]

After the second sounding.

[Enter] ENVY, arising in the midst of the stage.

ENVY

Light, I salute thee, but with wounded nerves,

Wishing thy golden splendour pitchy darkness.

[Envy notices the title board.]

What’s here? ‘Th’Arraignment’? Ay: this, this is it

That our sunk eyes have waked for all this while;

Here will be subject for my snakes and me. 5

Cling to my neck and wrists, my loving worms,

And cast you round in soft and amorous folds

Till I do bid uncurl; then break your knots,

Shoot out yourselves at length, as your forced stings

Would hide themselves within his maliced sides 10

To whom I shall apply you.

[Envy becomes aware of the audience.]

Stay! The shine

Of this assembly here offends my sight;

I’ll darken that first, and outface their grace.

[To the audience] Wonder not if I stare; these fifteen weeks

(So long as since the plot was but an embryon) 15

Have I with burning lights mixed vigilant thoughts

In expectation of this hated play,

To which at last I am arrived as Prologue.

Nor would I you should look for other looks,

Gesture, or compliment from me than what 20

Th’infected bulk of Envy can afford –

For I am risse here with a covetous hope

To blast your pleasures and destroy your sports

With wrestings, comments, applications,

Spy-like suggestions, privy whisperings, 25

And thousand such promoting sleights as these.

Mark how I will begin: the scene is –

[Envy scans the location signs.]

Ha!

‘Rome’? ‘Rome’? And ‘Rome’? [To herself] Crack, eye-strings, and your

balls

Drop into earth! Let me be ever blind!

I am prevented; all my hopes are crossed, 30

Checked, and abated. Fie, a freezing sweat

Flows forth at all my pores; my entrails burn!

What should I do? ‘Rome’? ‘Rome’? O my vexed soul,

How might I force this to the present state?

[Envy peers into the audience.]

Are there no players here? No poet-apes 35

That come with basilisks’ eyes, whose forkèd tongues

Are steeped in venom, as their hearts in gall?

Either of these would help me; they could wrest,

Pervert, and poison all they hear or see

With senseless glosses and allusions. 40

Now, if you be good devils, fly me not.

You know what dear and ample faculties

I have endowed you with; I’ll lend you more.

Here, take my snakes among you, come, and eat,

And while the squeezed juice flows in your black jaws, 45

Help me to damn the author. Spit it forth

Upon his lines, and show your rusty teeth

At every word or accent; or else choose

Out of my longest vipers, to stick down

In your deep throats, and let the heads come forth 50

At your rank mouths: that he may see you armed

With triple malice, to hiss, sting, and tear

His work and him – to forge, and then declaim,

Traduce, corrupt, apply, inform, suggest –

Oh, these are gifts wherein your souls are blest. 55

What? Do you hide yourselves? Will none appear?

None answer? What, doth this calm troop affright you?

Nay, then I do despair. [To herself] Down, sink again.

This travail is all lost with my dead hopes.

If in such bosoms spite have left to dwell, 60

Envy is not on earth, nor scarce in hell. [Envy partially descends.]

The third sounding.

[Enter] PROLOGUE [in armour].

PROLOGUE

[To Envy] Stay, monster, ere thou sink.

[Prologue places a foot on Envy’s head.]

Thus on thy head

Set we our bolder foot, with which we tread

Thy malice into earth. So spite should die, [Exit Envy downward.]

Despised and scorned by noble industry. 65

If any muse why I salute the stage,

An armèd Prologue, know, ’tis a dangerous age,

Wherein who writes had need present his scenes

Forty-fold proof against the conjuring means

Of base detractors and illiterate apes, 70

That fill up rooms in fair and formal shapes.

’Gainst these have we put on this forced defence,

Whereof the allegory and hid sense

Is, that a well erected confidence

Can fright their pride and laugh their folly hence. 75

Here now, put case our author should once more

Swear that his play were good – he doth implore

You would not argue him of arrogance,

Howe’er that common spawn of ignorance,

Our fry of writers, may beslime his fame 80

And give his action that adulterate name.

Such full-blown vanity he more doth loathe

Than base dejection; there’s a mean ’twixt both,

Which with a constant firmness he pursues,

As one that knows the strength of his own muse. 85

And this he hopes all free souls will allow;

Others, that take it with a rugged brow,

Their moods he rather pities than envies.

His mind, it is above their injuries. [Exit.]

1.1 [Enter] OVID [reading from his new poem].

OVID

‘Then, when this body falls in funeral fire,

My name shall live, and my best part aspire.’

It shall go so.

[Enter] LUSCUS.

LUSCUS

Young master, Master Ovid, do you hear? God sa’ me! Away with your

songs and sonnets and on with your gown and cap, quickly – here, here – 5

[He hands Ovid the garments.] Your father will be a man of this room presently.

Come – nay, nay, nay, nay, be brief. [He takes Ovid’s poem.] These verses, too, a

poison on ’em, I cannot abide ’em, they make me ready to cast, by the banks

of Helicon. Nay, look what a rascally untoward thing this poetry is; I could

tear ’em now. 10

OVID

[Taking the poem] Give me. How near’s my father?

LUSCUS

Heart a’ man! Get a law book in your hand; I will not answer you else.

[Ovid picks up a book.]

Why, so; now there’s some formality in you. By Jove and three or four of the

gods more, I am right of mine old master’s humour for that; this villainous

poetry will undo you, by the welkin. 15

OVID

What, hast thou buskins on, Luscus, that thou swear’st so tragically and

high?

LUSCUS

No, but I have boots on, sir, and so has your father too by this time, for

he called for ’em ere I came from the lodging.

OVID

Why, was he no readier? 20

LUSCUS

Oh, no; and there was the mad skeldering captain with the velvet arms

ready to lay hold on him as he comes down – he that presses every man he

meets, with an oath, to lend him money, and cries, ‘Thou must do’t, old boy,

as thou art a man, a man of worship.’

OVID

Who, Pantilius Tucca? 25

LUSCUS

Ay, he; and I met little Master Lupus, the tribune, going thither too.

OVID

Nay, an he be under their arrest, I may with safety enough read over my

elegy before he come.

[He puts down the law book and picks up his poem.]

LUSCUS

God sa’ me! What’ll you do? Why, young master, you are not Castalian-

mad, lunatic, frantic, desperate? Ha? 30

OVID

What ailest thou, Luscus?

LUSCUS

God be with you, sir, I’ll leave you to your poetical fancies and furies. I’ll

not be guilty, I. [Exit.]

OVID

Be not, good Ignorance; I’m glad th’art gone,

For thus alone, our ear shall better judge 35

The hasty errors of our morning muse.

[He reads his composition.]

‘Envy, why twitt’st thou me my time’s spent ill

And call’st my verse fruits of an idle quill?

Or that, unlike the line from whence I sprung,

War’s dusty honours I pursue not young? 40

Or that I study not the tedious laws

And prostitute my voice in every cause?

Thy scope is mortal, mine immortal, fame,

Which through the world shall ever chant my name.

Homer will live whilst Tenedos stands, and Ide, 45

Or to the sea fleet Simois doth slide;

And so shall Hesiod, too, while vines do bear

Or crooked sickles crop the ripened ear.

Callimachus, though in invention low,

Shall still be sung, since he in art doth flow. 50

No loss shall come to Sophocles’ proud vein;

With sun and moon, Aratus shall remain.

Whilst slaves be false, fathers hard, and bawds be whorish,

Whilst harlots flatter shall Menander flourish.

Ennius, though rude, and Accius’ high-reared strain 55

A fresh applause in every age shall gain.

Of Varro’s name what ear shall not be told?

Of Jason’s Argo, and the fleece of gold?

Then shall Lucretius’ lofty numbers die

When earth and seas in fire and flames shall fry. 60

Tityrus, Tillage, Aenee shall be read

Whilst Rome of all the conquered world is head.

Till Cupid’s fires be out and his bow broken

Thy verses, neat Tibullus, shall be spoken.

Our Gallus shall be known from east to west; 65

So shall Lycoris, whom he now loves best.

The suffering ploughshare or the flint may wear,

But heavenly poesy no death can fear.

Kings shall give place to it, and kingly shows,

The banks o’er which gold-bearing Tagus flows. 70

Kneel hinds to trash; me let bright Phoebus swell

With cups full flowing from the muses’ well.

Frost-fearing myrtle shall impale my head,

And of sad lovers I’ll be often read.

Envy the living, not the dead, doth bite, 75

For after death all men receive their right.

Then, when this body falls in funeral fire,

My name shall live, and my best part aspire.’

1.2 [Enter] OVID SENIOR, LUSCUS, TUCCA, [and] LUPUS.

OVID SENIOR

[To his son] Your name shall live indeed, sir; you say true; but how

infamously, how scorned and contemned in the eyes and ears of the best and

gravest Romans, that you think not on; you never so much as dream of that.

Are these the fruits of all my travail and expenses? Is this the scope and aim of

thy studies? Are these the hopeful courses wherewith I have so long flattered 5

my expectation from thee? Verses? Poetry? Ovid, whom I thought to see the

pleader, become Ovid the play-maker?

OVID

No, sir.

OVID SENIOR

Yes, sir. I hear of a tragedy of yours coming forth for the common

players there, called Medea. By my household gods, if I come to the acting of 10

it, I’ll add one tragic part more than is yet expected to it; believe me when I

promise it. What? Shall I have my son a stager now? An ingle for players? A

gull? A rook? A shot-clog? To make suppers and be laughed at? Publius, I will

set thee on the funeral pile first.

OVID

Sir, I beseech you to have patience. 15

LUSCUS

[To Ovid] Nay, this ’tis to have your ears dammed up to good counsel.

[To the others] I did augur all this to him aforehand, without poring into an ox’s

paunch for the matter, and yet he would not be scrupulous.

TUCCA

[To Luscus] How now, goodman slave? What, roly poly? All rivals, rascal?

[To Ovid Senior] Why, my Master of Worship, dost hear? Are these thy best projects? 20

Is this thy designs and thy discipline, to suffer knaves to be competitors with

commanders and gentlemen? [To Luscus] Are we parallels, rascal? Are we

parallels?

OVID SENIOR

[To Luscus] Sirrah, go get my horses ready. You’ll still be prating.

TUCCA

[To Luscus] Do, you perpetual stinkard, do – go, talk to tapsters and ostlers, 25

you slave; they are i’your element – go; here be the emperor’s captains, you

ragamuffin rascal, and not your comrades. [Exit Luscus.]

LUPUS

[To Ovid Senior] Indeed, Marcus Ovid, these players are an idle generation

and do much harm in a state, corrupt young gentry very much; I know it; I

have not been a tribune thus long and observed nothing. Besides, they will 30

rob us, us that are magistrates, of our respect, bring us upon their stages and

make us ridiculous to the plebeians; they will play you, or me, the wisest men

they can come by, still – me! – only to bring us in contempt with the vulgar

and make us cheap.

TUCCA

Th’art in the right, my venerable cropshin, they will indeed; the tongue 35

of the oracle never twanged truer. Your courtier cannot kiss his mistress’s

slippers in quiet for ’em, nor your white innocent gallant pawn his revelling

suit to make his punk a supper. An honest decayed commander cannot

skelder, cheat, nor be seen in a bawdy house, but he shall be straight in

one of their wormwood comedies. They are grown licentious, the rogues: 40

libertines, flat libertines. They forget they are i’the statute, the rascals: they

are blazoned there; there they are tricked, they and their pedigrees; they need

no other heralds, iwis.

OVID SENIOR

[To his son] Methinks if nothing else, yet this alone, the reading of

the public edicts, should fright thee from commerce with them and give thee 45

distaste enough of their actions. But this betrays what a student you are; this

argues your proficiency in the law.

OVID

They wrong me, sir, and do abuse you more,

That blow your ears with these untrue reports.

I am not known unto the open stage, 50

Nor do I traffic in their theatres.

Indeed, I do acknowledge, at request

Of some near friends and honourable Romans,

I have begun a poem of that nature.

OVID SENIOR

You have, sir? A poem? And where is’t? That’s the law you study. 55

OVID

Cornelius Gallus borrowed it to read.

OVID SENIOR

Cornelius Gallus? There’s another gallant, too, hath drunk of

the same poison; and Tibullus, and Propertius. But these are gentlemen of

means and revenue, now. Thou art a younger brother, and hast nothing but

thy bare exhibition – which I protest shall be bare indeed if thou forsake not 60

these unprofitable by-courses, and that timely, too. Name me a professed

poet, that his poetry did ever afford him so much as a competency. Ay, your

god of poets there, whom all of you admire and reverence so much, Homer,

he whose worm-eaten statue must not be spewed against but with hallowed

lips and grovelling adoration, what was he? What was he? 65

TUCCA

[To Ovid Senior] Marry, I’ll tell thee, old swagg’rer: he was a poor, blind,

rhyming rascal, that lived obscurely up and down in booths and taphouses,

and scarce ever made a good meal in his sleep, the whoreson hungry beggar.

OVID SENIOR

[To his son] He says well. Nay, I know this nettles you, now, but

answer me: is’t not true? You’ll tell me his name shall live, and that (now 70

being dead) his works have eternized him and made him divine. But could

this divinity feed him while he lived? Could his name feast him?

TUCCA

Or purchase him a senator’s revenue? Could it?

OVID SENIOR

Ay, or give him place in the commonwealth? Worship or

attendants? Make him be carried in his litter? 75

TUCCA

[To Ovid Senior] Thou speakest sentences, old Bias.

LUPUS

[To young Ovid]All this the law will do, young sir, if you’ll follow it.

OVID SENIOR

If he be mine, he shall follow and observe what I will apt him to,

or I profess here openly and utterly to disclaim in him.

OVID

Sir, let me crave you will forgo these moods. 80

I will be anything, or study anything;

I’ll prove the unfashioned body of the law

Pure elegance, and make her rugged’st strains

Run smoothly as Propertius’ elegies.

OVID SENIOR

Propertius’ elegies? Good! 85

LUPUS

[To Ovid Senior] Nay, you take him too quickly, Marcus.

OVID SENIOR

Why, he cannot speak, he cannot think, out of poetry; he is

bewitched with it.

LUPUS

[To Ovid Senior] Come, do not misprize him.

OVID SENIOR

‘Misprize’? Ay, marry, I would have him use some such words, 90

now; they have some touch, some taste, of the law. He should make himself

a style out of these, and let his Propertius’s elegies go by.

LUPUS

Indeed, young Publius, he that will now hit the mark must shoot through

the law; we have no other planet reigns, and in that sphere you may sit and

sing with angels. Why, the law makes a man happy without respecting any 95

other merit; a simple scholar, or none at all, may be a lawyer.

TUCCA

He tells thee true, my noble neophyte; my little grammaticaster, he does.

It shall never put thee to thy mathematics, metaphysics, philosophy, and I

know not what supposed sufficiencies. If thou canst but have the patience

to plod enough, talk, and make noise enough, be impudent enough and ’tis 100

enough.

LUPUS

Three books will furnish you.

TUCCA

And the less art, the better. Besides, when it shall be in the power of

thy cheverel conscience to do right or wrong at thy pleasure, my pretty

Alcibiades – 105

LUPUS

Ay, and to have better men than himself, by many thousand degrees, to

observe him and stand bare –

TUCCA

True, and he to carry himself proud and stately, and have the law on his

side for’t, old boy.

OVID SENIOR

Well, the day grows old, gentlemen, and I must leave you. – 110

Publius, if thou wilt hold my favour, abandon these idle, fruitless studies

that so bewitch thee. Send Janus home his back-face again, and look only

forward to the law; intend that. I will allow thee what shall suit thee in the

rank of gentlemen and maintain thy society with the best; and under these

conditions I leave thee. My blessings light upon thee if thou respect them; 115

if not, mine eyes may drop for thee, but thine own heart will ache for itself;

and so farewell.

[Enter LUSCUS.]

[To Luscus] What, are my horses come?

LUSCUS

Yes, sir, they are at the gate without.

OVID SENIOR

That’s well. – Asinius Lupus, a word. [To Tucca] Captain, I shall 120

take my leave of you?

TUCCA

No, my little old boy. [Indicating Lupus] Dispatch with Cothurnus there;

I’ll attend thee, I —

LUSCUS

[Aside] To borrow some ten drachmas; I know his project.

OVID SENIOR

[To Lupus] Sir, you shall make me beholding to you. – Now, Captain 125

Tucca, what say you?

TUCCA

Why, what should I say? Or what can I say, my flower o’the order? Should

I say thou art rich? Or that thou art honourable? Or wise? Or valiant? Or

learned? Or liberal? Why, thou art all these, and thou knowest it, my noble

Lucullus, thou knowest it; come, be not ashamed of thy virtues, old stump. 130

Honour’s a good brooch to wear in a man’s hat at all times. Thou art the man

of war’s Maecenas, old boy. Why shouldst not thou be graced then by them,

as well as he is by his poets?

[Enter a] PYRGUS.

How now, my carrier, what news?

[The Pyrgus whispers to Tucca.]

LUSCUS

[Aside] The boy has stayed within for his cue this half hour. 135

TUCCA

[To the Pyrgus] Come, do not whisper to me, but speak it out. What? It is

no treason against the state, I hope, is’t?

LUSCUS

[Aside] Yes, against the state of my master’s purse.

PYRGUS

Sir, Agrippa desires you to forbear him till the next week; his moils are

not yet come up. 140

TUCCA

His moils? Now the bots, the spavin, and the glanders, and some dozen

diseases more light on him and his moils! What, ha’ they the yellows,

his moils, that they come no faster? Or are they foundered, ha? His moils ha’ the

staggers, belike, ha’ they?

PYRGUS

Oh, no, sir – [Aside] Then your tongue might be suspected for one of his 145

moils.

TUCCA

He owes me almost a talent, and he thinks to bear it away with his moils,

does he? [To the Pyrgus] Sirrah, you nutcracker, go your ways to him again,

and tell him I must ha’ money, I; I cannot eat stones and turfs, say. What,

will he clem me and my followers? Ask him an he will clem me; do, go. He 150

would have me fry my jerkin, would he? Away, setter, away. Yet stay, my little

tumbler. [Aside to the Pyrgus, indicating Ovid Senior] This old boy shall supply

now. [Aloud] I will not trouble him, I cannot be

importunate, I; I cannot be impudent.

PYRGUS

Alas, sir, no; you are the most maidenly, blushing creature upon the 155

earth.

TUCCA

[To Ovid Senior] Dost thou hear, my little six-and-fifty or thereabouts?

Thou art not to learn the humours and tricks of that old bald cheater, Time;

thou hadst not this chain for nothing. Men of worth have their chimeras as

well as other creatures; and they do see monsters sometimes; they do, they 160

do, brave boy.

PYRGUS

[Aside] Better cheap than he shall see you, I warrant him.

TUCCA

[Apart to Ovid Senior] Thou must let me have six, six – drachmas, I mean,

old boy; thou shalt do it; I tell thee, old boy, thou shalt, and in private, too,

dost thou see? Go, walk off. [He points.] There, there. Six is the sum. Thy son’s 165

a gallant spark and must not be put out of a sudden.

[Ovid Senior goes aside.]

[To young Ovid] Come hither, Callimachus. Thy father tells me thou art too

poetical, boy; thou must not be so, thou must leave them, young novice, thou

must; they are a sort of poor, starved rascals, that are ever wrapped up in foul

linen, and can boast of nothing but a lean visage peering out of a seam-rent 170

suit: the very emblems of beggary. No, dost hear? Turn lawyer, thou shalt be

my solicitor –

[Ovid Senior returns with money for Tucca.]

[To Ovid Senior] ’Tis right, old boy, is’t?

OVID SENIOR

You were best tell it, Captain.

TUCCA

No; fare thou well, mine honest horseman. [To Lupus] And thou, old 175

beaver. [To Ovid Senior] Pray thee, Roman, when thou comest to town, see me

at my lodging, visit me sometimes; thou shalt be welcome, old boy. Do not

balk me, good swaggerer. Jove keep thy chain from pawning. Go thy ways; if

thou lack money, I’ll lend thee some; I’ll leave thee to thy horse, now. Adieu.

OVID SENIOR

Farewell, good Captain. 180

TUCCA

[Aside to the Pyrgus] Boy, you can have but half a share now, boy.

[Exeunt Tucca and the Pyrgus.]

OVID SENIOR

’Tis a strange boldness that accompanies this fellow. [To Luscus]

Come.

OVID

I’ll give attendance on you to your horse, sir, please you –

OVID SENIOR

No; keep your chamber and fall to your studies. Do so; the gods of 185

Rome bless thee! [Exeunt Ovid Senior, Lupus, and Luscus.]

OVID

And give me stomach to digest this law –

That should have followed sure, had I been he.

O sacred poesy, thou spirit of arts,

The soul of science and the queen of souls, 190

What profane violence, almost sacrilege,

Hath here been offered thy divinities!

That thine own guiltless poverty should arm

Prodigious Ignorance to wound thee thus!

For thence is all their force of argument 195

Drawn forth against thee, or from the abuse

Of thy great powers in adult’rate brains;

When, would men learn but to distinguish spirits,

And set true difference ’twixt those jaded wits

That run a broken pace for common hire, 200

And the high raptures of a happy muse

Borne on the wings of her immortal thought

That kicks at earth with a disdainful heel

And beats at heaven gates with her bright hooves,

They would not then with such distorted faces 205

And desp’rate censures stab at poesy.

They would admire bright knowledge, and their minds

Should ne’er descend on so unworthy objects

As gold or titles; they would dread far more

To be thought ignorant than be known poor. 210

The time was once, when wit drowned wealth; but now

Your only barbarism is t’have wit, and want.

No matter now in virtue who excels,

He that hath coin hath all perfection else.

1.3 [Enter TIBULLUS].

TIBULLUS

Ovid?

OVID

Who’s there? [He sees Tibullus.] Come in.

TIBULLUS

Good morrow, lawyer.

OVID

Good morrow, dear Tibullus; welcome. Sit down.

TIBULLUS

Not I. What, so hard at it?

[He approaches Ovid, who attempts to withhold his work.]

Let’s see, what’s here?

Nay, I will see it–

OVID

Pray thee, away –

[They struggle; Tibullus secures the paper.]

TIBULLUS [He reads aloud.]

‘If thrice in field a man vanquish his foe, 5

’Tis after in his choice to serve, or no.’

How now, Ovid! Law-cases in verse?

OVID

In troth, I know not; they run from my pen

Unwittingly, if they be verse. What’s the news abroad?

TIBULLUS

Off with this gown! I come to have thee walk. 10

OVID

No, good Tibullus, I’m not now in case.

Pray let me alone.

TIBULLUS

How, not in case?

’Slight, thou’rt in too much case, by all this law.

OVID

Troth, if I live, I will new-dress the law

In sprightly poesy’s habiliments. 15

TIBULLUS

The hell thou wilt! What, turn law into verse?

Thy father has schooled thee, I see.

[He takes out a letter, which he hands to Ovid.]

Here, read that same.

There’s subject for you – and, if I mistake not,

A supersedeas to your melancholy.

OVID

[He opens the letter.] How! Subscribed ‘Julia’! O my life, my heaven! 20

[He reads the contents to himself.]

TIBULLUS

Is the mood changed?

OVID

Music of wit! Note for th’harmonious spheres!

Celestial accents, how you ravish me!

TIBULLUS

What is it, Ovid?

OVID

That I must meet my Julia, the Princess Julia. 25

TIBULLUS

Where?

OVID

Why, at — Heart, I have forgot: my passion so transports me.

TIBULLUS

I’ll save your pains: it is at Albius’ house,

The jeweller’s, where the fair Lycoris lies.

OVID

Who? Cytheris, Cornelius Gallus’ love? 30

TIBULLUS

Ay, he’ll be there, too, and my Plautia.

OVID

And why not your Delia?

TIBULLUS

Yes, and your Corinna.

