Shakespeare of Stratford/The Biographical Facts/Fact 32
XXXII. A CAMBRIDGE ANECDOTE OF SHAKESPEARE AND BEN JONSON (1601–1602).
From the Second Part of The Return from Parnassus, acted at Cambridge, probably in December, 1601, or January, 1602. One scene (IV. v.) represents Shakespeare’s actor colleagues, Kempe and Burbage coming to Cambridge to get student recruits for their company. They talk together:
Kempe. Few of the university pen plays well. They smell too much of that writer, Ovid, and that writer, Metamorphosis, and talk too much of Proserpina and Jupiter. Why, here’s our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down; ay, and Ben Jonson too. O that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow: he brought up Horace giving the poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him beray his credit.
Burbage. It is a shrewd fellow indeed . . .
Note. Kempe left Shakespeare’s company (the Lord Chamberlain’s) in 1600, and joined Worcester’s Men in 1602. The passage refers to the so-called ‘War of the Theatres’ in 1601. The play by Jonson alluded to is Poetaster, of that year, in which Horace gives Marston-Crispinus a pill. What the purge that Shakespeare gave Jonson was has been much disputed. It was probably something in the early version of Hamlet, acted at Cambridge in 1601, which was omitted in the printed editions.