tax-money to relieve the poor, and the excuse that but fifteen pence was shared last week is not accepted in face of the idle and immoral lives that the rascals have led. In the end they are shipped off remorselessly to serve beyond the seas. It will be obvious that, while most of the points of criticism taken by the dramatist are those familiar to the literary pamphleteers, he is also not unsympathetic to the Puritan view of players as a canker in the state.
Jonson wrote his Poetaster in the spring of 1601. He had already heard of the intention of the Chamberlain's men against him, which afterwards took shape in Dekker and Marston's Satiromastix, and got in the first blows by depicting his assailants as 'a sort of copper-lac't scoundrels' in ancient Rome and their poets as Demetrius 'a dresser of plaies about the town here' and Crispinus 'poetaster and plagiary'. Some of his matter has its reminiscences of Histriomastix; some probably rests on details with regard to individual Chamberlain's men which are now irrecoverable.[1] His allusions to their poor winter season of 1600-1 and to the accumulation of shares by leading actors have already been quoted. The chief scene devoted to the players is that in which Histrio is bullied by Tucca, the huffing captain, who calls him 'stalker', 'gulch', 'stiffe toe', 'twopenny teare-mouth', and 'penny-biter', bids him turn fiddler again, get a bass violin at his back and march in a tawny coat with one sleeve to Goose Fair, and accuses his company of being usurers and brokers, who prey upon younger sons and citizens, and furnish facilities at their house for immoral practices. Tucca would bring his 'cockatrice' to see a bawdy play, but the players have nothing but humours, revels, and satires; to which Histrio replies that he is confusing them with 'the other side of Tyber', for 'we haue as much ribaldries in our plaies, as can bee, as you would wish, Captaine: all the sinners, i' the suburbs, come, and applaud our action, daily'. Crispinus is introduced as one who will teach the actors to tear and rant. Tucca bids Histrio give him forty shillings in earnest, since 'if hee pen for thee once, thou shalt not need to trauell, with thy pumps full of grauell, any more, after a blinde iade and a hamper: and stalke vpon boords, and barrell heads, to an old crackt trumpet'. Yet inasmuch as some of the players are 'honest gent'men-like scoundrels, and suspected to ha' some wit', Histrio may make Tucca a supper, and bring Frisker 'my zany' and Mango 'your fat fool', so long as he does not laugh too much or beg rapiers or scarfs;
- ↑ Poetaster, III. iv; IV. iv; V. iii. 108-38.