OVID

True, but my sweet Tibullus, keep that secret;

I would not for all Rome it should be thought

I veil bright Julia underneath that name: 35

Julia, the gem and jewel of my soul,

That takes her honours from the golden sky,

As beauty doth all lustre from her eye.

The air respires the pure Elysian sweets

In which she breathes, and from her looks descend 40

The glories of the summer. Heaven she is,

Praised in herself above all praise, and he

Which hears her speak would swear the tuneful orbs

Turned in his zenith only.

TIBULLUS

Publius, thou’lt lose thyself.

OVID

Oh, in no labyrinth can I safelier err 45

Than when I lose myself in praising her.

Hence, law, and welcome, muses! Though not rich,

Yet are you pleasing; let’s be reconciled

And now made one. Henceforth I promise faith,

And all my serious hours to spend with you – 50

With you, whose music striketh on my heart

And with bewitching tones steals forth my spirit

In Julia’s name. Fair Julia! Julia’s love

Shall be a law, and that sweet law I’ll study:

The law and art of sacred Julia’s love;55

All other objects will but abjects prove.

TIBULLUS

Come, we shall have thee as passionate as Propertius anon.

OVID

Oh, how does my Sextus?

TIBULLUS

Faith, full of sorrow for his Cynthia’s death.

OVID

What, still? 60

TIBULLUS

Still, and still more; his griefs do grow upon him

As do his hours. Never did I know

An understanding spirit so take to heart

The common work of fate.

OVID

O my Tibullus,

Let us not blame him, for against such chances 65

The heartiest strife of virtue is not proof.

We may read constancy and fortitude

To other souls, but had ourselves been struck

With the like planet – had our loves, like his,

Been ravished from us by injurious death, 70

And in the height and heat of our best days –

It would have cracked our sinews, shrunk our veins,

And made our very heart-strings jar, like his.

Come, let’s go take him forth, and prove if mirth

Or company will but abate his passion. 75

TIBULLUS

Content; and I implore the gods it may. [Exeunt.]

2.1 [Enter] ALBIUS [and] CRISPINUS [with a folded sheet of paper].

ALBIUS

Master Crispinus, you are welcome. Pray use a stool, sir. Your cousin

Cytheris will come down presently. We are so busy for the receiving of these

courtiers here that I can scarce be a minute with myself for thinking of them.

Pray you sit, sir; pray you sit, sir.

CRISPINUS

I am very well, sir. Ne’er trust me but you are most delicately seated 5

here, full of sweet delight and blandishment! An excellent

air, an excellent air!

ALBIUS

Ay, sir, ’tis a pretty air. [To himself] These courtiers run in my mind still;

I must look out – [To Crispinus] For Jupiter’s sake, sit, sir. Or please you walk

into the garden? There’s a garden on the back side. 10

CRISPINUS

I am most strenuously well, I thank you, sir.

ALBIUS

Much good do you, sir. [Exit.]

[Enter] CHLOE [with MAIDS carrying perfume and dried flowers].

CHLOE

[To Maids] Come, bring those perfumes forward a little, and strew some

roses and violets here.

[Enter ALBIUS.]

Fie, here be rooms savour the most pitifully rank that ever I felt! I cry the 15

gods mercy, my husband’s in the wind of us.

ALBIUS

[To Chloe] Why, this is good, excellent, excellent: well said, my sweet

Chloe. Trim up your house most obsequiously.

CHLOE

For Vulcan’s sake, breathe somewhere else! In truth, you overcome our

perfumes exceedingly; you are too predominant. 20

ALBIUS

Hear but my opinion, sweet wife.

CHLOE

A pin for your ’pinion. In sincerity, if you be thus fulsome to me in

everything, I’ll be divorced. God’s my body! You know what you were before

I married you: I was a gentlewoman born, I; I lost all my friends to be a

citizen’s wife, because I heard, indeed, they kept their wives as fine as ladies, 25

and that we might rule our husbands like ladies, and do what we listed. Do

you think I would have married you else?

ALBIUS

I acknowledge, sweet wife –- [Aside to Crispinus] She speaks the best of any

woman in Italy, and moves as mightily; which makes me I had rather she

should make bumps on my head as big as my two fingers than I would offend 30

her. [To Chloe] But, sweet wife –

CHLOE

Yet again? Is’t not grace enough for you that I call you husband and you

call me wife, but you must still be poking me against my will to things?

ALBIUS

But you know, wife: here are the greatest ladies and gallantest gentlemen

of Rome to be entertained in our house now; and I would fain advise thee to 35

entertain them in the best sort, i’faith, wife.

CHLOE

In sincerity, did you ever hear a man talk so idly? You would seem to

be master? You would have your spoke in my cart? You would advise me to

entertain ladies and gentlemen? Because you can marshal your pack needles,

horse combs, hobbyhorses, and wall candlesticks in your warehouse better 40

than I, therefore you can tell how to entertain ladies and gentlefolks better

than I?

ALBIUS

O my sweet wife, upbraid me not with that! ‘Gain savours sweetly from

anything’; he that respects to get must relish all commodities alike, and

admit no difference betwixt woad and frankincense, or the most precious 45

balsamum and a tar barrel.

CHLOE

Marry, faugh! You sell snuffers, too, if you be remembered, but I pray you

let me buy them out of your hand, for I tell you true, I take it highly in snuff

to learn how to entertain gentlefolks of you at these years, i’faith. Alas, man,

there was not a gentleman came to your house i’your t’other wife’s time, I 50

hope? Nor a lady? Nor music? Nor masques? Nor you, nor your house were so

much as spoken of before I disbased myself from my hood and my fartingall

to these bum-rolls and your whalebone bodice.

ALBIUS

Look here, my sweet wife: [He lays his finger on his lips.] I am mum, my

dear mummia, my balsamum, my spermaceti, and my very city of – [Aside to Crispinus] 55

She has the most best, true, feminine wit in Rome!

CRISPINUS

I have heard so, sir, and do most vehemently desire to participate the

knowledge of her fair features.

ALBIUS

Ah, peace; you shall hear more anon; be not seen yet, I pray you – not yet:

observe. 60[Exit.]

CHLOE

’Sbody, give husbands the head a little more, and they’ll be nothing but

head shortly. [Indicating Crispinus] What’s he there?

FIRST MAID

I know not, forsooth.

SECOND MAID

[To Crispinus] Who would you speak with, sir?

CRISPINUS

I would speak with my cousin Cytheris. 65

SECOND MAID

[To Chloe] He is one, forsooth, would speak with his cousin

Cytheris.

CHLOE

Is she your cousin, sir?

CRISPINUS

Yes, in truth, forsooth, for fault of a better.

CHLOE

She is a gentlewoman? 70

CRISPINUS

Or else she should not be my cousin, I assure you.

CHLOE

Are you a gentleman born?

CRISPINUS

That I am, lady; you shall see mine arms, if’t please you.

CHLOE

No, your legs do sufficiently show you are a gentleman born, sir; for a

man borne upon little legs is always a gentleman borne. 75

CRISPINUS

Yet I pray you, vouchsafe the sight of my arms, mistress; for I bear

them about me, to have ’em seen. [He pulls out a design.] My name is Crispinus,

or Cry-spinas, indeed, which is well expressed in my arms: a face crying, in

chief; and beneath it a bloody toe between three thorns pungent.

CHLOE

Then you are welcome, sir. Now you are a gentleman born, I can find in 80

my heart to welcome you; for I am a gentlewoman born, too, and will bear

my head high enough, though ’twere my fortune to marry a tradesman.

CRISPINUS

No doubt of that, sweet feature; your carriage shows it in any man’s

eye that is carried upon you with judgement.

[Enter ALBIUS.] He is still going in and out.

ALBIUS

Dear wife, be not angry. 85

CHLOE

God’s my passion!

ALBIUS

Hear me but one thing: let not your maids set cushions in the parlour

windows, nor in the dining-chamber windows, nor upon stools in either of

them, in any case, for ’tis tavern-like; but lay them one upon another in some

out-room or corner of the dining chamber. 90

CHLOE

Go, go; meddle with your bedchamber only, or rather with your bed in

your chamber only; or rather with your wife in your bed only; or, on my faith,

I’ll not be pleased with you only.

ALBIUS

Look here, my dear wife, entertain that gentleman kindly, I prithee –-

[Chloe makes a gesture; Albius lays his finger on his lips.]

Mum. 95

CHLOE

Go! I need your instructions, indeed; anger me no more, I advise you.

[Exit Albius.]

City-sin, quoth’a! She’s a wise gentlewoman, i’faith, will marry herself to the

sin of the city.

[Enter ALBIUS.]

ALBIUS

But this time and no more, by heaven, wife. Hang no pictures in the hall

nor in the dining chamber, in any case, but in the gallery only, for ’tis not 100

courtly else, o’my word, wife.

CHLOE

’Sprecious, never have done!

ALBIUS

Wife – [She cuffs or threatens him again.] [Exit.]

CHLOE

Do I not bear a reasonable corrigible hand over him, Crispinus?

CRISPINUS

By this hand, lady, you hold a most sweet hand over him. 105

[Enter ALBIUS.]

ALBIUS

And then for the great gilt andirons –

CHLOE

Again! Would the andirons were in your great guts, for me.

ALBIUS

I do vanish, wife. [Exit.]

CHLOE

How shall I do, Master Crispinus? Here will be all the bravest ladies in

court presently, to see your cousin Cytheris. O the gods! How might I behave 110

myself now, as to entertain them most courtly?

CRISPINUS

Marry, lady, if you will entertain them most courtly, you must do

thus: as soon as ever your maid or your man brings you word they are come,

you must say ‘A pox on ’em, what do they here?’ And yet when they come,

speak them as fair and give them the kindest welcome in words that can be. 115

CHLOE

Is that the fashion of courtiers, Crispinus?

CRISPINUS

I assure you it is, lady; I have observed it.

CHLOE

For your ‘pox’, sir, it is easily hit on; but ’tis not so easy to speak fair after,

methinks?

[Enter ALBIUS.]

ALBIUS

Oh, wife, the coaches are come, on my word, a number of coaches, and 120

courtiers.

CHLOE

A pox on them! What do they here?

ALBIUS

How now, wife! Wouldst thou not have ’em come?

CHLOE

Come? Come, you are a fool, you. [To Crispinus] He knows not the trick

on’t. [To the Maids] Call Cytheris, I pray you. 125[Exit a Maid.]

And good Master Crispinus, you can observe, you say; let me entreat you for

all the ladies’ behaviours, jewels, jests, and attires, that you marking as well

as I, we may put both our marks together when they are gone, and confer of

them.

CRISPINUS

I warrant you, sweet lady; let me alone to observe till I turn myself 130

to nothing but observation.

[Enter] CYTHERIS.

Good morrow, cousin Cytheris.

CYTHERIS

Welcome, kind cousin. What? Are they come?

ALBIUS

Ay, your friend Cornelius Gallus, Ovid, Tibullus, Propertius, with Julia

the Emperor’s daughter and the lady Plautia, are lighted at the door, and 135

with them Hermogenes Tigellius, the excellent musician.

CYTHERIS

Come, let us go meet them, Chloe.

CHLOE

Observe, Crispinus.

CRISPINUS

At a hair’s breadth, lady, I warrant you.

2.2 [Enter to them] GALLUS, OVID, TIBULLUS, PROPERTIUS, HERMOGENES, JULIA, [and] PLAUTIA.

GALLUS

[Kissing Chloe] Health to the lovely Chloe! [To Cytheris] You must pardon

me, mistress, that I prefer this fair gentlewoman.

CYTHERIS

I pardon and praise you for it, sir, [To Julia] and I beseech Your Excellence,

receive her beauties into your knowledge and favour.

JULIA

Cytheris, she hath favour and behaviour that commands as much of me; 5

and, sweet Chloe, know I do exceedingly love you, and that I will approve in

any grace my father the emperor may show you. [Indicating Albius] Is this your

husband?

ALBIUS

For fault of a better, if it please Your Highness.

CHLOE

[To Cytheris] God’s my life! How he shames me! 10

CYTHERIS

Not a whit, Chloe; they all think you politic and witty; wise women

choose not husbands for the eye, merit, or birth, but wealth and sovereignty.

OVID

[To Albius] Sir, we all come to gratulate for the good report of you.

TIBULLUS

[To Albius] And would be glad to deserve your love, sir.

ALBIUS

My wife will answer you all, gentlemen; I’ll come to you again presently. 15

[Exit.]

PLAUTIA

[Indicating Chloe] You have chosen you a most fair companion here,

Cytheris, and a very fair house.

CYTHERIS

To both which you and all my friends are very welcome, Plautia.

CHLOE

With all my heart, I assure Your Ladyship.

PLAUTIA

Thanks, sweet Mistress Chloe. 20

JULIA

You must needs come to court, lady, i’faith, and there be sure your welcome

shall be as great to us.

OVID

[To Julia] She will well deserve it, madam. I see even in her looks gentry and

general worthiness.

TIBULLUS

I have not seen a more certain character of an excellent disposition. 25

[Enter ALBIUS.]

ALBIUS

Wife.

CHLOE

[To Albius] Oh, they do so commend me here, the courtiers! What’s the

matter now?

ALBIUS

For the banquet, sweet wife.

CHLOE

Yes. And I must needs come to court, and be welcome, the princess says. 30

[Exeunt Chloe and Albius.]

GALLUS

Ovid and Tibullus, you may be bold to welcome your mistresses here.

[The couples embrace.]

OVID

We find it so, sir.

TIBULLUS

And thank Cornelius Gallus.

OVID

[To Propertius] Nay, my sweet Sextus, in faith, thou art not sociable.

PROPERTIUS

In faith, I am not, Publius, nor I cannot.

Sick minds are like sick men that burn with fevers, 35

Who, when they drink, please but a present taste,

And after bear a more impatient fit.

[To the company] Pray, let me leave you; I offend you all,

And myself most.

GALLUS

Stay, sweet Propertius!

TIBULLUS

You yield too much unto your griefs and fate, 40

Which never hurts but when we say it hurts us.

PROPERTIUS

Oh, peace, Tibullus! Your philosophy

Lends you too rough a hand to search my wounds.

Speak they of griefs that know to sigh and grieve;

The free and unconstrainèd spirit feels 45

No weight of my oppression. [Exit.]

OVID

Worthy Roman!

Methinks I taste his misery, and could

Sit down and chide at his malignant stars.

JULIA

Methinks I love him, that he loves so truly.

CYTHERIS

This is the perfect’st love, lives after death. 50

GALLUS

Such is the constant ground of virtue still.

PLAUTIA

It puts on an inseparable face.

[Enter CHLOE. She and Crispinus converse apart.]

CHLOE

Have you marked everything, Crispinus?

CRISPINUS

Everything, I warrant you.

CHLOE

What gentlemen are these? Do you know them? 55

CRISPINUS

Ay, they are poets, lady.

CHLOE

Poets? They did not talk of me since I went, did they?

CRISPINUS

Oh, yes, and extolled your perfections to the heavens.

CHLOE

Now, in sincerity, they be the finest kind of men that ever I knew. Poets!

Could one not get the emperor to make my husband a poet, think you? 60

CRISPINUS

No, lady, ’tis love and beauty make poets; and since you like poets so

well, your love and beauties shall make me a poet.

CHLOE

What, shall they? And such a one as these?

CRISPINUS

Ay, and a better than these; I would be sorry else.

CHLOE

And shall your looks change? And your hair change? And all, like these? 65

CRISPINUS

Why, a man may be a poet and yet not change his hair, lady.

CHLOE

Well, we shall see your cunning; yet if you can change your hair, I pray

do.

[Enter ALBIUS.]

ALBIUS

Ladies and lordings, there’s a slight banquet stays within for you; please

you draw near and accost it. 70

JULIA

We thank you, good Albius. But when shall we see those excellent jewels

you are commended to have?

ALBIUS

At Your Ladyship’s service. [Aside] I got that speech by seeing a play last

day, and it did me some grace now. I see ’tis good to collect sometimes; I’ll

frequent these plays more than I have done, now I come to be familiar with 75

courtiers.

GALLUS

[Approaching Hermogenes] Why, how now, Hermogenes? What ailest thou,

trow?

HERMOGENES

A little melancholy. Let me alone, pray thee.

GALLUS

Melancholy! How so? 80

HERMOGENES

With riding. A plague on all coaches for me!

CHLOE

[Indicating Hermogenes] Is that hard-favoured gentleman a poet too,

Cytheris?

CYTHERIS

No; this is Hermogenes – as humorous as a poet, though; he is a

musician. 85

CHLOE

A musician? Then he can sing.

CYTHERIS

That he can excellently. Did you never hear him?

CHLOE

Oh, no. Will he be entreated, think you?

CYTHERIS

I know not. [To Gallus] Friend, Mistress Chloe would fain hear

Hermogenes sing. Are you interested in him? 90

GALLUS

No doubt his own humanity will command him so far, to the satisfaction

of so fair a beauty; but rather than fail, we’ll all be suitors to him.

HERMOGENES

’Cannot sing.

GALLUS

Pray thee, Hermogenes.

HERMOGENES

’Cannot sing. 95

GALLUS

[Indicating Chloe] For honour of this gentlewoman, to whose house I

know thou mayst be ever welcome.

CHLOE

That he shall in truth, sir, if he can sing.

[Ovid, Julia, Tibullus, and Plautia join the group around Hermogenes.]

OVID

What’s that?

GALLUS

This gentlewoman is wooing Hermogenes for a song. 100

OVID

A song? Come, he shall not deny her. Hermogenes?

HERMOGENES

’Cannot sing.

GALLUS

[To the group] No, the ladies must do it; he stays but to have their thanks

acknowledged as a debt to his cunning.

JULIA

That shall not want; ourself will be the first shall promise to pay him more 105

than thanks upon a favour so worthily vouchsafed.

HERMOGENES

Thank you, madam, but ’will not sing.

TIBULLUS

Tut, the only way to win him is to abstain from entreating him.

CRISPINUS

[Aside to Chloe] Do you love singing, lady?

CHLOE

Oh, passingly. 110

CRISPINUS

Entreat the ladies to entreat me to sing, then, I beseech you.

CHLOE

[To Julia, indicating Crispinus] I beseech Your Grace, entreat this gentleman

to sing.

JULIA

That we will, Chloe. Can he sing excellently?

CHLOE

I think so, madam, for he entreated me to entreat you to entreat him to 115

sing.

CRISPINUS

[Aside to Chloe] Heaven and earth! Would you tell that?

JULIA

[To Crispinus] Good sir, let’s entreat you to use your voice.

CRISPINUS

Alas, madam, I cannot, in truth.

PLAUTIA

The gentleman is modest. I warrant you he sings excellently. 120

OVID

Hermogenes, clear your throat. I see by him, here’s a gentleman will

worthily challenge you.

CRISPINUS

Not I, sir, I’ll challenge no man.

TIBULLUS

That’s your modesty, sir; but we, out of an assurance of your

excellency, challenge him in your behalf. 125

CRISPINUS

I thank you, gentlemen. I’ll do my best.

HERMOGENES

[To Crispinus] Let that best be good, sir, you were best.

GALLUS

Oh, this contention is excellent. [To Crispinus] What is’t you sing, sir?

CRISPINUS

‘If I freely may discover’, etc. Sir, I’ll sing that.

OVID

[To Hermogenes] One of your own compositions, Hermogenes. He offers you 130

vantage enough.

CRISPINUS

Nay, truly, gentlemen, I’ll challenge no man – I can sing but one staff

of the ditty, neither.

GALLUS

The better; Hermogenes himself will be entreated to sing the other.

[He sings]

CRISPINUS

If I freely may discover 135

What would please me in my lover,

I would have her fair and witty,

Savouring more of court than city;

A little proud, but full of pity;

Light and humorous in her toying, 140

Oft building hopes, and soon destroying,

Long, but sweet, in the enjoying;

Neither too easy nor too hard:

All extremes I would have barred.

GALLUS

[To Crispinus] Believe me, sir, you sing most excellently. 145

OVID

If there were a praise above excellence, the gentleman highly deserves it.

HERMOGENES

[To Crispinus] Sir, all this doth not yet make me envy you, for I

know I sing better than you.

TIBULLUS

[To the company] Attend Hermogenes now.

HERMOGENES

[He sings.]

She should be allowed her passions, 150

So they were but used as fashions:

Sometimes froward, and then frowning,

Sometimes sickish, and then swowning,

Every fit with change still crowning.

Purely jealous I would have her, 155

Then only constant when I crave her;

’Tis a virtue should not save her.

Thus, nor her delicates would cloy me

Neither her peevishness annoy me.

JULIA

Nay, Hermogenes, your merit hath long since been both known and 160

admired of us.

HERMOGENES

You shall hear me sing another; now will I begin.

GALLUS

[Indicating Albius] We shall do this gentleman’s banquet too much wrong,

that stays for us, ladies.

JULIA

’Tis true; and well thought on, Cornelius Gallus. 165

[The company begins to move towards the dining chamber.]

HERMOGENES

Why, ’tis but a short air; ’twill be done presently; pray stay.

[To the musicians in the gallery] Strike, music!

OVID

No, good Hermogenes; we’ll end this difference within.

JULIA

[To Ovid] ’Tis the common disease of all your musicians, that they know no

mean to be entreated either to begin or end. 170

ALBIUS

[To the company] Please you lead the way, gentles?

ALL

Thanks, good Albius. [Exeunt all but Albius and Crispinus.]

ALBIUS

[To himself] Oh, what a charm of thanks was here put upon me! O Jove,

what a setting forth it is to a man to have many courtiers come to his house!

Sweetly was it said of a good old housekeeper, ‘I had rather want meat than 175

want guests’– specially if they be courtly guests. For never trust me if one of

their good legs made in a house be not worth all the good cheer a man can

make them. He that

would have fine guests, let him have a fine wife; he that would have a fine wife, let him come to me.

CRISPINUS

By your kind leave, Master Albius. 180

ALBIUS

What, you are not gone, Master Crispinus?

CRISPINUS

Yes, faith, I have a design draws me hence. Pray, sir, fashion me an

excuse to the ladies.

ALBIUS

Will you not stay and see the jewels, sir? I pray you, stay.

CRISPINUS

Not for a million, sir, now. Let it suffice, I must relinquish; and so, 185

in a word, please you to expiate this compliment.

ALBIUS

Mum. [Exit.]

CRISPINUS

I’ll presently go and ingle some broker for a poet’s gown and bespeak

a garland; and then, jeweller, look to your best jewel, i’faith.[Exit.]

3.1 [Enter] HORACE.

HORACE

[To himself] Hmh? Yes. I will begin an ode so; and it shall be to Maecenas.

[Enter] CRISPINUS.

CRISPINUS

’Slid, yonder’s Horace! They say he’s an excellent poet; Maecenas

loves him. I’ll fall into his acquaintance if I can. I think he be composing as

he goes i’the street. Ha? ’Tis a good humour an he be; I’ll compose, too.

HORACE

[Reciting to himself]

Swell me a bowl with lusty wine 5

Till I may see the plump Lyaeus swim

Above the brim;

I drink as I would write,

In flowing measure filled with flame and spright.

CRISPINUS

Sweet Horace, Minerva and the muses stand auspicious to thy 10

designs! How far’st thou, sweet man? Frolic? Rich? Gallant? Ha?

HORACE

Not greatly gallant, sir; like my fortunes: well. I’m bold to take my

leave, sir. You’d naught else, sir, would you?

CRISPINUS

Troth, no, but I could wish thou didst know us, Horace. We are a

scholar, I assure thee. 15

HORACE

A scholar, sir? I shall be covetous of your fair knowledge.

CRISPINUS

Gramercy, good Horace. Nay, we are new turned poet, too, which is

more; and a satirist, too, which is more than that. I write just in thy vein, I. I

am for your odes or your sermons, or anything, indeed. We are a gentleman,

besides: our name is Rufus Laberius Crispinus. We are a pretty Stoic, too. 20

HORACE

To the proportion of your beard, I think it, sir.

