The Cambridge author, perhaps, is thinking of the pill (not purge) which, in Satiromastix, might be administered to Jonson.  The Cambridge author may have thought that Shakespeare wrote the passage on the pill which was to “fetch up” masses of Ben’s insolence, self-love, arrogance, and detraction.  If this be not the sequence of ideas, it is not easy to understand how or why Kempe is made to say that Shakespeare has given Jonson a purge.  Stupid old nonsense!  There are other more or less obscure indications of Jonson’s spite, during the stage-quarrel, against Shakespeare, but the most unmistakable proof lies in his verses in “Poet-Ape.”  I am aware that Ben’s intention here to hit at Shakespeare has been denied, for example by Mr. Collins with his usual vigour of language.  But though I would fain agree with him, the object of attack can be no known person save Will.  Jonson was already, in The Poetaster, using the term “Poet-Ape,” for he calls the actors at large “apes.”

Jonson thought so well of his rhymes that he included them in the Epigrams of his first Folio (1616).  By that date, the year of Shakespeare’s death, if he really loved Shakespeare, as he says, in verse and prose, Ben might have suppressed the verses.  But (as Drummond noted) he preferred his jest, such as it was, to his friend; who was not, as usually understood, a man apt to resent a very blunt shaft of very obsolete wit.  Like Moliere, Shakespeare had outlived the charge of plagiarism, made long ago by the jealous Ben.

Poet-Ape is an actor-playwright “That would be thought our chief”—­ words which, by 1601, could only apply to Shakespeare; there was no rival, save Ben, near his throne.  The playwright-actor, too, has now confessedly

“grown To a little wealth and credit in the scene,”

of no other actor-playwright could this be said.

He is the author of “works” (Jonson was laughed at for calling his own plays “works"), but these works are “the frippery of wit,” that is, a tissue of plagiarisms, as in the case of Pantalabus.  But “told of this he slights it,” as most successful authors, when accused, as they often are, of plagiarism by jealous rivals, wisely do;—­so did Moliere.  This Poet-Ape began his career by “picking and gleaning” and “buying reversions of old plays.”  This means that Shakespeare did work over earlier plays which his company had acquired; or, if Shakespeare did not,—­then, I presume,—­Bacon did!

That, with much bad humour, is the gist of the rhymes on Poet-Ape.  Ben thinks Shakespeare’s “works” very larcenous, but still, the “works,” as such, are those of the poet-actor.  I hope it is now clear that Poet-Ape, who, like Pantalabus, “takes up all”; who has “grown to a little wealth and credit in the scene,” and who “thinks himself the chief” of contemporary dramatists, can be nobody but Shakespeare.  Hence it follows that the “works” of Poet-Ape, are the works of Shakespeare.  Ben admits, nay, asserts the existence of the works, says that they may reach “the after-time,” but he calls them a mass of plagiarisms,—­because he is in a jealous rage.