Note 228 — XIII—MATURITY OF GENIUS

Less satisfactory is the endeavour that has been made by Mr. F. G. Fleay and Mr. George Wyndham to treat Troilus and Cressida as Shakespeare’s contribution to the embittered controversy of 1601-2, between Jonson on the one hand and Marston and Dekker and their actor friends on the other hand, and to represent the play as a pronouncement against Jonson. According to this fanciful view, Shakespeare held up Jonson to savage ridicule in Ajax, while in Thersites he denounced Marston, despite Marston’s intermittent antagonism to Jonson, which entitled him to freedom from attack by Jonson’s foes. The appearance of the word ‘mastic’ in the line (1. iii. 73) ‘When rank Thersites opes his mastic jaws’ is treated as proof of Shakespeare’s identification of Thersites with Marston, who used the pseudonym ‘Therio-mastix’ in his Scourge of Villainy. It would be as reasonable to identify him with Dekker, who wrote the greater part of Satiro-mastix. ‘Mastic’ is doubtless an adjective formed without recondite significance from the substantive ‘mastic,’ i.e. the gum commonly used at the time for stopping decayed teeth. No hypothesis of a polemical intention is needed to account for Shakespeare’s conception of Ajax or Thersites. There is no trait in either character as depicted by Shakespeare which a reading of Chapman’s Homer would fail to suggest. The controversial interpretation of the play is in conflict with chronology (for Troilus cannot, on any showing, be assigned to the period of the war between Jonson and Dekker, in 1601-2), and it seems confuted by the facts and arguments already adduced in the discussion of the theatrical conflict (see pp. 213-219). If more direct disproof be needed, it may be found in Shakespeare’s prologue to Troilus, where there is a good-humoured and expressly pacific allusion to the polemical aims of Jonson’s Poetaster. Jonson had introduced into his play ‘an armed prologue’ on account, he asserted, of his enemies’ menaces. Shakespeare, after describing in his prologue to Troilus the progress of the Trojan war before his story opened, added that his ‘prologue’ presented itself ‘arm’d,’ not to champion ‘author’s pen or actor’s voice,’ but simply to announce in a guise befitting the warlike subject-matter that the play began in the middle of the conflict between Greek and Trojan, and not at the beginning. These words of Shakespeare put out of court any interpretation of Shakespeare’s play that would represent it as a contribution to the theatrical controversy.