CRISPINUS

By Phoebus, here’s a most neat fine street, is’t not? I protest to

thee I am enamoured of this street, now, more than of half the streets of

Rome, again; ’tis so polite and terse! There’s the front of a building, now. I

study architecture, too; if ever I should build, I’d have a house just of that 25

prospective.

HORACE

[Aside] Doubtless this gallant’s tongue has a good turn when he sleeps.

CRISPINUS

I do make verses when I come in such a street as this. Oh, your city

ladies, you shall ha’ ’em sit in every shop like the muses — offering you the

Castalian dews and the Thespian liquors, to as many as have but the sweet 30

grace and audacity to — sip of their lips. Did you never hear any of my verses?

HORACE

No, sir. (Aside) But I am in some fear I must now.

CRISPINUS

I’ll tell thee some (if I can but recover ’em) I composed e’en now of a

dressing I saw a jeweller’s wife wear, who indeed was a jewel herself. I prefer

that kind of tire, now. What’s thy opinion, Horace? 35

HORACE

With your silver bodkin it does well, sir.

CRISPINUS

I cannot tell, but it stirs me more than all your court-curls or your

spangles or your tricks. I affect not these high gable ends, these Tuscan tops,

nor your coronets, nor your arches, nor your pyramids; give me a fine, sweet

— little delicate dressing, with a bodkin, as you say, and a mushroom for all 40

your other ornatures.

HORACE

[Aside] Is’t not possible to make an escape from him?

CRISPINUS

I have remitted my verses all this while. I think I ha’ forgot ’em.

HORACE

[Aside] Here’s he could wish you had, else.

CRISPINUS

Pray Jove I can entreat ’em of my memory. 45

HORACE

You put your memory to too much trouble, sir.

CRISPINUS

No, sweet Horace, we must not ha’ thee think so.

HORACE

I cry you mercy. [Aside] Then they are my ears

That must be tortured. Well, you must have patience, ears.

CRISPINUS

Pray thee, Horace, observe. 50

HORACE

[Surveying him] Yes, sir. Your satin sleeve begins to fret at the rug that

is underneath it, I do observe; and your ample velvet bases are not without

evident stains of a hot disposition naturally.

CRISPINUS

Oh, I’ll dye them into another colour at pleasure. How many yards

of velvet dost thou think they contain? 55

HORACE

[Aside] Heart! I have put him now in a fresh way

To vex me more. [To Crispinus] Faith, sir, your mercer’s book

Will tell you with more patience than I can,

(Aside) For I am crossed, and so’s not that, I think.

CRISPINUS

’Slight, these verses have lost me again; I shall not invite ’em to my 60

mind now.

HORACE

Rack not your thoughts, good sir; rather defer it

To a new time. I’ll meet you at your lodging

Or where you please. Till then, Jove keep you, sir. [Horace starts to go.]

CRISPINUS

Nay, gentle Horace, stay; I have it now. 65

HORACE

Yes, sir. [Aside] Apollo, Hermes, Jupiter, look down upon me.

CRISPINUS

[Reciting]

Rich was thy hap, sweet, dainty cap

There to be placed:

Where thy smooth black, sleek white may smack,

And both be graced. 70

‘White’ is there usurped for her brow: her forehead; and then ‘sleek’, as the

parallel to ‘smooth’ that went before. A kind of paranomasy or agnomination;

do you conceive, sir?

HORACE

Excellent. Troth, sir, I must be abrupt and leave you.

CRISPINUS

Why, what haste hast thou? Pray thee, stay a little. Thou shalt not go 75

yet, by Phoebus.

HORACE

I shall not? [Aside] What remedy? Fie, how I sweat with suffering!

CRISPINUS

And then —

HORACE

Pray, sir, give me leave to wipe my face a little.

CRISPINUS

Yes, do, good Horace. 80

HORACE

Thank you, sir.

[Aside] Death! I must crave his leave to piss, anon,

Or that I may go hence with half my teeth;

I am in some such fear. This tyranny

Is strange, to take mine ears up by commission 85

Whether I will or no, and make them stalls

To his lewd solecisms and worded trash.

Happy thou, bold Bolanus, now, I say,

Whose freedom and impatience of this fellow

Would long ere this have called him fool, and fool, 90

And rank and tedious fool, and have slung jests

As hard as stones till thou hadst pelted him

Out of the place, whilst my tame modesty

Suffers my wit be made a solemn ass

To bear his fopperies — 95

CRISPINUS

Horace, thou art miserably affected to be gone, I see. But – pray thee,

let’s prove to enjoy thee awhile. Thou hast no business, I assure me. Whither

is thy journey directed, ha?

HORACE

Sir, I am going to visit a friend that’s sick.

CRISPINUS

A friend? What’s he? Do not I know him? 100

HORACE

No, sir, you do not know him. [Aside] And ’tis not the worse for him.

CRISPINUS

What’s his name? Where’s he lodged?

HORACE

Where I shall be fearful to draw you out of your way, sir: a great way

hence. Pray, sir, let’s part.

CRISPINUS

Nay, but where is’t? I pray thee, say. 105

HORACE

On the far side of all Tiber, [Pointing] yonder, by Caesar’s gardens.

CRISPINUS

Oh, that’s my course directly; I am for you. Come, go. Why stand’st

thou?

HORACE

Yes, sir. Marry, the plague is in that part of the city; I had almost forgot

to tell you, sir. 110

CRISPINUS

Faugh! It’s no matter; I fear no pestilence. I ha’ not offended Phoebus.

HORACE

[Aside] I have, it seems, or else this heavy scourge

Could ne’er have lighted on me —

CRISPINUS

Come along.

HORACE

I am to go down some half mile [Pointing in a different direction] this way, 115

sir, first, to speak with his physician; and from thence to his apothecary,

where I shall stay the mixing of divers drugs —

CRISPINUS

Why, it’s all one. I have nothing to do, and I love not to be idle;

I’ll bear thee company. How call’st thou the pothecary?

HORACE

[Aside] Oh, that I knew a name would fright him, now! [To Crispinus] 120

Sir, Rhadamanthus; Rhadamanthus, sir.

There’s one so called is a just judge in hell

And doth inflict strange vengeance on all those

That here on earth torment poor patient spirits.

CRISPINUS

He dwells at the Three Furies, by Janus’ temple? 125

HORACE

Your pothecary does, sir.

CRISPINUS

Heart, I owe him money for sweetmeats, and he has laid to arrest me,

I hear; but —

HORACE

Sir, I have made a most solemn vow: I will never bail any man.

CRISPINUS

Well, then, I’ll swear and speak him fair, if the worst come. But his 130

name is Minos, not Rhadamanthus, Horace.

HORACE

That may be, sir; I but guessed at his name by his sign. But your Minos

is a judge, too, sir!

CRISPINUS

I protest to thee, Horace, do but taste me once. If I do know myself

and mine own virtues truly, thou wilt not make that esteem of Varius, or 135

Virgil, or Tibullus, or any of ’em indeed, as now in thy ignorance thou dost,

which I am content to forgive. I would fain see which of these could pen more

verses in a day, or with more facility, than I; or that could court his mistress,

kiss her hand, make better sport with her fan or her dog —

HORACE

I cannot bail you yet, sir. 140

CRISPINUS

– or that could move his body more gracefully, or dance better. You

should see me, were it not i’the street –

HORACE

Nor yet.

CRISPINUS

Why, I have been a reveller, and at my cloth of silver suit and my long

stocking in my time, and will be again – 145

HORACE

If you may be trusted, sir.

CRISPINUS

And then for my singing, Hermogenes himself envies me, that is

your only master of music you have in Rome.

HORACE

Is your mother living, sir?

CRISPINUS

Au! Convert thy thoughts to somewhat else, I pray thee. 150

HORACE

You have much of the mother in you, sir; your father is dead?

CRISPINUS

Ay, I thank Jove, and my grandfather, too, and all my kinsfolks, and

well composed in their urns.

HORACE

[Aside] The more their happiness, that rest in peace,

Free from th’abundant torture of thy tongue. 155

Would I were with them too.

CRISPINUS

What’s that, Horace?

HORACE

I now remember me, sir, of a sad fate

A cunning woman, one Sabella, sung

When in her urn she cast my destiny,

I being but a child.

CRISPINUS

What was’t, I pray thee? 160

HORACE

She told me I should surely never perish

By famine, poison, or the enemy’s sword;

The hectic fever, cough, or pleurisy

Should never hurt me, nor the tardy gout;

But in my time I should be once surprised 165

By a strong, tedious talker, that should vex

And almost bring me to consumption.

Therefore, if I were wise, she warned me shun

All such long-winded monsters as my bane;

For if I could but ’scape that one discourser, 170

I might, no doubt, prove an old agèd man.

[Making ready to go] By your leave, sir?

CRISPINUS

Tut, tut, abandon this idle humour; ’tis nothing but melancholy.

’Fore Jove, now I think on’t, I am to appear in court here to answer to one

that has me in suit. Sweet Horace, go with me. This is my hour; if I neglect it, 175

the law proceeds against me. Thou art familiar with these things. Pray thee,

if thou lov’st me, go.

HORACE

Now let me die, sir, if I know your laws

Or have the power to stand still half so long

In their loud courts, as while a case is argued. 180

Besides, you know, sir, where I am to go,

And the necessity —

CRISPINUS

’Tis true —

HORACE

[Aside] I hope the hour of my release be come! He will upon this

consideration discharge me, sure. 185

CRISPINUS

Troth, I am doubtful what I may best do: whether to leave thee, or

my affairs, Horace?

HORACE

O Jupiter! Me, sir; me, by any means. I beseech you, me, sir.

CRISPINUS

No, faith, I’ll venture those now. Thou shalt see I love thee. Come,

Horace. 190

HORACE

Nay, then, I am desperate; I follow you, sir. ’Tis hard contending with

a man that overcomes thus.

CRISPINUS

And how deals Maecenas with thee? Liberally, ha? Is he open-handed?

Bountiful?

HORACE

He’s still himself, sir. 195

CRISPINUS

Troth, Horace, thou art exceeding happy in thy friends and acquaintance;

they are all most choice spirits and of the first rank of Romans. I do

not know that poet, I protest, has used his fortune more prosperously than

thou hast. If thou wouldst bring me known to Maecenas, I should second thy

desert well; thou shouldst find a good, sure assistant of me: one that would 200

speak all good of thee in thy absence and be content with the next place, not

envying thy reputation with thy patron. Let me not live but I think thou and

I, in a small time, should lift them all out of favour, both Virgil, Varius, and

the best of them, and enjoy him wholly to ourselves.

HORACE

[Aside] Gods, you do know it, I can hold no longer; 205

This breeze hath pricked my patience. [To Crispinus] Sir, Your Silkness

Clearly mistakes Maecenas and his house,

To think there breathes a spirit beneath his roof

Subject unto those poor affections

Of undermining envy and detraction – 210

Moods only proper to base, grovelling minds.

That place is not in Rome, I dare affirm,

More pure or free from such low, common evils.

There’s no man grieved that this is thought more rich

Or this more learnèd; each man hath his place, 215

And to his merit his reward of grace,

Which with a mutual love they all embrace.

CRISPINUS

You report a wonder! ’Tis scarce credible, this.

HORACE

I am no torturer to enforce you to believe it, but ’tis so.

CRISPINUS

Why, this inflames me with a more ardent desire to be his than before. 220

But I doubt I shall find the entrance to his familiarity somewhat more than

difficult, Horace.

HORACE

Tut, you’ll conquer him as you have done me. There’s no standing out

against you, sir; I see that. Either your importunity or the intimation of your

good parts, or — 225

CRISPINUS

Nay, I’ll bribe his porter and the grooms of his chamber, make his

doors open to me that way first; and then I’ll observe my times. Say he

should extrude me his house today; shall I therefore desist, or let fall my

suit tomorrow? No. I’ll attend him, follow him, meet him i’the street, the

highways, run by his coach, never leave him. What! Man hath nothing given 230

him in this life without much labour.

HORACE

[Aside] And impudence.

Archer of heaven, Phoebus, take thy bow

And with a full-drawn shaft nail to the earth

This Python, that I may yet run hence and live; 235

Or, brawny Hercules, do thou come down

And — though thou mak’st it up thy thirteenth labour —

Rescue me from this Hydra of discourse here.

3.2 [Enter FUSCUS] ARISTIUS.

ARISTIUS

Horace, well met.

HORACE

[Aside to Aristius] Oh, welcome, my reliever!

Aristius, as thou lov’st me, ransom me.

ARISTIUS

What ail’st thou, man?

HORACE

[As before] Death, I am seized on here

By a land-remora; I cannot stir,

Not move, but as he please.

CRISPINUS

Wilt thou go, Horace? 5

HORACE

[As before] Heart! He cleaves to me like Alcides’ shirt,

Tearing my flesh and sinews; oh, I ha’ been vexed

And tortured with him beyond forty fevers.

For Jove’s sake, find some means to take me from him!

ARISTIUS

[Aloud] Yes, I will: but I’ll go first and tell Maecenas. 10

CRISPINUS

[To Horace] Come, shall we go?

ARISTIUS

[Aloud] The jest will make his eyes run, i’faith.

[Aristius starts to leave.]

HORACE

Nay, Aristius?

ARISTIUS

[Going] Farewell, Horace.

HORACE

Death! Will ’a leave me? [Calling after him] Fuscus Aristius, do you hear? 15

Gods of Rome!

[Aristius returns.]

You said you had somewhat to say to me in private.

ARISTIUS

Ay, but I see you are now employed with that gentleman. ’Twere

offence to trouble you. I’ll take some better opportunity; farewell. [Exit.]

HORACE

Mischief and torment! O my soul and heart, 20

How are you cramped with anguish! Death itself

Brings not the like convulsions. O this day,

That ever I should view thy tedious face —

CRISPINUS

Horace, what passion, what humour is this?

HORACE

Away, good prodigy, afflict me not. 25

[To himself] A friend, and mock me thus! Never was man

So left under the axe — How now?

3.3 [Enter to them] MINOS, [with two] LICTORS.

MINOS

[Indicating Crispinus to the Lictors] That’s he in the embroidered hat there,

with the ash-coloured feather: his name is Laberius Crispinus.

LICTOR

Laberius Crispinus, I arrest you in the emperor’s name.

CRISPINUS

Me, sir? Do you arrest me?

LICTOR

Ay, sir, at the suit of Master Minos the pothecary. 5

HORACE

[Aside] Thanks, great Apollo! I will not slip thy favour offered me in my

escape, for my fortunes. [Exit unobserved by Crispinus.]

CRISPINUS

Master Minos? I know no Master Minos. [Looking about] Where’s

Horace? Horace? Horace?

MINOS

[Coming forward] Sir, do not you know me? 10

CRISPINUS

Oh, yes, I know you, Master Minos; cry you mercy. But Horace? God’s

me, is he gone?

MINOS

Ay, and so would you, too, if you knew how. – Officer, look to him.

[The Lictors approach Crispinus to remove him.]

CRISPINUS

Do you hear, Master Minos? Pray let’s be used like a man of our own

fashion. By Janus and Jupiter, I meant to have paid you next week, every 15

drachma. Seek not to eclipse my reputation thus vulgarly.

MINOS

Sir, your oaths cannot serve you; you know I have forborne you long.

CRISPINUS

I am conscious of it, sir.

[The Lictors lay hold of him and pull him away.]

Nay, I beseech you, gentlemen, do not exhale me thus; remember ’tis but for

sweetmeats — 20

LICTOR

Sweet meat must have sour sauce, sir. Come along.

[They drag him.]

CRISPINUS

Sweet Master Minos! I am forfeited to eternal disgrace if you do not

commiserate. [To the First Lictor] Good officer, be not so officious.

3.4 [Enter] TUCCA, [with FIRST and SECOND] PYRGI.

TUCCA

[To the Lictors] Why, how now, my good brace of bloodhounds? Whither

do you drag the gent’man? You mongrels, you curs, you bandogs, we are

Captain Tucca that talk to you, you inhumane pilchers.

MINOS

[To Tucca] Sir, he is their prisoner.

TUCCA

Their pestilence! What are you, sir? 5

MINOS

A citizen of Rome, sir.

TUCCA

Then you are not far distant from a fool, sir.

MINOS

A pothecary, sir.

TUCCA

I knew thou wast not a physician.

[He makes a show of sniffing.]

Faugh! Out of my nostrils! Thou stink’st of lotium and the syringe. Away, 10

quacksalver! [To the First Pyrgus] Follower, my sword!

FIRST PYRGUS

[Handing a sword to Tucca] Here, noble leader. [Aside] You’ll do no

harm with it, I’ll trust you.

TUCCA

[To the Lictor] Do you hear, you, goodman slave? Hook, ram, rogue,

catchpole! Loose the gent’man, or by my velvet arms — 15

The officer strikes up his [Tucca’s] heels.

LICTOR

[Catching Tucca’s sword] What will you do, sir?

TUCCA

Kiss thy hand, my honourable active varlet, and embrace thee, thus.

FIRST PYRGUS

[Aside] Oh, patient metamorphosis!

TUCCA

[To the Lictor] My sword, my tall rascal.

LICTOR

Nay, soft, sir; some wiser than some. 20

TUCCA

What? And a wit, too! By Pluto, thou must be cherished, slave:

[He gives the Lictor money.]

here’s three drachmas for thee; hold.

FIRST PYRGUS

[Aside] There’s half his lendings gone.

TUCCA

[To the Lictor] Give me.

LICTOR

No, sir, your first word shall stand: I’ll hold all. 25

TUCCA

Nay, but, rogue —

LICTOR

You would make a rescue of our prisoner, sir, you?

TUCCA

I, a rescue? Away, inhuman varlet! Come, come, I never relish above one

jest at most; do not disgust me, sirrah, do not. Rogue, I tell thee, rogue, do

not. 30

LICTOR

How, sir? ‘Rogue’?

TUCCA

Ay. Why, thou art not angry, rascal? Art thou?

LICTOR

I cannot tell, sir; I am little better upon these terms.

TUCCA

Ha! Gods and fiends! Why, dost hear? Rogue, thou, give me thy hand;

I say unto thee, thy hand, rogue. What? Dost not thou know me? Not me, 35

rogue? Not Captain Tucca, rogue?

MINOS

[To the Lictor] Come: pray surrender the gentleman his sword, officer; we’ll

have no fighting here.

TUCCA

[To Minos] What’s thy name?

MINOS

Minos, an’t please you. 40

TUCCA

Minos? Come hither, Minos; thou art a wise fellow, it seems. Let me talk

with thee.

CRISPINUS

Was ever wretch so wretched as unfortunate I?

TUCCA

[Apart to Minos] Thou art one of the Centumviri, old boy, art not?

MINOS

No, indeed, Master Captain. 45

TUCCA

Go to, thou shalt be, then; I’ll ha’ thee one, Minos. Take my sword from

those rascals, dost thou see? Go, do it; I cannot attempt with patience. [Aloud]

What does this gentleman owe thee, little Minos?

MINOS

Fourscore sesterces, sir.

TUCCA

What? No more? Come, thou shalt release him, Minos. What, I’ll be his 50

bail; thou shalt take my word, old boy, and cashier these Furies. Thou shalt

do’t, I say, thou shalt, little Minos, thou shalt.

CRISPINUS

Yes; and as I am a gentleman and a reveller, I’ll make a piece of poetry,

and absolve all within these five days.

TUCCA

Come, Minos is not to learn how to use a gent’man of quality, I know. 55

[To Minos] My sword. If he pay thee not, I will and I must, old boy. Thou shalt be

my pothecary, too. Hast good eringoes, Minos?

MINOS

The best in Rome, sir.

TUCCA

Go to, then. [To the Pyrgi] Vermin, know the house.

FIRST PYRGUS

I warrant you, Colonel. 60

TUCCA

[To Minos, indicating Crispinus] For this gentleman, Minos?

MINOS

I’ll take your word, Captain.

TUCCA

Thou hast it. My sword —

MINOS

Yes, sir; [To Crispinus] but you must discharge the arrest, Master Crispinus.

TUCCA

How, Minos? Look in the gentleman’s face and but read his silence. Pay, 65

pay; ’tis honour, Minos.

[Minos pays the Lictors, who release Crispinus.]

CRISPINUS

[To Tucca] By Jove, sweet Captain, you do most infinitely endear and

oblige me to you.

TUCCA

Tut, I cannot compliment, by Mars; but Jupiter love me as I love good

words and good clothes, and there’s an end. Thou shalt give my boy that 70

girdle and hangers when thou hast worn them a little more –

CRISPINUS

O Jupiter! Captain, he shall have them now, presently.

[To the First Pyrgus] Please you to be acceptive, young gentleman.

FIRST PYRGUS

Yes, sir, fear not: I shall accept. [Aside] I have a pretty, foolish

humour of taking, if you knew all. 75

TUCCA

[To the First Pyrgus] Not now. You shall not take, boy.

CRISPINUS

By my truth and earnest, but he shall, Captain, by your leave.

TUCCA

[To the First Pyrgus] Nay, an ’a swear by his truth and earnest, take it, boy.

Do not make a gent’man forsworn.

[Crispinus transfers the belt to the Pyrgus

while Tucca is occupied with the Lictors.]

LICTOR

[Approaching Tucca with the confiscated sword] Well, sir, there is your sword; 80

but thank Master Minos. You had not carried it as you do, else.

[The Lictors start to leave.]

TUCCA

Minos is just, and you are knaves, and —

LICTOR

[Turning] What say you, sir?

TUCCA

Pass on, my good scoundrel, pass on; I honour thee.

[The Lictors move towards the exit.]

But that I hate to have action with such base rogues as these, you should 85

ha’ seen me unrip their noses now, and have sent ’em to the next barber’s to

stitching; for, do you see —

[The Lictors turn back.]

I am a man of humour, and I do love the varlets, the honest varlets; they have

wit and valour, and are indeed good, profitable – [Exeunt Lictors.]

arrant rogues as any live in an empire. [Aside to Crispinus] Dost thou hear, 90

poetaster? Second me. [Aloud] Stand up, Minos, close. [To both] Gather yet:

so. — Sir: [Aside to Crispinus] thou shalt have a quarter share; be resolute.

[Aloud to him] You shall, at my request, take Minos by the hand here: little Minos;

I will have it so: all friends, and a health. Be not inexorable. — And thou shalt

impart the wine, old boy; thou shalt do’t, little Minos, thou shalt; make us 95

pay it in our physic. What! We must live and honour the gods sometimes:

now Bacchus, now Comus, now Priapus — every god a little.

[Enter] HISTRIO.

What’s he that stalks by there? – Boy, Pyrgus, you were best let him pass,

sirrah. Do, ferret, let him pass, do.

FIRST PYRGUS

’Tis a player, sir. 100

TUCCA

A player? Call him; call the lousy slave hither. What, will he sail by and

not once strike or vail to a man-of-war, ha? [Calling to Histrio] Do you hear?

You, player, rogue, stalker! Come back here! No respect to men of worship,

you slave?

[Histrio turns and approaches.]

What, you are proud, you rascal; are you proud, ha? You grow rich, do you? 105

And purchase, you twopenny tearmouth? You have Fortune and the good

year on your side, you stinkard? You have? You have?

HISTRIO

Nay, sweet Captain, be confined to some reason. I protest I saw you not,

sir.

TUCCA

You did not? Where was your sight, Oedipus? You walk with hare’s eyes, 110

do you? I’ll ha’ ’em glazed, rogue; an you say the word, they shall be glazed

for you. Come, we must have you turn fiddler again, slave, get a bass violin at

your back and march in a tawny coat with one sleeve to Goose Fair, and then

you’ll know us; you’ll see us then. You will, gulch, you will! Then,

[Mimicking a strolling musician] ‘Will’t please Your Worship to have any music, Captain?’ 115

HISTRIO

[Laughing] Nay, good Captain.

TUCCA

What? Do you laugh, Owlglass? Death, you perstemptuous varlet, I am

none of your fellows; I have commanded a hundred and fifty such rogues, I!

FIRST PYRGUS

[Aside] Ay, and most of that hundred and fifty have been leaders

of a legion. 120

HISTRIO

If I have exhibited wrong, I’ll tender satisfaction, Captain.

TUCCA

Say’st thou so, honest vermin? Give me thy hand; thou shalt make us a

supper one of these nights.

HISTRIO

When you please, by Jove, Captain, most willingly.

TUCCA

Dost thou swear? Tomorrow, then. Say and hold, slave. There are some of 125

you players honest gent’manlike scoundrels and suspected to ha’ some wit as

well as your poets, both at drinking and breaking of jests, and are companions

for gallants. A man may skelder ye now and then of half a dozen shillings or

so. [Indicating Crispinus] Dost thou not know that Pantolabus there?

HISTRIO

No, I assure you, Captain. 130

TUCCA

Go and be acquainted with him, then. He is a gent’man, parcel-poet, you

slave. His father was a man of worship, I tell thee. Go! He pens high, lofty, in

a new stalking strain, bigger than half the rhymers i’the town, again; he was

born to fill thy mouth, Minotaurus, he was. He will teach thee to tear and

rand, rascal. To him; cherish his muse, go! Thou hast forty, forty — shillings, 135

I mean, stinkard; give him in earnest, do. He shall write for thee, slave. If he

pen for thee once, thou shalt not need to travel with thy pumps full of gravel

any more after a blind jade and a hamper, and stalk upon boards and barrel

heads to an old cracked trumpet —

HISTRIO

Troth, I think I ha’ not so much about me, Captain. 140

TUCCA

It’s no matter; give him what thou hast, Stifftoe. I’ll give my word for

the rest. Though it lack a shilling or two, it skills not. Go, thou art an honest

shifter; I’ll ha’ the statute repealed for thee.

[Histrio goes aside to assemble his money.]

– Minos, I must tell thee, Minos, [Indicating Crispinus] thou hast dejected yon

gent’man’s spirit exceedingly. Dost observe? Dost note, little Minos? 145

MINOS

Yes, sir.

TUCCA

Go to, then: raise, recover, do. Suffer him not to droop in prospect of a

player, a rogue, a stager. Put twenty into his hand, twenty – sesterces, I mean,

and let nobody see. Go, do it, the work shall commend itself. Be Minos; I’ll

pay. 150

MINOS

Yes, forsooth, Captain.

[He approaches Crispinus.]

SECOND PYRGUS

[To the First Pyrgus] Do not we serve a notable shark?

[While Tucca and Histrio talk, Minos gives money to Crispinus.]

TUCCA

[To Histrio] And what new matters have you now afoot, sirrah, ha? I would

fain come with my cockatrice one day and see a play, if I knew when there

were a good bawdy one; but they say you ha’ nothing but humours, revels, 155

and satires that gird and fart at the time, you slave.

HISTRIO

No, I assure you, Captain, not we. They are on the other side of Tiber.

We have as much ribaldry in our plays as can be, as you would wish, Captain.

All the sinners i’the suburbs come and applaud our action daily.

TUCCA

I hear you’ll bring me o’the stage there: you’ll play me, they say; I shall 160

be presented by a sort of copper-laced scoundrels of you. Life of Pluto, an you

stage me, stinkard, your mansions shall sweat for’t, your tabernacles, varlets,

your Globes and your triumphs!

HISTRIO

Not we, by Phoebus, Captain. Do not do us imputation without desert.

TUCCA

I wu’ not, my good twopenny rascal. Reach me thy neuf. Dost hear? 165

What wilt thou give me a week for my brace of beagles here, my little point-

trussers? You shall ha’ them act among ye. [To the First Pyrgus] Sirrah, you,

pronounce. – Thou shalt hear him speak in King Darius’s doleful strain.

FIRST PYRGUS

[He recites.] ‘O doleful days! O direful deadly dump!

O wicked world! and worldly wickedness! 170

How can I hold my fist from crying “thump”

In rue of this right rascal wretchedness!’

TUCCA

[To the First Pyrgus] In an amorous vein now, sirrah. [To the others] Peace.

FIRST PYRGUS

‘Oh, she is wilder and more hard withal

Than beast or bird, or tree or stony wall. 175

Yet might she love me to uprear her state;

Ay, but perhaps she hopes some nobler mate.

Yet might she love me to content her sire;

Ay, but her reason masters her desire.

Yet might she love me as her beauty’s thrall; 180

Ay, but I fear she cannot love at all.’

TUCCA

[To the Second Pyrgus] Now the horrible fierce soldier: you, sirrah.

SECOND PYRGUS

‘What? Will I brave thee? Ay, and beard thee, too!

A Roman spirit scorns to bear a brain

So full of base pusillanimity.’ 185

HISTRIO

Excellent!

TUCCA

[To Histrio] Nay, thou shalt see that shall ravish thee anon; prick up thine

ears, stinkard. — The ghost, boys.

FIRST PYRGUS

Vindicta!

SECOND PYRGUS

Timoria! 190

FIRST PYRGUS

Vindicta!

SECOND PYRGUS

Timoria!

FIRST PYRGUS

Veni!

SECOND PYRGUS

Veni!

TUCCA

[To Second Pyrgus] Now thunder, sirrah: you, the rumbling player. 195

SECOND PYRGUS

Ay, but somebody must cry ‘murder!’ then, in a small voice.

TUCCA

Your fellow sharer there shall do it. [To the First Pyrgus] Cry, sirrah, cry.

[The Second Pyrgus beats a drum roll.]

FIRST PYRGUS

[In a high voice] ‘Murder! Murder!’

SECOND PYRGUS

‘Who calls out “murder”? [To the First Pyrgus] Lady, was it you?’

HISTRIO

Oh, admirable good, I protest.200

TUCCA

[To the Second Pyrgus] Sirrah boy, brace your drum a little straiter and do

the t’other fellow there, he in the — what sha’ call him — [To the First Pyrgus]

And ‘yet stay’, too.

[The Second Pyrgus beats another drum roll.]

SECOND PYRGUS

‘Nay, an thou dalliest, then I am thy foe,

And fear shall force what friendship cannot win. 205

Thy death shall bury what thy life conceals:

Villain! Thou diest for more respecting her –- ’

FIRST PYRGUS

‘Oh, stay, my lord!’

SECOND PYRGUS

‘— than me.

Yet speak the truth, and I will guerdon thee;

But if thou dally once again, thou diest.’ 210

TUCCA

Enough of this, boy.

SECOND PYRGUS

‘Why then, lament therefor! Damned be thy guts

Unto King Pluto’s hell and princely Erebus!

For sparrows must have food.’

HISTRIO

Pray, sweet Captain, let one of them do a little of a lady. 215

TUCCA

Oh, he will make thee eternally enamoured of him there. [To First Pyrgus]

Do, sirrah, do; ’twill allay your fellow’s fury a little.

FIRST PYRGUS

[In a high voice] ‘Master, mock on; the scorn thou givest me,

Pray Jove, some lady may return on thee.’

SECOND PYRGUS

No, you shall see me do the Moor. [To Tucca] Master, lend me 220

your scarf a little.

TUCCA

Here; ’tis at thy service, boy.

SECOND PYRGUS

You, Master Minos, hark hither a little.

[He draws Minos apart and speaks to him.]

They [Minos and the Second Pyrgus] withdraw to make themselves ready.

TUCCA

[To Histrio] How dost like him? Art not rapt? Art not tickled, now? Dost

not applaud, rascal? Dost not applaud? 225

HISTRIO

Yes. What will you ask for ’em a week, Captain?

TUCCA

No, you mangonizing slave, I will not part from ’em; you’ll sell ’em for

ingles, you. Let’s ha’ good cheer tomorrow night at supper, stalker, and then

we’ll talk: good capon and plover, do you hear, sirrah? And do not bring

your eating player with you there; I cannot away with him; he will eat a 230

leg of mutton while I am in my porridge, the lean Poluphagos; his belly is

like Barathrum, he looks like a midwife in man’s apparel, the slave. Nor the

villainous out-of-tune fiddler Enobarbus, bring not him. What hast thou

there? Six-and-thirty, ha?

HISTRIO

No, here’s all I have, Captain: some five-and-twenty. [He gives Tucca the money.] 235

Pray, sir, will you present and accommodate it unto the gentleman?

For mine own part, I am a mere stranger to his humour. Besides, I have some

business invites me hence, with Master Asinius Lupus, the tribune.

TUCCA

Well, go thy ways, pursue thy projects; let me alone with this design.

My poetaster shall make thee a play, and thou shalt be a man of good parts 240

in it. But stay, let me see: do not bring your Aesop, your politician, unless

you can ram up his mouth with cloves; the slave smells ranker than some

sixteen dunghills and is seventeen times more rotten. Marry, you may bring

Frisker, my zany; he’s a good skipping swaggerer; and your fat fool there,

my Mango, bring him too; but let him not beg rapiers nor scarves in his over- 245

familiar playing face, nor roar out his barren bold jests with a tormenting

laughter, between drunk and dry. Do you hear, Stifftoe? Give him warning,

admonition, to forsake his saucy, glavering grace and his goggle eye; it does

not become him, sirrah; tell him so. I have stood up and defended you, I, to

gent’men, when you have been said to prey upon puisnes and honest citizens 250

for socks or buskins, or when they ha’ called you usurers or brokers, or said

you were able to help to a piece of flesh; I have sworn I did not think so.

Nor that you were the common retreats for punks decayed i’their practice. I

cannot believe it of you —

HISTRIO

Thank you, Captain. Jupiter and the rest of the gods confine your 255

modern delights without disgust! [Histrio starts to leave.]

TUCCA

Stay, thou shalt see the Moor ere thou goest.

[Enter] DEMETRIUS.

What’s he with the half arms there, that salutes us out of his cloak like a

motion, ha?

HISTRIO

Oh, sir, his doublet’s a little decayed; he is otherwise a very simple, 260

honest fellow, sir, one Demetrius, a dresser of plays about the town here.

We have hired him to abuse Horace and bring him in in a play with all his

gallants: as, Tibullus, Maecenas, Cornelius Gallus, and the rest.

TUCCA

And why so, stinkard?

HISTRIO

Oh, it will get us a huge deal of money, Captain, and we have need on’t, 265

for this winter has made us all poorer than so many starved snakes. Nobody

comes at us: not a gentleman, nor a —

TUCCA

But you know nothing by him, do you, to make a play of?

HISTRIO

Faith, not much, Captain; but our author will devise that that shall

serve in some sort. 270

TUCCA

Why, my Parnassus here shall help him if thou wilt. Can thy author do it

impudently enough?

HISTRIO

Oh, I warrant you, Captain, and spitefully enough, too; he has one

of the most overflowing rank wits in Rome. He will slander any man that

breathes, if he disgust him. 275

TUCCA

I’ll know the poor, egregious, nitty rascal, an he have these commendable

qualities; I’ll cherish him — stay, here comes the Tartar — I’ll make a gathering

for him, I: a purse, and put the poor slave in fresh rags.

The boy comes in on Minos’s shoulders, who stalks as he [the Second Pyrgus] acts.

Tell him so, to comfort him. [To the Second Pyrgus] Well said, boy.

SECOND PYRGUS

‘Where art thou, boy? Where is Calipolis? 280

Fight, earthquakes, in the entrails of the earth,

And eastern whirlwinds in the hellish shades!

Some foul contagion of th’infected heavens

Blast all the trees, and in their cursèd tops

The dismal night-raven and tragic owl 285

Breed, and become forerunners of my fall!’

TUCCA

[To Histrio] Well, now fare thee well, my honest penny-biter. Commend me

to Seven-shares-and-a-half, and remember tomorrow. If you lack a service,

you shall play in my name, rascals, but you shall buy your own cloth, and I’ll

ha’ two shares for my countenance. [Histrio and Demetrius start to exit.] 290

Let thy author stay with me.

DEMETRIUS

[To Tucca] Yes, sir. [Exit Histrio.]

TUCCA

[To Minos] ’Twas well done, little Minos, thou didst stalk well. Forgive me

that I said thou stunk’st, Minos; ’twas the savour of a poet I met sweating in

the street, hangs yet in my nostrils. 295

CRISPINUS

Who? Horace?

TUCCA

Ay, he; dost thou know him?

CRISPINUS

Oh, he forsook me most barbarously, I protest.

TUCCA

Hang him, fusty satyr, he smells all goat; he carries a ram under his

armholes, the slave; I am the worse when I see him. 300

[Tucca and Crispinus speak apart.]

Did not Minos impart?

CRISPINUS

[Showing Tucca the money] Yes, here are twenty drachmas he did convey.

TUCCA

Well said. Keep ’em; we’ll share anon. [Aloud] Come, little Minos.

CRISPINUS

Faith, Captain, I’ll be bold to show you a mistress of mine, a jeweller’s

wife, a gallant, as we go along. 305

TUCCA

There spoke my genius. Minos, some of thy eringoes, little Minos; send.

[To Crispinus] Come hither, Parnassus. [Indicating Demetrius] I must ha’ thee

familiar with my little locust here; ’tis a good vermin, they say. See, here’s

Horace and old Trebatius, the great lawyer, in his company. Let’s avoid him

now; he is too well seconded. [Exeunt.] 310

3.5 [Enter] HORACE [and] TREBATIUS.

HORACE

There are to whom I seem excessive sour,

And past a satire’s law t’extend my power;

Others, that think whatever I have writ

Wants pith and matter to eternise it,

And that they could in one day’s light disclose 5

A thousand verses such as I compose.

What shall I do, Trebatius? Say.

TREBATIUS

Surcease.

HORACE

And shall my muse admit no more increase?

TREBATIUS

So I advise.

HORACE

An ill death let me die

If ’twere not best; but sleep avoids mine eye, 10

And I use these, lest nights should tedious seem.

TREBATIUS

Rather contend to sleep, and live like them

That, holding golden sleep in special price,

Rubbed with sweet oils, swim silver Tiber thrice,

And every ev’n with neat wine steepèd be; 15

Or, if such love of writing ravish thee,

Then dare to sing unconquered Caesar’s deeds,

Who cheers such actions with abundant meeds.

HORACE

That, father, I desire; but when I try,

I feel defects in every faculty. 20

Nor is’t a labour fit for every pen

To paint the horrid troops of armèd men,

The lances burst in Gallia’s slaughtered forces,

Or wounded Parthians tumbled from their horses.

Great Caesar’s wars cannot be fought with words. 25

TREBATIUS

Yet what his virtue in his peace affords,

His fortitude and justice, thou canst show,

As wise Lucilius honoured Scipio.

HORACE

Of that my powers shall suffer no neglect,

When such slight labours may aspire respect. 30

But if I watch not a most chosen time,

The humble words of Flaccus cannot climb

Th’attentive ear of Caesar; nor must I

With less observance shun gross flattery,

For he, reposèd safe in his own merit, 35

Spurns back the glozes of a fawning spirit.

TREBATIUS

But how much better would such accents sound

Than with a sad and serious verse to wound

Pantolabus, railing in his saucy jests?

Or Nomentanus, spent in riotous feasts? 40

In satires, each man (though untouched) complains

As he were hurt, and hates such biting strains.

HORACE

What shall I do? Milonius shakes his heels

In ceaseless dances when his brain once feels

The stirring fervour of the wine ascend 45

And that his eyes false number apprehend.

Castor his horse, Pollux loves handy fights;

A thousand heads, a thousand choice delights.

My pleasure is in feet my words to close,

As, both our better, old Lucilius does. 50

He as his trusty friends his books did trust

With all his secrets, nor in things unjust

Or actions lawful ran to other men;

So that the old man’s life described was seen

As in a votive table, in his lines. 55

And to his steps my genius inclines,

Lucanian or Apulian, I not whether,

For the Venusian colony ploughs either,

Sent thither when the Sabines were forced thence

(As old fame sings), to give the place defence 60

’Gainst such as, seeing it empty, might make road

Upon the empire, or there fix abode —

Whether th’Apulian borderer it were

Or the Lucanian violence they fear.

But this my style no living man shall touch 65

If first I be not forced by base reproach;

But, like a sheathèd sword, it shall defend

My innocent life. For why should I contend

To draw it out, when no malicious thief

Robs my good name, the treasure of my life? 70

O Jupiter, let it with rust be eaten

Before it touch or insolently threaten

The life of any with the least disease;

So much I love and woo a general peace.

But he that wrongs me, better, I proclaim, 75

He never had assayed to touch my fame.

For he shall weep, and walk with every tongue

Throughout the city infamously sung.

Servius the praetor threats the laws and urn

If any at his deeds repine or spurn; 80

The witch Canidia, that Albucius got,

Denounceth witchcraft where she loveth not;

Thurius the judge doth thunder worlds of ill

To such as strive with his judicial will.

All men affright their foes in what they may; 85

Nature commands it, and men must obey.

Observe with me: The wolf his tooth doth use,

The bull his horn. And who doth this infuse

But Nature? There’s luxurious Scaeva; trust

His long-lived mother with him, his so just 90

And scrupulous right hand no mischief will,

No more than with his heel a wolf will kill,

Or ox with jaw. Marry, let him alone

With tempered poison to remove the crone.

But briefly: if to age I destined be, 95

Or that quick death’s black wings environ me;

If rich, or poor; at Rome, or fate command

I shall be banished to some other land;

What hue soever my whole state shall bear,

I will write satires still, in spite of fear. 100

TREBATIUS

Horace, I fear thou draw’st no lasting breath,

And that some great man’s friend will be thy death.

HORACE

What? When the man that first did satirize

Durst pull the skin over the ears of vice

And make who stood in outward fashion clear 105

Give place, as foul within, shall I forbear?

Did Laelius, or the man so great with fame

That from sacked Carthage fetched his worthy name,

Storm that Lucilius did Metellus pierce

Or bury Lupus quick in famous verse? 110

Rulers and subjects by whole tribes he checked,

But virtue and her friends did still protect.

And when from sight or from the judgement seat

The virtuous Scipio and wise Laelius met

Unbraced with him, in all light sports they shared, 115

Till their most frugal suppers were prepared.

Whate’er I am, though both for wealth and wit

Beneath Lucilius I am pleased to sit,

Yet Envy, spite of her empoisoned breast,

Shall say I lived in grace here with the best; 120

And, seeking in weak trash to make her wound,

Shall find me solid, and her teeth unsound –

’Less learned Trebatius’ censure disagree.

TREBATIUS

No, Horace, I of force must yield to thee.

Only take heed, as being advised by me, 125

Lest thou incur some danger. Better pause

Than rue thy ignorance of the sacred laws;

There’s justice, and great action may be sued

’Gainst such as wrong men’s fames with verses lewd.

HORACE

Ay, with lewd verses such as libels be, 130

And aimed at persons of good quality;

I reverence and adore that just decree.

But if they shall be sharp yet modest rhymes

That spare men’s persons and but tax their crimes,

Such shall in open court find current pass 135

Were Caesar judge, and with the maker’s grace.

TREBATIUS

Nay, I’ll add more: if thou thyself being clear

Shalt tax in person a man fit to bear

Shame and reproach, his suit shall quickly be

Dissolved in laughter, and thou thence set free. 140[Exeunt.]

4.1 [Enter] CHLOE [and] CYTHERIS [with one or two MAIDS carrying a muff, a dog, a fan, and a mask].

CHLOE

But, sweet lady, say: am I well enough attired for the court, in sadness?

CYTHERIS

Well enough? Excellent well, sweet Mistress Chloe. This strait-bodied

city attire, I can tell you, will stir a courtier’s blood more than the finest loose

sacks the ladies use to be put in; and then you are as well jewelled as any of

them; your ruff and linen about you is much more pure than theirs; and for 5

your beauty, I can tell you, there’s many of them would defy the painter if

they could change with you. Marry, the worst is, you must look to be envied

and endure a few court frumps for it.

CHLOE

Oh, Jove, madam, I shall buy them too cheap! [To a Maid] Give me my

muff and my dog there. [To Cytheris] And will the ladies be anything familiar 10

with me, think you?

CYTHERIS

Oh, Juno! Why, you shall see ’em flock about you with their puff

wings and ask you where you bought your lawn, and what you paid for it,

who starches you — and entreat you to help ’em to some pure laundresses out

of the city. 15

CHLOE

Oh, Cupid! [To the Maid] Give me my fan, and my mask too. — And will the

lords and the poets there use one well, too, lady?

CYTHERIS

Doubt not of that; you shall have kisses from them go pit-pat, pit-pat,

pit-pat upon your lips as thick as stones out of slings at the assault of a city.

And your ears will be so furred with the breath of their compliments that you 20

cannot catch cold of your head if you would, in three winters after.

CHLOE

[To Cytheris] Thank you, sweet lady. Oh, heaven! And how must one behave

herself amongst ’em? You know all.

CYTHERIS

Faith, impudently enough, Mistress Chloe, and well enough. Carry

not too much underthought betwixt yourself and them; nor your city 25

-mannerly word ‘forsooth’, use it not too often in any case, but plain ‘ay,

madam’ and ‘no, madam’; nor never say ‘Your Lordship’ nor ‘Your Honour’,

but ‘you’, and ‘you, my lord’ and ‘my lady’; the other they count too simple

and minsitive. And though they desire to kiss heaven with their titles, yet

they will count them fools that give them too humbly. 30

CHLOE

Oh, intolerable! Jupiter! By my troth, lady, I would not for a world but

you had lyen in my house; and i’faith you shall not pay a farthing for your

board nor your chambers.

CYTHERIS

Oh, sweet Mistress Chloe!

CHLOE

I’faith, you shall not, lady. [Cytheris makes as if to speak.] Nay, good lady, do 35

not offer it.

4.2 [Enter to them] GALLUS [and] TIBULLUS.

GALLUS

Come, where be these ladies? By your leave, bright stars, this gentleman

and I are come to man you to court, where your late kind entertainment is

now to be requited with a heavenly banquet.

CYTHERIS

A heavenly banquet, Gallus?

GALLUS

No less, my dear Cytheris. 5

TIBULLUS

That were not strange, lady, if the epithet were only given for the

company invited thither: yourself and [Indicating Chloe] this fair gentle-

woman.

CHLOE

Are we invited to court, sir?

TIBULLUS

You are, lady, by the great princess Julia, who longs to greet you with 10

any favours that may worthily make you an often courtier.

CHLOE

In sincerity, I thank her, sir. You have a coach, ha’ you not?

TIBULLUS

The princess hath sent her own, lady.

CHLOE

Oh, Venus! That’s well. I do long to ride in a coach most vehemently.

CYTHERIS

But, sweet Gallus, pray you resolve me why you give that heavenly 15

praise to this earthly banquet?

GALLUS

Because, Cytheris, it must be celebrated by the heavenly powers. All the

gods and goddesses will be there; to two of which you two must be exalted.

CHLOE

A pretty fiction, in truth.

CYTHERIS

A fiction indeed, Chloe, and fit for the fit of a poet. 20

GALLUS

Why, Cytheris, may not poets, from whose divine spirits all the honours

of the gods have been deduced, entreat so much honour of the gods to have

their divine presence at a poetical banquet?

CYTHERIS

Suppose that no fiction; yet where are your abilities to make us two

goddesses at your feast? 25

GALLUS

Who knows not, Cytheris, that the sacred breath of a true poet can blow

any virtuous humanity up to deity?

TIBULLUS

To tell you the female truth (which is the simple truth), ladies, and

to show that poets, in spite of the world, are able to deify themselves: at

this banquet to which you are invited, we intend to assume the figures of 30

the gods, and to give our several loves the forms of goddesses. Ovid will be

Jupiter; the Princess Julia, Juno; Gallus here, Apollo; you, Cytheris, Pallas;

I will be Bacchus; and my love, Plautia, Ceres. And to install you and your

husband, fair Chloe, in honours equal with ours, you shall be a goddess and

your husband a god. 35

CHLOE

A god? O my god!

TIBULLUS

A god, but a lame god, lady: for he shall be Vulcan, and you Venus.

And this will make our banquet no less than heavenly.

CHLOE

In sincerity, it will be sugared. Good Jove, what a pretty foolish thing

it is to be a poet! [Apart to Cytheris] But hark you, sweet Cytheris: could they 40

not possibly leave out my husband? Methinks a body’s husband does not so

well at court; a body’s friend, or so – but husband, ’tis like your clog to your

marmoset, for all the world and the heavens.

CYTHERIS

Tut, never fear, Chloe; your husband will be left without in the lobby

or the great chamber, when you shall be put in i’the closet by this lord and 45

by that lady.

CHLOE

Nay, then I am certified: he shall go.

4.3 [Enter to them] HORACE.

GALLUS

Horace! Welcome.

HORACE

Gentlemen, hear you the news?

TIBULLUS

What news, my Quintus?

HORACE

Our melancholic friend, Propertius,

Hath closed himself up in his Cynthia’s tomb

And will by no entreaties be drawn thence. 5

[Enter] ALBIUS, [ushering in] CRISPINUS, TUCCA, [and] DEMETRIUS.

ALBIUS

Nay, good Master Crispinus, pray you, bring near the gentleman.

HORACE

[To his companions] Crispinus? Hide me, good Gallus; Tibullus, shelter

me!

CRISPINUS

[To Tucca] Make your approach, sweet Captain.

TIBULLUS

What means this, Horace? 10

HORACE

[To his companions] I am surprised again; farewell.

GALLUS

Stay, Horace.

HORACE

What, and be tired on by yond vulture? No,

Phoebus defend me! [Exit.]

TIBULLUS

’Slight! I hold my life

This same is he met him in Holy Street.

GALLUS

Troth, ’tis like enough. This act of Propertius relisheth very strange with 15

me.

TUCCA

[To Crispinus] By thy leave, my neat scoundrel: what, is this the mad boy

you talked on?

CRISPINUS

Ay, this is Master Albius, Captain.

TUCCA

[To Albius] Give me thy hand, Agamemnon; we hear abroad thou art 20

the Hector of citizens. What sayest thou? Are we welcome to thee, noble

Neoptolemus?

ALBIUS

Welcome, Captain? By Jove and all the gods i’the Capitol —

TUCCA

No more; we conceive thee. Which of these is thy wedlock, Menelaus?

Thy Helen? Thy Lucrece? That we may do her honour, mad boy? 25

CRISPINUS

She i’the little fine dressing, sir, is my mistress.

ALBIUS

For fault of a better, sir.

TUCCA

A better, profane rascal? – I cry thee mercy, my good scroil, was’t thou?

ALBIUS

No harm, Captain.

TUCCA

She is a Venus, a Vesta, a Melpomene! [To Chloe] Come hither, Penelope. 30

[They converse apart.]

What’s thy name, Iris?

CHLOE

My name is Chloe, sir; I am a gentlewoman.

TUCCA

Thou art in merit to be an empress, Chloe, for an eye and a lip; thou hast

an emperor’s nose. [He kisses her.] Kiss me again. [She kisses him.] ’Tis a virtuous

punk. So. Before Jove, the gods were a sort of goslings when they suffered 35

so sweet a breath to perfume the bed of a stinkard. Thou hadst ill fortune,

Thisbe; the Fates were infatuate; they were, punk, they were.

CHLOE

That’s sure, sir. Let me crave your name, I pray you, sir.

TUCCA

I am known by the name of Captain Tucca, punk; the noble Roman, punk;

a gent’man and a commander, punk. 40

CHLOE

In good time! A gentleman and a commander? That’s as good as a poet,

methinks.

[She walks aside.]

CRISPINUS

[Picking up a viol] A pretty instrument! [To Albius] It’s my cousin

Cytheris’s viol, this, is’t not?

CYTHERIS

[To Crispinus] Nay, play, cousin, it wants but such a voice and hand to 45

grace it as yours is.

CRISPINUS

Alas, cousin, you are merrily inspired.

CYTHERIS

Pray you play, if you love me.

CRISPINUS

Yes, cousin; you know I do not hate you.

TIBULLUS

[Aside to Gallus] A most subtle wench! How she hath baited him with a 50

viol yonder, for a song!

CRISPINUS

[To Cytheris] Cousin, pray you call Mistress Chloe; she shall hear an

essay of my poetry.

TUCCA

I’ll call her. [He approaches Chloe.] Come hither, cockatrice; here’s one will

set thee up, my sweet punk – set thee up. 55

CHLOE

[To Crispinus] Are you a peewit so soon, sir?

ALBIUS

Wife: mum.

[plays and sings.]

CRISPINUS

Love is blind and a wanton;

In the whole world, there is scant–

one such another; 60

No, not his mother.

He hath plucked her doves and sparrows

To feather his sharp arrows,

And alone prevaileth

Whilst sick Venus waileth. 65

But if Cypris once recover

The wag, it shall behove her

To look better to him,

Or she will undo him.

ALBIUS

Oh, most odoriferous music! 70

TUCCA

[To Albius] Aha, stinkard! Another Orpheus, you slave, another Orpheus!

An Arion riding on the back of a dolphin, rascal!

GALLUS

[To Crispinus] Have you a copy of this ditty, sir?

CRISPINUS

Master Albius has.

ALBIUS

Ay, but in truth, they are my wife’s verses; I must not show ’em. 75

TUCCA

Show ’em, bankrupt, show ’em; they have salt in ’em and will brook the

air, stinkard.

GALLUS

[Taking the verses and reading them] How? ‘To his bright mistress, Canidia’?

CRISPINUS

Ay, sir, that’s but a borrowed name; as Ovid’s Corinna, or Propertius

his Cynthia, or your Nemesis or Delia, Tibullus. 80

GALLUS

It’s the name of Horace his witch, as I remember.

TIBULLUS

[Taking the verses from Gallus and examining them] Why, the ditty’s all

borrowed; ’tis Horace’s! Hang him, plagiary!

TUCCA

How? He borrow of Horace? He shall pawn himself to ten brokers first. —

Do you hear, poetasters? I know you to be men of worship — [To the others] He 85

shall write with Horace for a talent, and let Maecenas and his whole college

of critics take his part. [To Crispinus] Thou shalt do’t, young Phoebus; thou

shalt, Phaeton; thou shalt.

DEMETRIUS

[To Tucca] Alas, sir, Horace! He is a mere sponge, nothing but

humours and observation; he goes up and down sucking from every 90

society, and when he comes home, squeezes himself dry again. I know

him, I.

TUCCA

Thou say’st true, my poor poetical fury; he will pen all he knows. A

sharp, thorny-toothed, satirical rascal; fly him. He carries hay in his horn;

he will sooner lose his best friend than his least jest. What he once drops on 95

paper against a man lives eternally to upbraid him in the mouth of every

slave tankard-bearer or waterman; not a bawd or a boy that comes from the

bakehouse but shall point at him. ’Tis all dog and scorpion; he carries poison

in his teeth and a sting in his tail. Faugh, body of Jove! I’ll have the slave

whipped one of these days for his satires and his humours by one cashiered 100

clerk or another.

CRISPINUS

We’ll undertake him, Captain.

DEMETRIUS

Ay, and tickle him, i’faith, for his arrogancy and his impudence in

commending his own things, and for his translating; I can trace him, i’faith.

Oh, he is the most open fellow living; I had as lief as a new suit I were at it. 105

TUCCA

Say no more, then, but do it; ’tis the only way to get thee a new suit. Sting

him, my little newts; I’ll give you instructions; I’ll be your intelligencer. We’ll

all join and hang upon him like so many horse-leeches, the players and all.

We shall sup together soon; and then we’ll conspire, i’faith.

[Tucca, Crispinus, Demetrius, and Albius walk apart.]

GALLUS

[To Tibullus] Oh, that Horace had stayed still here! 110

TIBULLUS

So would not I, for [Indicating Crispinus and Demetrius] both these would

have turned Pythagoreans then.

GALLUS

What, mute?

TIBULLUS

Ay, as fishes, i’faith. [To Cytheris and Chloe] Come, ladies, shall we go?

CYTHERIS

We await you, sir. But Mistress Chloe asks if you have not a god to 115

spare [Indicating Tucca] for this gentleman?

GALLUS

Who, Captain Tucca?

CYTHERIS

Ay; he.

GALLUS

Yes, if we can invite him along, he shall be Mars.

CHLOE

Has Mars anything to do with Venus? 120

TIBULLUS

Oh, most of all, lady.

CHLOE

Nay, then, I pray let him be invited; and what shall Crispinus be?

TIBULLUS

Mercury, Mistress Chloe.

CHLOE

Mercury? That’s a poet, is’t?

GALLUS

No, lady; but somewhat inclining that way. He is a herald at arms. 125

CHLOE

A herald at arms? Good. And Mercury? Pretty. He has to do with Venus,

too?

TIBULLUS

A little; with her face, lady, or so.

CHLOE

’Tis very well. Pray, let’s go; I long to be at it.

CYTHERIS

[To Crispinus and Tucca] Gentlemen, shall we pray your companies 130

along?

CRISPINUS

You shall not only pray, but prevail, lady. – Come, sweet Captain.

TUCCA

Yes, I follow. [To Albius] But thou must not talk of this now, my little

bankrupt.

ALBIUS

Captain, look here: [He lays his finger to his lips.] mum. 135

DEMETRIUS

[To Tucca] I’ll go write, sir.

TUCCA

Do, do. Stay; [He gives Demetrius a coin.] there’s a drachma to purchase

gingerbread for thy muse.[Exeunt.]

4.4 [Enter] LUPUS, HISTRIO [with a letter, and a] LICTOR.

LUPUS

Come, let us talk here; here we may be private. Shut the door, lictor.

[To Histrio] You are a player, you say.

HISTRIO

Ay, an’t please Your Worship.

LUPUS

Good; and how are you able to give this intelligence?

HISTRIO

Marry, sir, they directed a letter to me and my fellow sharers. 5

LUPUS

Speak lower; you are not now i’ your theatre, stager. [To the Lictor]

My sword, knave.

[The Lictor fetches Lupus’s sword.]

[To Histrio] They directed a letter to you and your fellow sharers; forward.

HISTRIO

Yes, sir; to hire some of our properties: as, a sceptre and a crown for

Jove, and a caduceus for Mercury, and a petasus — 10

LUPUS

‘Caduceus’? And ‘petasus’? Let me see your letter. [He takes the letter from Histrio and scans it.]

This is a conjuration — a conspiracy, this.

[To the Lictor] Quickly, on with my buskins!

[The Lictor fetches Lupus’s buskins.]

[To Histrio] I’ll act a tragedy, i’faith. Will nothing but our gods serve these

poets to profane? [To the Lictor] Dispatch! — Player, I thank thee. The emperor 15

shall take knowledge of thy good service. [A knock at the door.] Who’s there

now? [To the Lictor] Look, knave.

[The Lictor goes to the door. Lupus re-examines the letter.]

A crown and a sceptre? This is good! Rebellion now?

FIRST LICTOR

’Tis your pothecary, sir: Master Minos.

LUPUS

What tell’st thou me of pothecaries, knave? Tell him I have affairs of state 20

in hand; I can talk to no pothecaries now. – Heart of me! – Stay the pothecary

there!

[The Lictor goes to the door.]

[To Histrio] You shall see, I have fished out a cunning piece of plot now: they

have had some intelligence that their project is discovered, and now have

they dealt with my pothecary to poison me – ’tis so – knowing that I meant to 25

take physic today; as sure as death, ’tis there! Jupiter, I thank thee that thou

hast yet made me so much of a politician.

[Enter two or more LICTORS with] MINOS.

[To Minos] You are welcome, sir! [To the Lictors] Take the potion from him

there. [To Minos] I have an antidote more than you wot of, sir. [To the Lictors]

Throw it on the ground there. 30

[The Lictors pour the potion onto the floor.]

So! Now fetch in the dog. And yet we cannot tarry to try experiments now;

arrest him.

[The Lictors place Minos under guard.]

[To Minos] You shall go with me, sir. I’ll tickle you, pothecary; I’ll give you a

glister, i’faith. [To himself] Have I the letter? Ay; ’tis here. – Come, your fasces,

lictors! The half-pikes and the halberds, take them down from the Lares 35

there! [To Histrio] Player, assist me!

[They arm themselves.]

[Enter] MAECENAS [and] HORACE.

MAECENAS

Whither now, Asinius Lupus, with this armoury?

LUPUS

I cannot talk now; I charge you, assist me. Treason! Treason!

HORACE

How! Treason?

LUPUS

Ay; if you love the emperor and the state, follow me! 40

[Exeunt with Minos, guarded.]

4.5 [Enter] OVID [JUPITER], JULIA [JUNO], GALLUS [APOLLO], CYTHERIS
[PALLAS], TIBULLUS [BACCHUS], PLAUTIA [CERES], ALBIUS [VULCAN], CHLOE
[VENUS], TUCCA [MARS], CRISPINUS [MERCURY], HERMOGENES [MOMUS,
and a] PYRGUS [GANYMEDE].

OVID

[As Jupiter] Gods and goddesses, take your several seats.

[The guests sit.]

[To Crispinus] Now, Mercury, move your caduceus and in Jupiter’s name

command silence.

CRISPINUS

In the name of Jupiter, silence!

HERMOGENES

[As Momus] The crier of the court has too clarified a voice. 5

GALLUS

[As Phoebus Apollo] Peace, Momus.

OVID

[To Gallus] Oh, he is the god of reprehension; let him alone. ’Tis his office.

[To Crispinus] Mercury, go forward and proclaim after Phoebus our high

pleasure to all the deities that shall partake this high banquet.

CRISPINUS

Yes, sir. 10

GALLUS

[As Phoebus Apollo] The great god Jupiter,

CRISPINUS

The great god Jupiter,

GALLUS

Of his licentious goodness,

CRISPINUS

Of his licentious goodness,

[Crispinus goes on repeating every line after Gallus.]

GALLUS

Willing to make this feast no fast 15

From any manner of pleasure,

Nor to bind any god or goddess

To be anything the more god or goddess for their names:

He gives them all free licence

To speak no wiser than persons of baser titles 20

And to be nothing better than common men or women.

And therefore no god

Shall need to keep himself more strictly to his goddess

Than any man does to his wife,

Nor any goddess 25

Shall need to keep herself more strictly to her god

Than any woman does to her husband.

But since it is no part of wisdom,

In these days, to come into bonds,

It shall be lawful for every lover 30

To break loving oaths,

To change their lovers, and make love to others,

As the heat of everyone’s blood

And the spirit of our nectar shall inspire.

And Jupiter save Jupiter! 35

TIBULLUS

So; now we may play the fools by authority.

[The company eat and drink.]

HERMOGENES

To play the fool by authority is wisdom.

JULIA

[As Juno, to Hermogenes] Away with your mattery sentences, Momus; they

are too grave and wise for this meeting.

OVID

[He indicates Hermogenes to Crispinus.] Mercury, give our jester a stool; let him 40

sit by, and reach him of our cates.

[Crispinus gives Hermogenes a stool, food, and a cup.]

TUCCA

Dost hear, mad Jupiter? We’ll have it enacted: he that speaks the first wise

word shall be made cuckold. What say’st thou? Is’t not a good motion?

OVID

Deities, are you all agreed?

ALL

Agreed, great Jupiter. 45

ALBIUS

I have read in a book that to play the fool wisely is high wisdom.

GALLUS

How now, Vulcan! Will you be the first wizard?

OVID

[To Tucca] Take his wife, Mars, and make him cuckold, quickly.

TUCCA

[To Chloe] Come, cockatrice.

CHLOE

[To Ovid] No, let me alone with him, Jupiter. [To Albius, threatening him] I’ll 50

make you take heed, sir, while you live, again, if there be twelve in a company,

that you be not the wisest of ’em.

ALBIUS

No more; I will not, indeed, wife, hereafter; I’ll be here – mum.

OVID

[To the Pyrgus] Fill us a bowl of nectar, Ganymede; we will drink to our

daughter Venus. 55

[The Pyrgus pours wine.]

GALLUS

[To Albius] Look to your wife, Vulcan; Jupiter begins to court her.

TIBULLUS

[As Bacchus] Nay, let Mars look to it; Vulcan must do as Venus does,

bear.

TUCCA

[To the Pyrgus] Sirrah boy; catamite! Look you play Ganymede well now,

you slave. Do not spill your nectar. Carry your cup even; so. You should have 60

rubbed your face with whites of eggs, you rascal, till your brows had shone

like our sooty brother’s here [Indicating Albius], as sleek as a hornbook; or ha’

steeped your lips in wine till you made ’em so plump that Juno might have

been jealous of ’em. [To Chloe] Punk, kiss me, punk.

OVID

[Taking the cup.] Here, daughter Venus, I drink to thee. 65

CHLOE

Thank you, good father Jupiter.

TUCCA

[To Julia] Why, mother Juno! Gods and fiends! What, wilt thou suffer this

ocular temptation?

TIBULLUS

Mars is enraged; he looks big and begins to stut for anger.

HERMOGENES

Well played, Captain Mars. 70

TUCCA

Well said, minstrel Momus; I must put you in, must I? When will you be

in good fooling of yourself, fiddler? Never?

HERMOGENES

Oh, ’tis our fashion to be silent when there is a better fool in

place, ever.

TUCCA

Thank you, rascal. 75

OVID

[To the Pyrgus] Fill to our daughter Venus, Ganymede, who fills her father

with affection.

[The Pyrgus continues to serve wine.]

JULIA

Wilt thou be ranging, Jupiter, before my face?

OVID

Why not, Juno? Why should Jupiter stand in awe of thy face, Juno?

JULIA

Because it is thy wife’s face, Jupiter. 80

OVID

What, shall a husband be afraid of his wife’s face? Will she paint it so

horribly? We are a king, cotquean; and we will reign in our pleasures; and we

will cudgel thee to death if thou find fault with us.

JULIA

I will find fault with thee, king cuckold-maker. What, shall the king of

gods turn the king of good fellows, and have no fellow in wickedness? This 85

makes our poets, that know our profaneness, live as profane as we. By my

godhead, Jupiter, I will join with all the other gods here, bind thee hand and

foot, throw thee down into earth, and make a poor poet of thee, if thou abuse

me thus.

GALLUS

A right smart-tongued goddess; a right Juno. 90

OVID

Juno, we will cudgel thee, Juno; we told thee so yesterday, when thou wert

jealous of us for Thetis.

PYRGUS

[To Ovid] Nay, today she had me in inquisition, too.

TUCCA

[To the Pyrgus] Well said, my fine Phrygian fry; inform, inform. [To Crispinus]

Give me some wine, king of heralds, I may drink to my cockatrice. 95

OVID

[He refuses wine from the Pyrgus.] No more, Ganymede. [To Julia] We will cudgel

thee, Juno; by Styx, we will.

JULIA

Ay, ’tis well, gods may grow impudent in iniquity, and they must not be

told of it —

OVID

Yea, we will knock our chin against our breast and shake thee out of 100

Olympus into an oyster boat for thy scolding.

JULIA

Your nose is not long enough to do it, Jupiter, if all thy strumpets thou

hast among the stars took thy part. And there is never a star in thy forehead

but shall be a horn, if thou persist to abuse me.

CRISPINUS

A good jest, i’faith. 105

OVID

We tell thee thou anger’st us, cotquean; and we will thunder thee in pieces

for thy cotqueanity.

CRISPINUS

Another good jest.

ALBIUS

O my hammers and my Cyclops! This boy fills not wine enough to make

us kind to one another. 110

TUCCA

[To Albius] Nor thou hast not collied thy face enough, stinkard.

ALBIUS

[Taking a wine container] I’ll ply the table with nectar, and make them

friends.

HERMOGENES

Heaven is like to have but a lame skinker, then.

ALBIUS

Wine and good livers make true lovers. I’ll sentence them together. 115

[Pouring wine for Ovid and Julia] Here, father; here, mother; for shame, drink

yourselves drunk and forget this dissension. You two should cling together

before our faces and give us an example of unity.

[He goes about the table pouring wine.]

GALLUS

Oh, excellently spoken, Vulcan, on the sudden!

TIBULLUS

Jupiter may do well to prefer his tongue to some office for his 120

eloquence.

TUCCA

His tongue shall be gent’man usher to his wit, and still go before it.

ALBIUS

An excellent fit office!

CRISPINUS

Ay, and an excellent good jest, besides.

HERMOGENES

[To Tucca] What, have you hired Mercury to cry your jests you 125

make?

OVID

Momus, you are envious.

TUCCA

[To Hermogenes] Why, you whoreson blockhead, ’tis your only block of wit

in fashion, nowadays, to applaud other folks’ jests.

HERMOGENES

True – with those that are not artificers themselves. [To Albius] 130

Vulcan, you nod; and the mirth of the feast droops.

PYRGUS

He has filled nectar so long till his brain swims in it.

GALLUS

What, do we nod, fellow gods? Sound music, and let us startle our spirits

with a song.

TUCCA

[To Gallus] Do, Apollo; thou art a good musician. 135

GALLUS

What says Jupiter?

OVID

Ha? Ha?

GALLUS

A song.

OVID

Why, do, do, sing.

PLAUTIA

[To Tibullus] Bacchus, what say you? 140

TIBULLUS

[To Plautia] Ceres?

PLAUTIA

But to this song?

TIBULLUS

Sing, for my part.

JULIA

Your belly weighs down your head, Bacchus. Here’s a song toward.

TIBULLUS

Begin, Vulcan — 145

ALBIUS

What else? What else?

TUCCA

Say, Jupiter —

OVID

Mercury —

CRISPINUS

Ay, say, say —

Song

Wake, our mirth begins to die. 150

Quicken it with tunes and wine;

Raise your notes; you’re out. Fie, fie,

This drowsiness is an ill sign.

We banish him the choir of gods

That droops again; 155

Then all are men,

For here’s not one but nods.

OVID

I like not this sudden and general heaviness amongst our godheads; ’tis

somewhat ominous. Apollo, command us louder music, and let Mercury and

Momus contend to please and revive our senses. 160

Song

HERMOGENES

Then in a free and lofty strain

Our broken tunes we thus repair;

CRISPINUS

And we answer them again,

Running division on the panting air,

BOTH

To celebrate this feast of sense 165

As free from scandal as offence.

HERMOGENES

Here is beauty for the eye;

CRISPINUS

For the ear, sweet melody;

HERMOGENES

Ambrosiac odours for the smell;

CRISPINUS

Delicious nectar for the taste; 170

BOTH

For the touch, a lady’s waist,

Which doth all the rest excel!

OVID

Ay; this hath waked us. [To Crispinus] Mercury, our herald, go from ourself,

the great god Jupiter, to the great emperor, Augustus Caesar; and command

him from us (of whose bounty he hath received his surname, Augustus) that 175

for a thank-offering to our beneficence he presently sacrifice as a dish to

this banquethis beautiful and wanton daughter Julia. She’s a curst quean,

tell him, and plays the scold behind his back; therefore let her be sacrificed.

Command him this, Mercury, in our high name of Jupiter Altitonans.

JULIA

Stay, feather-footed Mercury, and tell Augustus from us, the great Juno 180

Saturnia: if he think it hard to do as Jupiter hath commanded him and

sacrifice his daughter, that he had better to do so ten times than suffer her to

love the well-nosed poet Ovid – whom he shall do well to whip, or cause to

be whipped, about the Capitol, for soothing her in her follies.

4.6 [Enter] CAESAR, MAECENAS, HORACE, LUPUS, HISTRIO, MINOS [guarded, and] LICTORS.

CAESAR

What sight is this? Maecenas! Horace! Say,

Have we our senses? Do we hear and see?

Or are these but imaginary objects

Drawn by our fantasy? [To Maecenas and Horace] Why speak you not,

‘Let us do sacrifice’? Are they the gods? 5

Reverence, amaze, and fury fight in me.

[The banqueters kneel.]

What? Do they kneel? Nay, then I see ’tis true

I thought impossible. Oh, impious sight! [He turns his face away.]

Let me divert mine eyes; the very thought

Everts my soul with passion. Look not, man. 10

There is a panther, whose unnatural eyes

Will strike thee dead. [Turning towards Julia] Turn, then, and die on her

With her own death!

He offers to kill his daughter.

MAECENAS, HORACE

[Interposing] What means imperial Caesar?

CAESAR

[To Horace and Maecenas] What, would you have me let the strumpet live

That for this pageant earns so many deaths? 15

TUCCA

[Aside to the Pyrgus] Boy, slink, boy.

PYRGUS

[Aside to Tucca] Pray Jupiter we be not followed by the scent, Master.

[Exeunt unobtrusively Tucca and the Pyrgus.]

CAESAR

[To Albius] Say, sir, what are you?

ALBIUS

I play Vulcan, sir.

CAESAR

But what are you, sir? 20

ALBIUS

Your citizen and jeweller, sir.

CAESAR

[To Chloe] And what are you, dame?

CHLOE

I play Venus, forsooth.

CAESAR

I ask not what you play, but what you are?

CHLOE

Your citizen and jeweller’s wife, sir. 25

CAESAR

[To Crispinus] And you, good sir?

CRISPINUS

Your gentleman parcel-poet, sir.

CAESAR

Oh, that profanèd name!

[To Julia] And are these seemly company for thee,

Degenerate monster? [To Horace and Maecenas] All the rest I know, 30

And hate all knowledge for their hateful sakes.

[To Ovid, Gallus, and Tibullus] Are you, that first the deities inspired

With skill of their high natures and their powers,

The first abusers of their useful light,

Profaning thus their dignities in their forms, 35

And making them like you, but counterfeits?

Oh, who shall follow virtue and embrace her,

When her false bosom is found naught but air?

And yet of those embraces centaurs spring

That war with human peace, and poison men. 40

Who shall with greater comforts comprehend

Her unseen being and her excellence,

When you, that teach and should eternize her,

Live as she were no law unto your lives,

Nor lived herself but with your idle breaths? 45

If you think gods but feigned, and virtue painted,

Know, we sustain an actual residence;

And with the title of an emperor

Retain his spirit and imperial power;

By which – [To Ovid] in imposition too remiss, 50

Licentious Naso, for thy violent wrong

In soothing the declined affections

Of our base daughter – we exile thy feet

From all approach to our imperial court,

On pain of death, and thy misgotten love 55

Commit to patronage of iron doors,

Since her soft-hearted sire cannot contain her.

MAECENAS

Oh, good my lord, forgive: be like the gods.

HORACE

Let royal bounty, Caesar, mediate.

CAESAR

There is no bounty to be showed to such 60

As have no real goodness. Bounty is

A spice of virtue; and what virtuous act

Can take effect on them that have no power

Of equal habitude to apprehend it,

But live in worship of that idol, vice, 65

As if there were no virtue but in shade

Of strong imagination, merely enforced?

This shows their knowledge is mere ignorance;

Their far-fetched dignity of soul, a fancy;

And all their square pretext of gravity 70

A mere vainglory. [To the Lictors] Hence, away with ’em.

[The Lictors place Ovid and Julia under separate guard and begin to clear the room of banqueters.]

I will prefer for knowledge none but such

As rule their lives by it, and can becalm

All sea of humour with the marble trident

Of their strong spirits. Others fight below 75

With gnats and shadows; others nothing know.

[Exeunt.]

4.7 [Enter] TUCCA, CRISPINUS, [and the] PYRGUS.

TUCCA

[To Crispinus] What’s become of my little punk, Venus? And the poltfoot

stinkard, her husband, ha?

CRISPINUS

Oh, they are rid home i’the coach as fast as the wheels can run.

TUCCA

God Jupiter is banished, I hear, and his cockatrice, Juno, locked up. Heart,

an all the poetry in Parnassus get me to be a player again, I’ll sell ’em my share 5

for a sesterce. But this is Humours, Horace, that goat-footed envious slave!

He’s turned fawn now, an informer, the rogue; ’tis he has betrayed us all. Did

you not see him with the emperor, crouching?

CRISPINUS

Yes.

TUCCA

Well, follow me. Thou shalt libel and I’ll cudgel the rascal. [To the Pyrgus] 10

Boy, provide me a truncheon. [To both] Revenge shall gratulate him, tam Marti,

quam Mercurio.

PYRGUS

Ay, but master, take heed how you give this out; Horace is a man of the

sword.

CRISPINUS

’Tis true, in troth; they say he’s valiant. 15

TUCCA

Valiant? So is mine arse. Gods and fiends! I’ll blow him into air when I

meet him next. He dares not fight with a puckfist.

PYRGUS

Master, here he comes.

HORACE passes by.

TUCCA

Where? [To Horace] Jupiter save thee, my good poet; my noble prophet;

my little fat Horace! [To Crispinus and the Pyrgus] I scorn to beat the rogue 20

i’the court, and I saluted him thus fair because he should suspect nothing,

the rascal. Come, we’ll go see how forward our journeyman is toward the

untrussing of him.

CRISPINUS

Do you hear, Captain? I’ll write nothing in it but innocence, because

I may swear I am innocent. 25[Exeunt Tucca, Crispinus, and the Pyrgus.]

[Enter to Horace,] MAECENAS, [and hurriedly at another door,] LUPUS, [with LICTORS and] HISTRIO.

HORACE

[To Lupus] Nay, why pursue you not the emperor

For your reward now, Lupus?

MAECENAS

[To Lupus] Stay, Asinius,

You and your stager and your band of lictors.

I hope your service merits more respect

Than thus, without a thanks, to be sent hence! 30

HISTRIO

Well, well, jest on, jest on.

HORACE

[To Histrio] Thou base, unworthy groom –

LUPUS

Ay, ay, ’tis good.

HORACE

[To Lupus] Was this the treason? This the dangerous plot

Thy clamorous tongue so bellowed through the court?

Hadst thou no other project to increase 35

Thy grace with Caesar but this wolfish train,

To prey upon the life of innocent mirth

And harmless pleasures, bred of noble wit?

Away, I loathe thy presence! Such as thou,

They are the moths and scarabs of a state, 40

The bane of empires, and the dregs of courts;

Who, to endear themselves to any employment,

Care not whose fame they blast, whose life they endanger;

And under a disguised and cobweb mask

Of love unto their sovereign, vomit forth 45

Their own prodigious malice; and pretending

To be the props and columns of his safety,

The guard unto his person and his peace,

Disturb it most with their false lapwing cries.

LUPUS

Good. Caesar shall know of this, believe it. 50

[Exeunt Lupus, Histrio, and Lictors.]

MAECENAS

Caesar doth know it, wolf, and to his knowledge

He will, I hope, reward your base endeavours.

Princes that will but hear or give access

To such officious spies can ne’er be safe:

They take in poison with an open ear, 55

And, free from danger, become slaves to fear. Exeunt.

4.8 [Enter] OVID.

OVID

Banished the court? Let me be banished life,

Since the chief end of life is there concluded.

Within the court is all the kingdom bounded,

And as her sacred sphere doth comprehend

Ten thousand times so much as so much place 5

In any part of all the empire else,

So every body moving in her sphere

Contains ten thousand times as much in him

As any other her choice orb excludes.

As in a circle a magician then 10

Is safe against the spirit he excites,

But out of it is subject to his rage

And loseth all the virtue of his art,

So I, exiled the circle of the court,

Lose all the good gifts that in it I joyed. 15

No virtue current is but with her stamp,

And no vice vicious, blanched with her white hand.

The court’s the abstract of all Rome’s desert,

And my dear Julia th’abstract of the court.

Methinks, now I come near her, I respire 20

Some air of that late comfort I received,

And while the evening with her modest veil

Gives leave to such poor shadows as myself

To steal abroad, I, like a heartless ghost,

Without the living body of my love 25

Will here walk, and attend her. For I know

Not far from hence she is imprisonèd,

And hopes of her strict guardian to bribe

So much admittance as to speak to me

And cheer my fainting spirits with her breath. 30

4.9 [Enter] JULIA. She appeareth above, as at her chamber window.

JULIA

Ovid? My love?

OVID

Here, heavenly Julia.

JULIA

Here and not here! Oh, how that word doth play

With both our fortunes, differing like our selves:

Both one, and yet divided as opposed!

I high, thou low! Oh, this our plight of place 5

Doubly presents the two lets of our love,

Local and ceremonial height and lowness;

Both ways I am too high and thou too low.

Our minds are even, yet; oh, why should our bodies,

That are their slaves, be so without their rule? 10

I’ll cast myself down to thee; if I die,

I’ll ever live with thee. No height of birth,

Of place, of duty, or of cruel power

Shall keep me from thee. Should my father lock

This body up within a tomb of brass, 15

Yet I’ll be with thee. If the forms I hold

Now in my soul be made one substance with it,

That soul immortal, and the same ’tis now,

Death cannot raze th’affects she now retaineth —

And then may she be anywhere she will. 20

The souls of parents rule not children’s souls

When death sets both in their dissolved estates;

Then is no child, nor father; then eternity

Frees all from any temporal respect.

I come, my Ovid; take me in thine arms 25

And let me breathe my soul into thy breast!

[She makes as if to throw herself down.]

OVID

Oh, stay, my love! The hopes thou dost conceive

Of thy quick death and of thy future life

Are not authentical. Thou choosest death

So thou might’st joy thy love in th’other life. 30

But know, my princely love, when thou art dead

Thou only must survive in perfect soul;

And in the soul are no affections.

We pour out our affections with our blood,

And with our blood’s affections fade our loves. 35

No life hath love in such sweet state as this;

No essence is so dear to moody sense

As flesh and blood, whose quintessence is sense.

Beauty composed of blood and flesh moves more

And is more plausible to blood and flesh 40

Than spiritual beauty can be to the spirit.

Such apprehension as we have in dreams

When sleep, the bond of senses, locks them up,

Such shall we have when death destroys them quite.

If love be then thy object, change not life. 45

Live high and happy still; I, still below,

Close with my fortunes, in thy height shall joy.

JULIA

Ay me, that virtue, whose brave eagle’s wings

With every stroke blow stars in burning heaven,

Should like a swallow preying toward storms 50

Fly close to earth, and with an eager plume

Pursue those objects which none else can see,

But seem to all the world the empty air.

Thus thou, poor Ovid, and all virtuous men

Must prey like swallows on invisible food, 55

Pursuing flies, or nothing; and thus love

And every worldly fancy is transposed

By worldly tyranny to what plight it list.

O father, since thou gav’st me not my mind,

Strive not to rule it; take but what thou gav’st 60

To thy disposure. Thy affections

Rule not in me. I must bear all my griefs;

Let me use all my pleasures. Virtuous love

Was never scandal to a goddess’ state.

But he’s inflexible! And, my dear love, 65

Thy life may chance be shortened by the length

Of my unwilling speeches to depart.

Farewell, sweet life; though thou be yet exiled

Th’officious court, enjoy me amply still.

My soul in this my breath enters thine ears, 70

And on this turret’s floor will I lie dead

Till we may meet again. [She kneels.] In this proud height

I kneel beneath thee in my prostrate love

And kiss the happy sands that kiss thy feet.

[She kisses the ground before rising.]

Great Jove submits a sceptre to a cell, 75

And lovers, ere they part, will meet in hell.

OVID

Farewell all company, and if I could,

All light, with thee! Hell’s shade should hide my brows

Till thy dear beauty’s beams redeemed my vows. [He starts to leave.]

JULIA

Ovid, my love! Alas, may we not stay She calls him back. 80

A little longer, think’st thou, undiscerned?

OVID

[Turning back] For thine own good, fair goddess, do not stay.

Who would engage a firmament of fires

Shining in thee, for me, a fallen star?

Be gone, sweet life-blood. If I should discern 85

Thyself but touched for my sake, I should die.

JULIA

I will be gone, then, and not heaven itself

Shall draw me back. [She starts to leave.]

OVID

Yet, Julia, if thou wilt, He calls her back.

A little longer stay.

JULIA

[Returning] I am content.

OVID

O mighty Ovid! What the sway of heaven 90

Could not retire, my breath hath turnèd back.

JULIA

Who shall go first, my love? My passionate eyes

Will not endure to see thee turn from me.

OVID

If thou go first, my soul will follow thee.

JULIA

Then we must stay.

OVID

Ay me, there is no stay 95

In amorous pleasures; if both stay, both die.

I hear thy father — hence, my deity! [Exit Julia.]

[To himself] Fear forgeth sounds in my deluded ears.

I did not hear him; I am mad with love.

There is no spirit under heaven that works 100

With such illusion; yet such witchcraft kill me,

Ere a sound mind without it save my life!

[He kneels.] Here, on my knees, I worship the blest place

That held my goddess, and the loving air

That closed her body in his silken arms. 105

Vain Ovid! Kneel not to the place nor air;

She’s in thy heart. [He rises.] Rise, then, and worship there.

The truest wisdom silly men can have

Is dotage on the follies of their flesh. [Exit.]

5.1 CAESAR [is discovered seated in a chair of state;] GALLUS, TIBULLUS, MAECENAS, [and] HORACE [near him].

CAESAR

We that have conquered still to save the conquered,

And loved to make inflictions feared, not felt,

Grieved to reprove and joyful to reward,

More proud of reconcilement than revenge,

Resume into the late state of our love 5

Worthy Cornelius Gallus and Tibullus.

You both are gentlemen; you, Cornelius,

A soldier of renown and the first provost

That ever let our Roman eagles fly

On swarthy Egypt, quarried with her spoils. 10

Yet, not to bear cold forms nor men’s out-terms

Without the inward fires and lives of men,

You both have virtues shining through your shapes

To show your titles are not writ on posts

Or hollow statues – which the best men are 15

Without Promethean stuffings reached from heaven.

Sweet poesy’s sacred garlands crown your gentry,

Which is, of all the faculties on earth,

The most abstract and perfect, if she be

True born and nursed with all the sciences. 20

She can so mould Rome and her monuments

Within the liquid marble of her lines

That they shall stand fresh and miraculous

Even when they mix with innovating dust.

In her sweet streams shall our brave Roman spirits 25

Chase and swim after death, with their choice deeds

Shining on their white shoulders; and therein

Shall Tiber and our famous rivers fall

With such attraction that th’ambitious line

Of the round world shall to her centre shrink 30

To hear their music; and for these high parts

Caesar shall reverence the Pierian arts.

MAECENAS

Your Majesty’s high grace to poesy

Shall stand ’gainst all the dull detractions

Of leaden souls, who, for the vain assumings 35

Of some, quite worthless of her sovereign wreaths,

Contain her worthiest prophets in contempt.

GALLUS

Happy is Rome of all earth’s other states,

To have so true and great a president

For her inferior spirits to imitate 40

As Caesar is, who addeth to the sun

Influence and lustre, in increasing thus

His inspirations, kindling fire in us.

HORACE

Phoebus himself shall kneel at Caesar’s shrine

And deck it with bay garlands dewed with wine 45

To quit the worship Caesar does to him,

Where other princes, hoisted to their thrones

By Fortune’s passionate and disordered power,

Sit in their height like clouds before the sun,

Hind’ring his comforts; and by their excess 50

Of cold in virtue and cross heat in vice,

Thunder and tempest on those learnèd heads

Whom Caesar with such honour doth advance.

TIBULLUS

All human business Fortune doth command

Without all order, and with her blind hand 55

She, blind, bestows blind gifts that still have nursed

They see not who nor how, but still the worst.

CAESAR

Caesar, for his rule and for so much stuff

As Fortune puts in his hand, shall dispose it

As if his hand had eyes and soul in it: 60

With worth and judgement. Hands that part with gifts

Or will restrain their use, without desert

Or with a misery numbed to virtue’s right,

Work as they had no soul to govern them,

And quite reject her, sev’ring their estates 65

From human order. Whosoever can

And will not cherish virtue is no man.

[Enter] EQUITES ROMANI.

AN EQUES

Virgil is now at hand, imperial Caesar.

CAESAR

Rome’s honour is at hand, then. [To the Equites] Fetch a chair

And set it on our right hand, where ’tis fit 70

Rome’s honour, and our own, should ever sit.

[While Caesar speaks, the Equites set the chair in place; then exeunt.]

Now he is come out of Campania,

I doubt not he hath finished all his Aeneids,

Which like another soul I long t’enjoy.

([To] Maecenas, Gallus, [and] Tibullus) What think you three of Virgil,

gentlemen, 75

That are of his profession, though ranked higher?

Or, Horace, what say’st thou, that art the poorest

And likeliest to envy or to detract?

HORACE

Caesar speaks after common men in this

To make a difference of me for my poorness, 80

As if the filth of poverty sunk as deep

Into a knowing spirit as the bane

Of riches doth into an ignorant soul.

No, Caesar, they be pathless, moorish minds

That, being once made rotten with the dung 85

Of damnèd riches, ever after sink

Beneath the steps of any villainy.

But knowledge is the nectar that keeps sweet

A perfect soul even in this grave of sin;

And for my soul, it is as free as Caesar’s, 90

For what I know is due I’ll give to all.

He that detracts or envies virtuous merit

Is still the covetous and the ignorant spirit.

CAESAR

Thanks, Horace, for thy free and wholesome sharpness,

Which pleaseth Caesar more than servile fawns. 95

A flattered prince soon turns the prince of fools,

And for thy sake we’ll put no difference more

Between the great and good for being poor.

Say then, loved Horace, thy true thought of Virgil.

HORACE

I judge him of a rectifièd spirit, 100

By many revolutions of discourse

In his bright reason’s influence, refined

From all the tartarous moods of common men;

Bearing the nature and similitude

Of a right heavenly body; most severe 105

In fashion and collection of himself,

And then as clear and confident as Jove.

GALLUS

And yet so chaste and tender is his ear

In suffering any syllable to pass

That he thinks may become the honoured name 110

Of issue to his so examined self

That all the lasting fruits of his full merit

In his own poems he doth still distaste;

As if his mind’s piece, which he strove to paint,

Could not with fleshly pencils have her right. 115

TIBULLUS

But to approve his works of sovereign worth,

This observation, methinks, more than serves,

And is not vulgar: that which he hath writ

Is with such judgement laboured and distilled

Through all the needful uses of our lives 120

That, could a man remember but his lines,

He should not touch at any serious point

But he might breathe his spirit out of him.

CAESAR

You mean he might repeat part of his works,

As fit for any conference he can use? 125

TIBULLUS

True, royal Caesar.

CAESAR

Worthily observed,

And a most worthy virtue in his works.

What thinks material Horace of his learning?

HORACE

His learning labours not the school-like gloss

That most consists in echoing words and terms 130

And soonest wins a man an empty name,

Nor any long or far-fetched circumstance

Wrapped in the curious general’ties of arts,

But a direct and analytic sum

Of all the worth and first effects of arts. 135

And for his poesy, ’tis so rammed with life

That it shall gather strength of life with being

And live hereafter more admired than now.

CAESAR

This one consent in all your dooms of him,

And mutual loves of all your several merits, 140

Argues a truth of merit in you all.

5.2 [Enter to them] VIRGIL, [conducted by] EQUITES ROMANI.

CAESAR

See, here comes Virgil; we will rise and greet him. [He stands.]

Welcome to Caesar, Virgil. Caesar and Virgil

Shall differ but in sound; to Caesar, Virgil,

Of his expressèd greatness, shall be made

A second surname; and to Virgil, Caesar. 5

Where are thy famous Aeneids? Do us grace

To let us see, and surfeit on their sight.

VIRGIL

Worthless they are of Caesar’s gracious eyes

If they were perfect; much more with their wants,

Which yet are more than my time could supply; 10

And could great Caesar’s expectation

Be satisfied with any other service,

I would not show them.

CAESAR

Virgil is too modest

Or seeks in vain to make our longings more.

Show them, sweet Virgil.

VIRGIL

Then, in such due fear 15

As fits presenters of great works to Caesar,

I humbly show them.

[Caesar accepts the manuscript from Virgil.]

CAESAR

Let us now behold

A human soul made visible in life,

And more refulgent in a senseless paper

Than in the sensual complement of kings. 20

[He returns the manuscript.]

Read, read thyself, dear Virgil. Let not me

Profane one accent with an untuned tongue;

Best matter, badly shown, shows worse than bad.

[He indicates the chair on his right.]

See then this chair, of purpose set for thee

To read thy poem in.

[Virgil makes as if to refuse.]

Refuse it not; 25

Virtue without presumption place may take

Above best kings, whom only she should make.

VIRGIL

It will be thought a thing ridiculous

To present eyes, and to all future times

A gross untruth, that any poet, void 30

Of birth or wealth or temporal dignity,

Should with decorum transcend Caesar’s chair.

Poor virtue raised, high birth and wealth set under,

Crosseth heav’n’s courses and makes worldlings wonder.

CAESAR

The course of heaven and fate itself in this 35

Will Caesar cross; much more all worldly custom.

HORACE

Custom in course of honour ever errs,

And they are best whom Fortune least prefers.

CAESAR

Horace hath but more strictly spoke our thoughts.

The vast, rude swinge of general confluence 40

Is in particular ends exempt from sense,

And therefore reason, which in right should be

The special rector of all harmony,

Shall show we are a man distinct by it

From those whom custom rapteth in her press. 45

[Caesar takes and opens the manuscript.]

Ascend, then, Virgil, and, where first by chance

We here have turned thy book, do thou first read.

VIRGIL

Great Caesar hath his will; I will ascend.

’Twere simple injury to his free hand,

That sweeps the cobwebs from unusèd virtue 50

And makes her shine proportioned to her worth,

To be more nice to entertain his grace

Than he is choice and liberal to afford it.

[Virgil mounts to his chair on the dais and prepares to read.]

CAESAR

[To the Equites] Gentlemen of our chamber, guard the doors

And let none enter. Peace. – Begin, good Virgil. 55

VIRGIL

[He reads.] ‘Meanwhile the skies ’gan thunder, and in tail

Of that, fell pouring storms of sleet and hail.

The Tyrian lords and Trojan youth each where,

With Venus’ Dardan nephew, now in fear

Seek out for several shelter through the plain, 60

Whilst floods come rolling from the hills amain.

Dido a cave, the Trojan prince the same

Lighted upon. There Earth, and heaven’s great dame

That hath the charge of marriage, first gave sign

Unto this contract; fire and air did shine, 65

As guilty of the match, and from the hill

The nymphs with shriekings do the region fill.

Here first began their bane. This day was ground

Of all their ills. For now nor rumour’s sound

Nor nice respect of state moves Dido aught; 70

Her love no longer now by stealth is sought;

She calls this wedlock, and with that fair name

Covers her fault. Forthwith the bruit and fame

Through all the greatest Libyan towns is gone;

Fame, a fleet evil, than which is swifter none, 75

That moving grows and flying gathers strength,

Little at first, and fearful, but at length

She dares attempt the skies, and stalking proud

With feet on ground, her head doth pierce a cloud!

This child our parent Earth, stirred up with spite 80

Of all the gods, brought forth; and, as some write,

She was last sister of that giant race

That thought to scale Jove’s court; right swift of pace

And swifter far of wing; a monster vast

And dreadful. Look how many plumes are placed 85

On her huge corpse, so many waking eyes

Stick underneath; and, which may stranger rise

In the report, as many tongues she bears,

As many mouths, as many list’ning ears.

Nightly in midst of all the heaven she flies, 90

And through the earth’s dark shadow shrieking cries;

Nor do her eyes once bend to taste sweet sleep.

By day on tops of houses she doth keep,

Or on high towers, and doth thence affright

Cities and towns of most conspicuous site. 95

As covetous she is of tales and lies

As prodigal of truth. This monster . . .’ etc.

5.3 [Enter at the door, meeting the Equites on guard,] LUPUS, [with a paper, attended by] LICTORS, [one carrying Lupus’s sword.] TUCCA, CRISPINUS, DEMETRIUS, [and AESOP attempt to crowd in after Lupus].

LUPUS

Come, follow me, assist me, second me! [To the Equites] Where’s the

emperor?

FIRST EQUES

Sir, you must pardon us.

SECOND EQUES

Caesar is private now, you may not enter.

TUCCA

Not enter? [To Lupus] Charge ’em upon their allegiance, cropshin. 5

FIRST EQUES

We have a charge to the contrary, sir.

LUPUS

I pronounce you all traitors, horrible traitors! What? Do you know my

affairs? I have matter of danger and state to impart to Caesar!

CAESAR

What noise is there? Who’s that names Caesar?

LUPUS

A friend to Caesar! One that for Caesar’s good would speak with Caesar! 10

CAESAR

Who is’t? Look, Cornelius.

FIRST EQUES

Asinius Lupus.

CAESAR

Oh, bid the turbulent informer hence;

We have no vacant ear, now, to receive

The unseasoned fruits of his officious tongue. 15

MAECENAS

[To the Equites] You must avoid him there.

[The Equites force Lupus and his companions back to the door.]

LUPUS

I conjure thee as thou art Caesar, or respect’st thine own safety or the

safety of the state, Caesar! Hear me, speak with me, Caesar! ’Tis no common

business I come about, but such as, being neglected, may concern the life of

Caesar! 20

CAESAR

The life of Caesar? Let him enter. Virgil, keep thy seat.

[Lupus and the Lictors approach the dais.]

EQUITES

[To Tucca, Crispinus, Demetrius, and Aesop] Bear back, there! Whither will

you? Keep back! [Exeunt Crispinus, Demetrius, and Aesop.]

TUCCA

[Pushing past] By your leave, goodman usher. Mend thy peruke; so.

LUPUS

Lay hold on Horace there, and on Maecenas, lictors! 25

[The Lictors place them under guard. Gallus and Tibullus start forward.]

Romans, offer no rescue, upon your allegiance. [He gives Caesar the paper.]

Read, royal Caesar. [To Horace] I’ll tickle you, satyr!

TUCCA

He will, Humours, he will; he will squeeze you, poet puckfist.

LUPUS

[To Horace] I’ll lop you off for an unprofitable branch, you satirical varlet!

TUCCA

Ay, and [Indicating Maecenas] Epaminondas, your patron here, with 30

his flagon chain. [To Maecenas] Come, resign; though ’twere your great-

grandfather’s, the law has made it mine now, sir.

[He takes Maecenas’s chain.]

[To the Lictors] Look to him, my particoloured rascals; look to him.

CAESAR

[Indicating the paper] What is this, Asinius Lupus? I understand it not.

LUPUS

Not understand it? A libel, Caesar. A dangerous, seditious libel! A libel in 35

picture.

CAESAR

A libel?

LUPUS

Ay, I found it in this Horace his study, in Maecenas his house, here. I

challenge the penalty of the laws against ’em!

TUCCA

[To Lupus] Ay, and remember to beg their land betimes, before some of 40

these hungry court-hounds scent it out.

CAESAR

[Handing the paper to a Lictor] Show it to Horace. Ask him if he know it.

LUPUS

Know it? His hand is at it, Caesar.

CAESAR

Then ’tis no libel.

HORACE

[He glances at the paper.] It is the imperfect body of an emblem, Caesar, I 45

began for Maecenas.

LUPUS

An emblem? Right. That’s Greek for a libel. Do but mark how confident

he is.

HORACE

A just man cannot fear, thou foolish tribune;

Not though the malice of traducing tongues, 50

The open vastness of a tyrant’s ear,

The senseless rigour of the wrested laws,

Or the red eyes of strained authority

Should in a point meet all to take his life.

His innocence is armour ’gainst all these. 55

LUPUS

Innocence? Oh, impudence! [He takes back the paper.] Let me see, let me see.

Is not here an eagle? And is not that eagle meant by Caesar? Ha? Does not

Caesar give the eagle? [To Horace] Answer me; what say’st thou?

TUCCA

[To Horace] Hast thou any evasion, stinkard?

LUPUS

Now he’s turned dumb. – I’ll tickle you, satyr. 60

HORACE

Pish. Ha ha!

LUPUS

Dost thou pish me? [To the Lictor carrying his sword] Give me my long-sword.

HORACE

With reverence to great Caesar: worthy Romans,

[Indicating Lupus] Observe but this ridiculous commenter.

The soul to my device was in this distich: 65

‘Thus, oft the base and ravenous multitude

Survive to share the spoils of fortitude’,

Which in this body I have figured here:

A vulture —

LUPUS

A vulture? Ay, now ’tis a vulture. Oh, abominable! Monstrous! Monstrous! 70

Has not your vulture a beak? Has it not legs? And talons? And wings? And

feathers?

TUCCA

[To Lupus] Touch him, old Buskins.

HORACE

And therefore must it be an eagle?

MAECENAS

Respect him not, good Horace; say your device. 75

HORACE

A vulture and a wolf —

LUPUS

A wolf? Good. That’s I; I am the wolf. My name’s Lupus; I am meant by

the wolf. On, on: a vulture and a wolf —

HORACE

Preying upon the carcass of an ass —

LUPUS

An ass? Good still: that’s I, too. I am the ass. You mean me by the ass – 80

MAECENAS

[To Lupus] Pray thee, leave braying then.

HORACE

[To Lupus] If you will needs take it, I cannot with modesty give it from

you.

MAECENAS

But by that beast, the old Egyptians

Were wont to figure in their hieroglyphics 85

Patience, frugality, and fortitude;

For none of which we can suspect you, tribune.

CAESAR

Who was it, Lupus, that informed you first,

This should be meant by us? Or was’t your comment?

LUPUS

No, Caesar; a player gave me the first light of it, indeed. 90

TUCCA

Ay, an honest sycophant-like slave, and a politician besides.

CAESAR

Where is that player?

TUCCA

He is without, here.

CAESAR

Call him in.

TUCCA

[To the Equites] Call in the player there: Master Aesop. Call him. 95

EQUITES

[Calling] Player! Where is the player?

[Enter AESOP.] CRISPINUS [and] DEMETRIUS [attempt to follow; the Equites bar their way.]

Bear back! None but the player enter.

TUCCA

[Indicating Crispinus and Demetrius] Yes, this gent’man and his Achates

must.

CRISPINUS

Pray you, master usher; we’ll stand close, here. 100

[Aesop approaches the dais; Crispinus and Demetrius pass in.]

TUCCA

[Indicating Crispinus] ’Tis a gent’man of quality, this, though he be

somewhat out of clothes, I tell ye. — Come, Aesop; hast a bay leaf i’thy mouth?

[Aesop nods.] Well said; be not out, stinkard. Thou shalt have a monopoly of

playing confirmed to thee and thy covey under the emperor’s broad seal, for

this service. 105

CAESAR

[To Lupus] Is this he?

LUPUS

Ay, Caesar, this is he.

CAESAR

Let him be whipped. — Lictors, go take him hence.

[Exeunt some Lictors with Aesop.]

And, Lupus, for your fierce credulity,

One fit him with a pair of larger ears. 110

’Tis Caesar’s doom, and must not be revoked.

We hate to have our court and peace disturbed

With these quotidian clamours. See it done.

LUPUS

Caesar!

CAESAR

Gag him, we may have his silence.

[Lupus is gagged.]

VIRGIL

Caesar hath done like Caesar. Fair and just 115

Is his award against these brainless creatures.

’Tis not the wholesome, sharp morality

Or modest anger of a satiric spirit

That hurts or wounds the body of a state,

But the sinister application 120

Of the malicious, ignorant, and base

Interpreter, who will distort and strain

The general scope and purpose of an author

To his particular and private spleen.

CAESAR

We know it, our dear Virgil, and esteem it 125

A most dishonest practice in that man

Will seem too witty in another’s work.

[Gallus and Tibullus approach Caesar.]

What would Cornelius Gallus and Tibullus?

TUCCA

[To Maecenas] (This while the rest [Gallus and Tibullus] whisper [to] Caesar.)

Nay, but as thou art a man — dost hear? — a man of worship, and honourable:

hold, here, take thy chain again. Resume, mad Maecenas. What? Dost thou 130

think I meant t’have kept it, bold boy? No; I did it but to fright thee, I, to try

how thou would’st take it. What? Will I turn shark upon my friends? Or my

friends’ friends? I scorn it with my three souls. Come, I love bully Horace as

well as thou dost, I; ’tis an honest hieroglyphic. [To Horace] Give me thy wrist,

Helicon. Dost thou think I’ll second e’er a rhinoceros of them all against 135

thee? Ha? [Indicating Maecenas] Or thy noble Hippocrene, here? I’ll turn stager

first, and be whipped too; dost thou see, bully?

CAESAR

[To Gallus and Tibullus] You have your will of Caesar; use it, Romans.

Virgil shall be your praetor, and ourself

Will here sit by, spectator of your sports, 140

And think it no impeach of royalty.

[Gallus, Tibullus, and Maecenas confer apart.]

[To Virgil] Our ear is now too much profaned, grave Maro,

With these distastes, to take thy sacred lines.

Put up thy book, till both the time and we

Be fitted with more hallowed circumstance 145

For the receiving so divine a work.

[To the others] Proceed with your design.

MAECENAS, GALLUS, [AND] TIBULLUS

Thanks to great Caesar.

GALLUS

Tibullus, draw you the indictment, then,

Whilst Horace arrests them on the statute of calumny.

Maecenas and I will take our places here. 150

Lictors, assist him.

HORACE

I am the worst accuser under heaven.

GALLUS

Tut, you must do’t; ’twill be noble mirth.

HORACE

I take no knowledge that they do malign me.

TIBULLUS

Ay, but the world takes knowledge.

HORACE

Would the world knew 155

How heartily I wish a fool should hate me!

[Crispinus and Demetrius are brought to the bar.]

TUCCA

[Aside] Body of Jupiter! What? Will they arraign my brisk Poetaster and

his poor journeyman, ha? Would I were abroad skeldering for a drachma, so

I were out of this labyrinth again; I do feel myself turn stinkard already. But I

must set the best face I have upon’t now. – Well said, my divine, deft Horace, 160

bring the whoreson detracting slaves to the bar, do. Make ’em hold up their

spread golls; I’ll give in evidence for thee, if thou wilt. [He and Crispinus speak apart.]

Take courage, Crispinus. Would thy man had a clean band!

CRISPINUS

What must we do, Captain?

TUCCA

Thou shalt see anon. Do not make division with thy legs so. 165

CAESAR

[Indicating Tucca] What’s he, Horace?

HORACE

I only know him for a motion, Caesar.

TUCCA

I am one of thy commanders, Caesar, a man of service and action; my

name is Pantilius Tucca. I have served i’thy wars against Mark Antony, I.

CAESAR

[To Gallus] Do you know him, Cornelius? 170

GALLUS

He’s one that hath had the mustering or convoy of a company now and

then; I never noted him by any other employment.

CAESAR

We will observe him better.

TIBULLUS

[He has finished writing.] Lictor, proclaim silence in the court.

LICTOR

In the name of Caesar, silence! 175

TIBULLUS

Let the parties, the accuser and the accused, present themselves.

LICTOR

The accuser and the accused: present yourselves in court.

CRISPINUS [AND] DEMETRIUS

Here.

VIRGIL

Read the indictment.

TIBULLUS

Rufus Laberius Crispinus and Demetrius Fannius, hold up your 180

hands. [He reads.] ‘You are before this time jointly and severally indicted, and

here presently to be arraigned upon the statute of calumny, or Lex Remmia,

the one by the name of Rufus Laberius Crispinus, alias Crispinas, poetaster

and plagiary; the other by the name of Demetrius Fannius, play dresser and

plagiary; that you, not having the fear of Phoebus or his shafts before your 185

eyes, contrary to the peace of our liege lord, Augustus Caesar, his crown and

dignity, and against the form of a statute in that case made and provided,

have most ignorantly, foolishly, and (more like yourselves) maliciously gone

about to deprave and calumniate the person and writings of Quintus Horatius

Flaccus here present: poet, and priest to the muses; and to that end have 190

mutually conspired and plotted, at sundry times as by several means and in

sundry places, for the better accomplishing your base and envious purpose;

taxing him falsely of self-love, arrogancy, impudence, railing, filching by

translation, etc. Of all which calumnies and every of them, in manner and

form aforesaid, what answer you? Are you guilty or not guilty?’ 195

TUCCA

[To Crispinus and Demetrius] ‘Not guilty’, say.

CRISPINUS [AND] DEMETRIUS

Not guilty.

TIBULLUS

How will you be tried?

TUCCA

[To Crispinus and Demetrius] ‘By the Roman gods and the noblest Romans.’

CRISPINUS [AND] DEMETRIUS

By the Roman gods and the noblest Romans. 200

VIRGIL

[To Crispinus and Demetrius] Here sits Maecenas and Cornelius Gallus.

Are you contented to be tried by these?

TUCCA

[To Crispinus and Demetrius] ‘Ay, so the noble captain may be joined with

them in commission,’ say.

CRISPINUS [AND] DEMETRIUS

Ay, so the noble captain may be joined with them 205

in commission.

VIRGIL

[To Horace] What says the plaintiff?

HORACE

I am content.

VIRGIL

Captain, then take your place.

TUCCA

[To Virgil] Alas, my worshipful praetor, ’tis more of thy gent’ness than 210

of my deserving, iwis. But since it hath pleased the court to make choice of

my wisdom and gravity, [To Crispinus and Demetrius] come, my calumnious

varlets: let’s hear you talk for yourselves now an hour or two. What can you

say? Make a noise. Act, act!

VIRGIL

[To Gallus, Maecenas, and Tucca] Stay; turn and take an oath first. 215

You shall swear

By thunder-darting Jove, the king of gods,

And by the genius of Augustus Caesar,

By your own white and uncorrupted souls

And the deep reverence of our Roman justice,

To judge this case with truth and equity, 220

As bound by your religion and your laws.

[To Tibullus] Now read the evidence;

[Tibullus takes out two papers.]

but first demand

Of either prisoner if that writ be theirs.

TIBULLUS

[Giving a Lictor one paper] Show this unto Crispinus. – Is it yours?

TUCCA

[To Crispinus] Say ‘ay’. [Crispinus hesitates.] What, dost thou stand upon it, 225

pimp? Do not deny thine own Minerva, thy Pallas, the issue of thy brain!

CRISPINUS

Yes, it is mine.

[The Lictor returns the paper to Tibullus.]

TIBULLUS

[Giving the Lictor another] Show that unto Demetrius. — Is it yours?

DEMETRIUS

It is.

[The Lictor returns the paper to Tibullus.]

TUCCA

There’s a father will not deny his own bastard, now, I warrant thee. 230

VIRGIL

Read them aloud.

TIBULLUS

[He reads the first.]

‘Ramp up, my genius! Be not retrograde,

But boldly nominate a spade, a spade.

What, shall thy lubrical and glibbery muse

Live as she were defunct, like punk in stews?’ 235

TUCCA

[Aside] Excellent!

TIBULLUS

‘Alas! That were no modern consequence,

To have cothurnal buskins frighted hence.

No! Teach thy incubus to poetize,

And throw abroad thy spurious snotteries 240

Upon that puffed-up lump of barmy froth — ’

TUCCA

[Aside] Aha!

TIBULLUS

‘Or clumsy chilblained judgement, that with oath

Magnificates his merit, and bespawls

The conscious time with humorous foam, and brawls 245

As if his organons of sense would crack

The sinews of my patience. Break his back,

O poets all and some, for now we list

Of strenuous ven-ge-ance to clutch the fist!

Subscri. Cris.’ 250

TUCCA

Ay, marry, this was written like a Hercules in poetry, now!

CAESAR

Excellently well threatened!

VIRGIL

Ay, and as strangely worded, Caesar.

CAESAR

We observe it.

VIRGIL

[To Tibullus] The other, now. 255

TUCCA

[Indicating Demetrius] This’s a fellow of a good prodigal tongue too; this’ll

do well.

[He reads.]

TIBULLUS

‘Our muse is in mind for th’untrussing a poet;

I slip by his name, for most men do know it.

A critic that all the world bescumbers 260

With satirical humours and lyrical numbers.’

TUCCA

[Aside] Art thou there, boy?

TIBULLUS

‘And for the most part, himself doth advance

With much self-love and more arrogance.’

TUCCA

[Aside] Good again. 265

TIBULLUS

‘And, but that I would not be thought a prater,

I could tell you he were a translator.

I know the authors from whence he has stole,

And could trace him, too, but that I understand ’em not

full and whole.’

TUCCA

[Aside] That line is broke loose from all his fellows; chain him up shorter, 270

do.

TIBULLUS

‘The best note I can give you to know him by

Is, that he keeps gallants company,

Whom I would wish in time should him fear,

Lest after they buy repentance too dear. 275

Subscri. Deme. Fan.’

TUCCA

Well said. This carries palm with it.

HORACE

[To Demetrius] And why, thou motley gull? Why should they fear?

When hast thou known us wrong or tax a friend?

I dare thy malice to betray it. Speak. 280

Now thou curl’st up, thou poor and nasty snake,

And shrink’st thy pois’nous head into thy bosom.

Out, viper, thou that eat’st thy parents, hence!

Rather such speckled creatures as thyself

Should be eschewed and shunned, such as will bite 285

And gnaw their absent friends, not cure their fame;

Catch at the loosest laughters, and affect

To be thought jesters; such as can devise

Things never seen or heard, t’impair men’s names

And gratify their credulous adversaries; 290

Will carry tales, do basest offices,

Cherish divided fires, and still increase

New flames out of old embers; will reveal

Each secret that’s committed to their trust.

These be black slaves; Romans, take heed of these. 295

TUCCA

Thou twang’st right, little Horace, they be indeed: a couple of chapfall’n

curs. [To Gallus and Maecenas] Come, we of the bench, let’s rise to the urn and

condemn ’em quickly.

VIRGIL

[To Gallus, Maecenas, and Tucca]Before you go together, worthy

Romans,

We are to tender our opinion 300

And give you those instructions that may add

Unto your even judgement in the cause —

Which thus we do commence. First, you must know

That where there is a true and perfect merit

There can be no dejection, and the scorn 305

Of humble baseness oftentimes so works

In a high soul upon the grosser spirit

That to his blearèd and offended sense

There seems a hideous fault blazed in the object,

When only the disease is in his eyes. 310

Here-hence it comes our Horace now stands taxed

Of impudence, self love, and arrogance

By these, who share no merit in themselves,

And therefore think his portion is as small.

For they from their own guilt assure their souls 315

If they should confidently praise their works,

In them it would appear inflation;

Which in a full and well-digested man

Cannot receive that foul abusive name,

But the fair title of erection. 320

And for his true use of translating men,

It still hath been a work of as much palm

In clearest judgements as t’invent or make.

His sharpness, that is most excusable,

As being forced out of a suffering virtue 325

Oppressèd with the licence of the time;

And howsoever fools or jerking pedants,

Players, or suchlike buffon, barking wits

May with their beggarly and barren trash

Tickle base, vulgar ears in their despite, 330

This, like Jove’s thunder, shall their pride control:

The honest satyr hath the happiest soul.

Now, Romans, you have heard our thoughts. Withdraw when you

please.

TIBULLUS

[To the Lictors] Remove the accused from the bar. 335

TUCCA

Who holds the urn to us, ha? [Aside to Crispinus and Demetrius] Fear nothing;

I’ll quit you, mine honest pitiful stinkards. I’ll do’t.

CRISPINUS

Captain, you shall eternally girt me to you, as I am generous.

TUCCA

Go to.

[Maecenas, Gallus, and Tucca withdraw and consult.]

CAESAR

[Aside to Tibullus] Tibullus, let there be a case of vizards privately 340

provided; we have found a subject to bestow them on.

TIBULLUS

It shall be done, Caesar.

CAESAR

Here be words, Horace, able to bastinado a man’s ears.

HORACE

Ay. Please it great Caesar, I have pills about me

Mixed with the whitest kind of hellebore, 345

Would give him a light vomit, that should purge

His brain and stomach of those tumorous heats,

Might I have leave to minister unto him.

CAESAR

Oh, be his Aesculapius, gentle Horace!

You shall have leave, and he shall be your patient. 350

— Virgil, use your authority; command him forth.

VIRGIL

Caesar is careful of your health, Crispinus,

And hath himself chose a physician

To minister unto you; take his pills.

[Crispinus is brought to Horace and accepts the medicine.]

HORACE

They are somewhat bitter, sir, but very wholesome. 355

Take yet another. So. Stand by, they’ll work anon.

TIBULLUS

Romans, return to your several seats. — Lictors, bring forward the urn,

and set the accused at the bar.

[The jurymen sit.]

TUCCA

[To Crispinus and Demetrius] Quickly, you whoreson egregious varlets!

Come forward. What? Shall we sit all day upon you? You make no more 360

haste now than a beggar upon pattens, or a physician to a patient that has no

money, you pilchers.

[Lictors bring the accused to the bar and the urn to the jurymen, who mark and place their ballots in it. The urn is brought to Tibullus.]

TIBULLUS

Rufus Laberius Crispinus and Demetrius Fannius, hold up your

hands. You have, according to the Roman custom, put yourselves upon trial

to the urn, for divers and sundry calumnies whereof you have before this 365

time been indicted and are now presently arraigned. Prepare yourselves to

hearken to the verdict of your triers.

[Tibullus takes the ballots from the urn.]

Caius Cilnius Maecenas pronounceth you, by this handwriting, guilty.

Cornelius Gallus, guilty. Pantilius Tucca —

TUCCA

Parcel-guilty, I. 370

DEMETRIUS

He means himself; for it was he, indeed,

Suborned us to the calumny.

TUCCA

[To Demetrius] I, you whoreson cantharides? Was’t I?

DEMETRIUS

I appeal to your conscience, Captain.

TIBULLUS

[To Demetrius] Then you confess it now. 375

DEMETRIUS

I do, and crave the mercy of the court.

TIBULLUS

What saith Crispinus?

CRISPINUS

[Groaning] Oh, the captain, the captain ——

HORACE

My physic begins to work with my patient, I see.

VIRGIL

Captain, stand forth and answer. 380

TUCCA

Hold thy peace, poet praetor; I appeal from thee to Caesar, I. — Do me

right, royal Caesar.

CAESAR

Marry, and I will, sir. — Lictors, gag him, do,

And put a case of vizards o’er his head,

That he may look bifronted, as he speaks. 385

TUCCA

Gods and fiends! Caesar! Thou wilt not, Caesar, wilt thou?

[Lictors approach him with gag and vizards.]

Away, you whoreson vultures, away! You think I am a dead corpse now,

because Caesar is disposed to jest with a man of mark, or so.

[They lay hands upon him.]

Hold your hooked talons out of my flesh, you inhuman harpies! Go to, do’t!

What? Will the royal Augustus cast away a gent’man of worship, a captain 390

and a commander, for a couple of condemned caitiff calumnious cargoes?

CAESAR

Dispatch, Lictors.

TUCCA

Caesar!

[The Lictors gag and mask Tucca, and move him aside.]

CAESAR

Forward, Tibullus.

VIRGIL

[To Tibullus] Demand what cause they had to malign Horace. 395

DEMETRIUS

In troth, no great cause, not I, I must confess, but that he kept better

company (for the most part) than I; and that better men loved him than loved

me; and that his writings thrived better than mine, and were better liked,

and graced; nothing else.

VIRGIL

Thus envious souls repine at others’ good. 400

HORACE

[To Demetrius] If this be all, faith, I forgive thee freely.

Envy me still, so long as Virgil loves me,

Gallus, Tibullus, and the best-best Caesar,

My dear Maecenas. While these, with many more,

Whose names I wisely slip, shall think me worthy 405

Their honoured and adored society,

And read, and love, prove, and applaud my poems,

I would not wish but such as you should spite them.

CRISPINUS

Oh —

TIBULLUS

How now, Crispinus? 410

CRISPINUS

Oh, I am sick —

HORACE

A basin, a basin quickly! Our physic works. – Faint not, man.

[A receptacle is brought and held up for Crispinus.]

CRISPINUS

[Retching] Oh – retrograde — reciprocal — incubus —

CAESAR

What’s that, Horace?

HORACE

‘Retrograde’ and ‘reciprocal incubus’ are come up. 415

GALLUS

Thanks be to Jupiter.

CRISPINUS

Oh — glibbery — lubrical — defunct — oh! —

HORACE

Well said; here’s some store.

VIRGIL

What are they?

HORACE

‘Glibbery’, ‘lubrical’, and ‘defunct’. 420

GALLUS

Oh, they came up easy.

CRISPINUS

Oh — oh! –

TIBULLUS

What’s that?

HORACE

Nothing yet.

CRISPINUS

Magnificate! 425

MAECENAS

‘Magnificate’? That came up somewhat hard.

CRISPINUS

Oh, I shall cast up my – spurious – snotteries —

HORACE

[To Crispinus] Good. Again.

CRISPINUS

Chilblained – oh! – oh! – clumsy —

HORACE

That ‘clumsy’ stuck terribly. 430

MAECENAS

What’s all that, Horace?

HORACE

‘Spurious snotteries’, ‘chilblained’, ‘clumsy’.

TIBULLUS

Oh, Jupiter!

GALLUS

Who would have thought there should ha’ been such a deal of filth in a

poet? 435

CRISPINUS

Oh — barmy froth —

CAESAR

What’s that?

CRISPINUS

— Puffy – inflate – turgidous – ventositous –

HORACE

‘Barmy froth’, ‘puffy’, ‘inflate’, ‘turgidous’, and ‘ventositous’ are come

up. 440

TIBULLUS

Oh, terrible windy words!

GALLUS

A sign of a windy brain.

CRISPINUS

Oh — oblatrant — furibund — fatuate — strenuous —

HORACE

Here’s a deal: ‘oblatrant’, ‘furibund’, ‘fatuate’, ‘strenuous’.

CAESAR

Now all’s come up, I trow. What a tumult he had in his belly! 445

HORACE

No; there’s the often ‘conscious damp’ behind, still.

CRISPINUS

Oh — conscious – damp.

HORACE

It’s come up, thanks to Apollo and Aesculapius. [Observing Crispinus]

Yet there’s another; you were best take a pill more?

CRISPINUS

Oh, no; oh! — oh! — oh! — oh! 450

HORACE

Force yourself, then, a little with your finger.

CRISPINUS

[Putting his finger down his throat] Oh — oh! – prorumped!

TIBULLUS

‘Prorumped’? What a noise it made! As if his spirit would have

prorumped with it.

CRISPINUS

Oh – oh! – oh! 455

VIRGIL

Help him; it sticks strangely, whatever it is.

CRISPINUS

Oh – clutched.

HORACE

Now it’s come: ‘clutched’.

CAESAR

‘Clutched’? It’s well that’s come up! It had but a narrow passage.

CRISPINUS

Oh — 460

VIRGIL

Again. Hold him; hold his head there.

[Crispinus’s head is supported over the receptacle.]

CRISPINUS

Snarling gusts – quaking custard.

HORACE

How now, Crispinus?

CRISPINUS

Oh — obstupefact!

TIBULLUS

Nay, that are all we, I assure you. 465

HORACE

How do you feel yourself?

CRISPINUS

Pretty and well, I thank you.

VIRGIL

These pills can but restore him for a time,

Not cure him quite of such a malady,

Caught by so many surfeits, which have filled 470

His blood and brain thus full of crudities;

’Tis necessary, therefore, he observe

A strict and wholesome diet. [To Crispinus] Look you take

Each morning of old Cato’s principles

A good draught, next your heart; that walk upon 475

Till it be well digested. Then come home

And taste a piece of Terence; suck his phrase

Instead of liquorice. And at any hand

Shun Plautus and old Ennius; they are meats

Too harsh for a weak stomach. Use to read 480

(But not without a tutor) the best Greeks:

As Orpheus, Musaeus, Pindarus,

Hesiod, Callimachus, and Theocrite,

High Homer; but beware of Lycophron:

He is too dark and dangerous a dish. 485

You must not hunt for wild, outlandish terms

To stuff out a peculiar dialect,

But let your matter run before your words;

And if at any time you chance to meet

Some Gallo-Belgic phrase, you shall not straight 490

Rack your poor verse to give it entertainment,

But let it pass, and do not think yourself

Much damnified if you do leave it out,

When nor your understanding nor the sense

Could well receive it. This fair abstinence 495

In time will render you more sound and clear;

And this I have prescribed to you, in place

Of a strict sentence, which till he perform,

[Indicating a gown] Attire him in that robe.

[A Lictor dresses Crispinus.]

And henceforth learn

To bear yourself more humbly: not to swell, 500

Or breathe your insolent and idle spite

On him whose laughter can your worst affright.

TIBULLUS

[To the Lictors] Take him away.

CRISPINUS

Jupiter guard Caesar!

VIRGIL

And for a week or two, see him locked up

In some dark place removed from company; 505

He will talk idly else after his physic.

[Crispinus is led aside.]

[To Demetrius] Now to you, sir. Th’extremity of law

Awards you to be branded in the front

For this your calumny; but since it pleaseth

Horace, the party wronged, t’entreat of Caesar 510

A mitigation of that juster doom,

With Caesar’s tongue thus we pronounce your sentence.

Demetrius Fannius, thou shalt here put on

[Indicating a fool’s costume] That coat and cap; and henceforth, think thyself

No other than they make thee. Vow to wear them 515

In every fair and generous assembly,

Till the best sort of minds shall take to knowledge

As well thy satisfaction as thy wrongs.

[Demetrius puts on the fool’s clothing.]

HORACE

[To Virgil] Only, grave praetor, here in open court

I crave the oath for good behaviour 520

May be administered unto them both.

VIRGIL

Horace, it shall. Tibullus, give it them.

TIBULLUS

Rufus Laberius Crispinus and Demetrius Fannius, lay your hands

on your hearts. [They do so.] You shall here solemnly attest and swear that

never after this instant, either at booksellers’ stalls, in taverns, twopenny 525

rooms, tiring-houses, noblemen’s butteries, puisnes’ chambers (the best and

farthest places where you are admitted to come), you shall once offer or dare

(thereby to endear yourself the more to any player, ingle, or guilty gull in your

company) to malign, traduce, or detract the person or writings of Quintus

Horatius Flaccus or any other eminent man transcending you in merit whom 530

your envy shall find cause to work upon, either for that or for keeping himself

in better acquaintance or enjoying better friends. Or if — transported by any

sudden and desperate resolution – you do, that then you shall not under

the bastoun, or in the next presence, being an honourable assembly of his

favourers, be brought as voluntary gent. to undertake the forswearing of it. 535

Neither shall you at any time (ambitiously affecting the title of the untrussers

or whippers of the age) suffer the itch of writing to overrun your performance

in libel, upon pain of being taken up for lepers in wit, and — losing both your

time and your papers – be irrecoverably forfeited to the Hospital of Fools. So

help you our Roman gods and the genius of great Caesar. 540

[Crispinus and Demetrius swear.]

VIRGIL

So. Now dissolve the court.

HORACE, TIBULLUS, GALLUS, MAECENAS, [and] VIRGIL

And thanks to Caesar,

That thus hath exercised his patience.

CAESAR

We have indeed, you worthiest friends of Caesar.

It is the bane and torment of our ears

To hear the discords of those jangling rhymers 545

That, with their bad and scandalous practices,

Bring all true arts and learning in contempt.

But let not your high thoughts descend so low

As these despisèd objects. Let them fall,

With their flat, grovelling souls. Be you yourselves. 550

And as with our best favours you stand crowned,

So let your mutual loves be still renowned.

Envy will dwell where there is want of merit,

Though the deserving man should crack his spirit.

Song

Blush, folly, blush! Here’s none that fears 555

The wagging of an ass’s ears,

Although a wolfish case he wears.

Detraction is but baseness’ varlet,

And apes are apes, though clothed in scarlet.

THE END560

Rumpatur, quisquis rumpitur invidia.

TO THE READER

If by looking on what is past thou hast deserved that name, I am willing thou

shouldst yet know more by that which follows: an apologetical dialogue, which

was only once spoken upon the stage, and all the answer I ever gave to sundry

impotent libels then cast out (and some yet remaining) against me and this play.

Wherein I take no pleasure to revive the times, but that posterity may make a 5

difference between their manners that provoked me then and mine that neglected

them ever. For in these strifes, and on such persons, were as wretched to affect

a victory as it is unhappy to be committed with them. Non annorum canicies est

laudanda, sed morum.

[Apologetical Dialogue]

The Persons

NASUTUS

POLYPOSUS

AUTHOR

[The AUTHOR is discovered at his desk amongst books and papers.

Enter at a distance NASUTUS and POLYPOSUS.]

NASUTUS

I pray you, let’s go see him, how he looks

After these libels.

POLYPOSUS

Oh, vexed, vexed, I warrant you.

NASUTUS

Do you think so? I should be sorry for him

If I found that.

POLYPOSUS

Oh, they are such bitter things,

He cannot choose.

NASUTUS

But is he guilty of ’em? 5

POLYPOSUS

Fuh! That’s no matter.

NASUTUS

No?

POLYPOSUS

No. Here’s his lodging;

We’ll steal upon him.

[They move towards the Author’s place of study.]

Or let’s listen – stay.

He has a humour oft t’talk t’himself.

NASUTUS

They are your manners lead me, not mine own.

[They stop just out of sight of the Author.]

AUTHOR

[To himself] The Fates have not spun him the coarsest thread, 10

That, free from knots of perturbation,

Doth yet so live, although but to himself,

As he can safely scorn the tongues of slaves,

And neglect Fortune more than she can him.

It is the happiest thing, this not to be 15

Within the reach of malice. It provides

A man so well to laugh off injuries,

And never sends him farther for his vengeance

Than the vexed bosom of his enemy.

Ay, now, but think how poor their spite sets off, 20

Who, after all their waste of sulphurous terms

And burst-out thunder of their chargèd mouths,

Have nothing left but the unsav’ry smoke

Of their black vomit to upbraid themselves,

Whilst I, at whom they shot, sit here shot-free 25

And as unhurt of envy, as unhit.

[Nasutus and Polyposus come forward.]

POLYPOSUS

Ay, but the multitude, they think not so, sir.

They think you hit and hurt, and dare give out

Your silence argues it in not rejoining

To this or that late libel!

AUTHOR

’Las, good rout! 30

I can afford them leave to err so still,

And, like the barking students of Bears’ College,

To swallow up the garbage of the time

With greedy gullets, whilst myself sit by

Pleased and yet tortured with their beastly feeding. 35

’Tis a sweet madness runs along with them:

To think all that are aimed at still are struck;

Then, where the shaft still lights, make that the mark,

And so each fear- or fever-shaken fool

May challenge Teucer’s hand in archery. 40

Good troth, if I knew any man so vile

To act the crimes these whippers reprehend,

Or what their servile apes gesticulate,

I should not then much muse their shreds were liked,

Since ill men have a lust t’hear others’ sins, 45

And good men have a zeal to hear sin shamed.

But when it is all excrement they vent,

Base filth and offal, or thefts notable

As ocean piracies or highway stands,

And not a crime there taxed but is their own 50

Or what their own foul thoughts suggested to them;

And that in all their heat of taxing others

Not one of them but lives himself (if known)

Improbior satyram scribente cinaedo;

What should I say, more than turn stone with wonder? 55

NASUTUS

I never saw this play bred all this tumult.

What was there in it could so deeply offend,

And stir so many hornets?

AUTHOR

Shall I tell you?

NASUTUS

Yes, and ingenuously.

AUTHOR

Then by the hope

Which I prefer unto all other objects, 60

I can profess I never writ that piece

More innocent or empty of offence.

Some salt it had, but neither tooth nor gall,

Nor was there in it any circumstance

Which, in the setting down, I could suspect 65

Might be perverted by an enemy’s tongue.

Only it had the fault to be called mine:

That was the crime.

POLYPOSUS

No? Why, they say you taxed

The law and lawyers, captains, and the players

By their particular names.

AUTHOR

It is not so. 70

I used no name. My books have still been taught

To spare the persons, and to speak the vices.

These are mere slanders, and enforced by such

As have no safer ways to men’s disgraces

But their own lies and loss of honesty: 75

Fellows of practised and most laxative tongues,

Whose empty and eager bellies i’the year

Compel their brains to many desp’rate shifts.

(I spare to name ’em, for their wretchedness

Fury itself would pardon.) These, or such – 80

Whether of malice or of ignorance

Or itch t’have me their adversary, I know not,

Or all these mixed –- but sure I am, three years

They did provoke me with their petulant styles

On every stage. And I at last, unwilling, 85

But weary, I confess, of so much trouble,

Thought I would try if shame could win upon ’em,

And therefore chose Augustus Caesar’s times,

When wit and arts were at their height in Rome,

To show that Virgil, Horace, and the rest 90

Of those great master-spirits did not want

Detractors then or practisers against them.

And by this line (although no parallel),

I hoped at last they would sit down and blush.

But nothing could I find more contrary. 95

And though the impudence of flies be great,

Yet this has so provoked the angry wasps –

Or, as you said, of the next nest the hornets –

That they fly buzzing, mad, about my nostrils,

And like so many screaming grasshoppers 100

Held by the wings, fill every ear with noise.

And what? Those former calumnies you mentioned:

First, of the law. Indeed, I brought in Ovid

Chid by his angry father for neglecting

The study of their laws, for poetry; 105

And I am warranted by his own words:

Saepe pater dixit, studium quid inutile tentas?

Maeonides nullus ipse reliquit opes.

And in far harsher terms elsewhere, as these:

Non me verbosas leges ediscere, non me 110

Ingrato voces prostituisse foro.

But how this should relate unto our laws

Or their just ministers with least abuse,

I reverence both too much to understand!

Then, for the captain: I will only speak 115

An epigram I here have made. [He shows a paper.] It is

‘Unto true soldiers’. That’s the lemma. Mark it.

[He reads aloud.] ‘Strength of my country, whilst I bring to view

Such as are miscalled captains, and wrong you

And your high names, I do desire that thence 120

Be nor put on you, nor you take offence.

I swear by your true friend, my muse, I love

Your great profession, which I once did prove,

And did not shame it with my actions then,

No more than I dare now do with my pen. 125

He that not trusts me, having vowed thus much,

But’s angry for the captain still, is such.’

Now for the players: it is true I taxed ’em,

And yet but some, and those so sparingly

As all the rest might have sat still, unquestioned, 130

Had they but had the wit or conscience

To think well of themselves. But impotent they

Thought each man’s vice belonged to their whole tribe;

And much good do’t ’em. What th’have done ’gainst me

I am not moved with. If it gave ’em meat 135

Or got ’em clothes, ’tis well. That was their end.

Only amongst them, I am sorry for

Some better natures, by the rest so drawn

To run in that vile line.

POLYPOSUS

And is this all?

Will you not answer then the libels?

AUTHOR

No. 140

POLYPOSUS

Nor the untrussers?

AUTHOR

Neither.

POLYPOSUS

Y’are undone then.

AUTHOR

With whom?

POLYPOSUS

The world.

AUTHOR

The bawd!

POLYPOSUS

It will be taken

To be stupidity or tameness in you.

AUTHOR

But they that have incensed me can in soul

Acquit me of that guilt. They know I dare 145

To spurn or baffle ’em, or squirt their eyes

With ink or urine. Or I could do worse:

Armed with Archilochus’ fury, write iambics

Should make the desperate lashers hang themselves;

Rhyme ’em to death as they do Irish rats 150

In drumming tunes. Or, living, I could stamp

Their foreheads with those deep and public brands

That the whole Company of Barber-Surgeons

Should not take off with all their art and plasters.

And these my prints should last, still to be read 155

In their pale fronts when what they write ’gainst me

Shall like a figure drawn in water fleet,

And the poor wretched papers be employed

To clothe tobacco or some cheaper drug.

This I could do, and make them infamous. 160

But to what end? When their own deeds have marked ’em,

And that I know within his guilty breast

Each slanderer bears a whip that shall torment him

Worse than a million of these temporal plagues –

Which to pursue were but a feminine humour, 165

And far beneath the dignity of a man.

NASUTUS

’Tis true: for to revenge their injuries

Were to confess you felt ’em. Let ’em go

And use the treasure of the fool – their tongues –

Who makes his gain by speaking worst of best. 170

POLYPOSUS

Oh, but they lay particular imputations –

AUTHOR

As what?

POLYPOSUS

That all your writing is mere railing.

AUTHOR

Ha! If all the salt in the old comedy

Should be so censured, or the sharper wit

Of the bold satire termèd scolding rage, 175

What age could then compare with those for buffons?

What should be said of Aristophanes?

Persius? Or Juvenal? Whose names we now

So glorify in schools, at least pretend it.

Ha’ they no other?

POLYPOSUS

Yes: they say you are slow, 180

And scarce bring forth a play a year.

AUTHOR

’Tis true.

I would they could not say that I did that;

There’s all the joy that I take i’their trade

Unless such scribes as they might be proscribed

Th’abusèd theatres. They would think it strange, now, 185

A man should take but colt’s-foot for one day,

And between whiles spit out a better poem

Than e’er the master of art or giver of wit,

Their belly, made. Yet this is possible,

If a free mind had but the patience 190

To think so much together, and so vile.

But that these base and beggarly conceits

Should carry it by the multitude of voices

Against the most abstracted work opposed

To the stuffed nostrils of the drunken rout! 195

Oh, this would make a learn’d and liberal soul

To rive his stainèd quill up to the back

And damn his long-watched labours to the fire

(Things that were born when none but the still night

And his dumb candle saw his pinching throes), 200

Were not his own free merit a more crown

Unto his travails than their reeling claps.

This ’tis that strikes me silent, seals my lips,

And apts me rather to sleep out my time

Than I would waste it in contemnèd strifes 205

With these vile Ibides, these unclean birds

That make their mouths their clysters, and still purge

From their hot entrails. But I leave the monsters

To their own fate. And since the comic muse

Hath proved so ominous to me, I will try 210

If tragedy have a more kind aspect.

Her favours in my next I will pursue,

Where, if I prove the pleasure but of one,

So he judicious be, he shall b’alone

A theatre unto me. Once I’ll ’say 215

To strike the ear of time in those fresh strains

As shall, beside the cunning of their ground,

Give cause to some of wonder, some despite,

And unto more, despair to imitate their sound.

I, that spend half my nights and all my days 220

Here in a cell, to get a dark, pale face,

To come forth worth the ivy or the bays,

And in this age can hope no other grace —

Leave me. There’s something come into my thought

That must and shall be sung, high and aloof, 225

Safe from the wolf’s black jaw and the dull ass’s hoof.

NASUTUS

I reverence these raptures, and obey ’em.

[Exeunt Nasutus and Polyposus.]

This Comical Satire was first

acted in the year

1601

By the then Children of Queen

Elizabeth’s 5

Chapel.

The principal comedians were:

NATHAN FIELD JOHN UNDERWOOD

SALOMON PAVY WILLIAM OSTLER

THOMAS DAY THOMAS MARTON 10

With the allowance of the Master of Revels.

Appendix 1: Pseudonymous Actors in 3.4

Scholars and editors have tried for years to identify the contemporary actors to whom Jonson gave pseudonyms in Poetaster. Fleay (1891) believed them to be all Pembroke’s Men; Gifford (1816), Admiral’s Men. Most scholars have considered them Chamberlain’s Men, assuming that these were underwriting Dekker’s forthcoming satire on Jonson (but see Introduction). So T. Davies, Dramatic Miscellany, T. W. Baldwin, 1927 (rpt. 1961); H. D. Gray, 1947; P. Simpson, 1948 (for these scholars, see H&S, 9.558–9); and Bednarz, 2001. Cf. Mallory, intro., lxxiv–lxxix. Jonson may not have limited himself to one company; any players active in London at the time could have been consolidated into Histrio’s supposed troupe (cf. 3.4.100n.). The pseudonymous actors’ proposed real identities, many of them unpersuasive, are summarized below. Line numbers refer to 3.4.

112–13 [Histrio,] a bass violin at your back Augustine Phillips (d. 1605), often a company representative for the Chamberlain’s Men, owned a bass viol and other musical instruments (see e.g. Bednarz, 2001, 237). However, many actors were musicians. Alleyn’s diary, for instance, lists instrument purchases; in a 1595 contract he is ‘Edward Alleyn of London, musician’ (Cerasano, 1994c, 69–70).

231 lean Poluphagos Richard Burbage (1568–1616), Robert Armin (1563–1615), John Sincklo (dates unknown), and Henry Condell (?1576–1627), Chamberlain’s Men (proposed respectively by Davies, Baldwin, Gray, and Bednarz).

233 fiddler Enobarbus Richard Cowley (?1568–1619), a Chamberlain’s Man (Baldwin, Gray, and Bednarz). Baldwin calls Cowley a musician (1961 [1927], 232–3n.8); but cf. 3.4.114–16n.

241 Aesop, your politician Shakespeare (Gray); John Heminges (1566–1630), frequent manager of the Chamberlain’s Men’s outside business (Baldwin, Simpson, and Bednarz).

244 Frisker, my zany William Sly, d. 1608 (Baldwin); Robert Armin, comedian (Gray and Bednarz). Both where Chamberlain’s Men. William Kemp (c. 1560–?1603), famous stage clown and writer of jigs (Davies); having sold his share in the Chamberlain’s Men (1599) and performed a famous morris dance from London to Norwich (1600), he was in London in September 1601.

244–5 fat fool … Mango John Lowin, 1576–1653 (Davies), first recorded as an actor (with Worcester’s Men) in 1602; Thomas Pope, d. 1603–4 (Baldwin, 1927, 233n.9; Gray; and Bednarz). Both where Chamberlain’s Men. Pope, and John Singer of the Admiral’s Men, were called ‘boorish … clowns’ in Rowlands’s 1600 Letting of Humour’s Blood, Satire 4.9–11 (1966), 252–3 (see Chambers, ES, 2.334).

The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson

Poetaster, or The Arraignment (1601)

Edited by Gabriele Bernhard Jackson

INTRODUCTION

Place in Jonson’s development

Early history: the quarto and folio texts

Date of the first production

Origin of the play

Sources

Theatrical rivalry

The temper of the times

To the Virtuous, and My Worthy Friend, Master
Richard Martin

The Persons of the Play

POETASTER, OR HIS ARRAIGNMENT

[The Induction]

TO THE READER

[Apologetical Dialogue]

Appendix 1: Pseudonymous Actors in 3.4

The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson

Poetaster, or The Arraignment (1601)

Edited by Gabriele Bernhard Jackson

INTRODUCTION

Place in Jonson’s development

Early history: the quarto and folio texts

Date of the first production

Origin of the play

Sources

Theatrical rivalry

The temper of the times

To the Virtuous, and My Worthy Friend, Master Richard Martin

The Persons of the Play

POETASTER, OR HIS ARRAIGNMENT

[The Induction]

TO THE READER

[Apologetical Dialogue]

Appendix 1: Pseudonymous Actors in 3.4

To the Virtuous, and My Worthy Friend, Master
Richard Martin