xiv. 73, of the cobbler who tried to teach a crow to say 'Ave Caesar' in

flattery of Augustus after the battle of Actium; cf. Mr. McKerrow's note to Nashe's _Pierce Penilesse_ (_Works_, iv. 105). Both ideas are suggested in Nashe's _Menaphon_ preface, and Greene, in _Francescos Fortunes_ (App. C, No. xliii), combines them with a third story, also due, perhaps through Cornelius Agrippa (App. C, No. xii), to Macrobius (_Sat._ III. xiv. 12), of a debate on the respective powers of orator and actor between Cicero and Roscius, into an obviously apocryphal jest: '_Cicero._ Why _Roscius_, art thou proud with _Esops_ Crow, being pranct with the glory of others feathers? Of thy selfe thou canst say nothing, and if the Cobler hath taught thee to say _Aue Caesar_, disdain not thy tutor, because thou pratest in a kings chamber.' Fleay, i. 258, chooses to identify the cobbler with Marlowe and Roscius with Robert Wilson, and (being ignorant of Macrobius) cites the use of the phrase 'Ave Caesar' in _Edward III_, I. i. 164, which he ascribes to Marlowe, as evidence. Such equations are always hazardous. The point of the passage is in the indebtedness of the players as a body to the poets as a body. If any individual actor were designated as Roscius about 1590, it would be more likely to be Alleyn than another; the compliment to him is not unusual later (cf. ch. xv). But he had hardly a monopoly of the name; and in the present case there is really no reason to suppose that Greene had any individual in mind, other than the historical Roscius. The name is given to Ostler (q.v.) in 1611, and was in common generic use for a player; cf. e.g. Marston, _Satires_ (1598), ii. 42:

That fair-framed piece of sweetest poesy, Which Muto put between his mistress' paps ... Was penned by Roscio the tragedian;

and _Scourge of Villainy_ (1598), xi. 40:

Say who acts best? Drusus or Roscio?

Similarly Fleay, ii. 279, has no real ground for supposing that the player in the _Groatsworth of Wit_ is Wilson in particular. If, again, any individual is meant, it might just as well be James Burbage. Throughout Fleay is inclined to exaggerate the extent of the theatrical references in the pamphlets of Greene and Nashe. But R. Simpson is much worse in his hopelessly uncritical Introduction to _Faire Em_ in _The School of Shakspere_, ii. 339, which is an attempt to trace a _vendetta_ against the actors and especially Shakespeare as a main motive in Greene's writing from 1584 onwards. As far as I can see, Greene's attacks on the stage are limited to the three pamphlets named in the text, and Nashe's to the _Menaphon_ preface. It is doubtful whether Greene was writing for the stage at all before about 1590; in any case it may be assumed that neither writer was normally engaged in tilting against his paymasters.]

[Footnote 1058: Cuthbert Conny-Catcher, _The Defence of Conny-Catching_ (1592, Greene, _Works_, xi. 75), 'What if I should prove you a Conny-Catcher, Maister _R. G._ would it not make you blush at the matter?... Aske the Queens Players, if you sold them not _Orlando Furioso_ for twenty Nobles, and when they were in the country sold the same Play to the Lord Admirals men for as much more. Was not this plaine _Conny-Catching_, Maister _R. G._?... But I hear, when this was objected, you made this excuse; that there was no more faith to be held with players than with them that valued faith at the price of a feather; for as they were comedians to act, so the actions of their lives were Camelion-like; that they were uncertain, variable, time-pleasers, men that measured honesty by profit, and that regarded their authors not by desert, but by necessity of time.']

[Footnote 1059: Dekker, _Jests to Make you Merrie_ (1607, _Works_, ii. 303, 352), 'As proud as a player that feedes on the fruité of diuine poetry (as swine on acorns).... O you that are the Poets of these sinfull times, ouer whome the Players haue now got the vpper hand, by making fooles of the poore country people, in driuing them like flockes of geese to sit cackling in an old barne: and to swallow downe those playes for new which here euery punck and her squire (like the interpreter and his poppet) can rand out by heart they are so stale, and therefore so stincking; I know the Lady Pecunia and you come very hardly together, & therefore trouble not you'; cf. his references to 'strowlers' in note to p. 332. Another seventeenth-century critic is H[enry] P[arrot], _Laquei Ridiculosi or Springes for Woodcocks_ (1613), _Epig._ 131, _Theatrum Licentia_:

Cotta's become a player most men know, And will no longer take such toyling paines; For here's the spring (saith he) whence pleasures flow And brings them damnable excessive gaines: That now are cedars growne from shrubs and sprigs, Since Greene's _Tu Quoque_ and those Garlicke Jigs. ]

[Footnote 1060: _Mediaeval Stage_, ii. 194, 214. For Elizabethan school-plays at Shrewsbury, cf. ch. xxiii, s.v. Ashton. Murray, ii. 204, 216, 243, 324, 364, 382, records plays by schoolboys or other children at Bath (1602), Bristol (1594), Coventry (1601-2), Ludlow (1562, 1575-6), Norwich (1564-5), Plymouth (Totnes boys, 1564-74).]

[Footnote 1061: _Poetaster_, III. iv. 344, 'O, it will get vs a huge deale of money, Captaine, and wee haue need on't; for this winter ha's made vs all poorer, then so many staru'd snakes: No bodie comes at vs; not a gentleman, nor a ----.']

[Footnote 1062: _Hamlet_, II. ii. 339. This is the Folio text. The Second Quarto omits all but the first ten lines, but that there was some reference to the children in the original version of the play, the date of which may be 1601, is shown by the First Quarto text:

_Hamlet._ How comes it that they trauell? Do they grow restie?

_Gilderstone._ No my lord, their reputation holds as it was wont.

_Hamlet._ How then?

_Gilderstone._ Yfaith my Lord, noueltie carries it away, For the principali publike audience that Came to them, are turned to private playes, And to the humour of children. ]

[Footnote 1063: The main interest of the 'war of the theatres', or 'Poetomachia' as Dekker, _Satiromastix_, Epist. 10, calls it, is for literature and biography, rather than for stage-history. I refer to it under the plays concerned in chh. xxiii, xxiv, and can only add a brief summary here. The treatment of R. A. Small, _The Stage Quarrel_ (1899), is excellent, and may be supplemented by H. C. Hart's papers, _Gabriel Harvey_, _Marston and Ben Jonson_ (_9 N. Q._ xi. 201, 281, 343, 501; xii. 161, 263, 342, 403, 482) and _On Carlo Buffone_ (_10 N. Q._ i. 381), while the less critical view, partly derived from Fleay, of J. H. Penniman, _The War of the Theatres_ (1897), is revised in his edition of _Poetaster_ and _Satiromastix_. The protagonists are Jonson and Marston, with whom became allied Dekker. Daniel and many others, whose names have been brought under discussion, do not seem to have been really concerned. Jonson himself tells us, in the _Apologetical Dialogue_, probably written late in 1601, to _Poetaster_ that 'three yeeres, They did provoke me with their petulant stiles On every stage'. This takes us to 1599, up to which year there is no just ground for suggesting any conflict between Jonson and Marston. Jonson may then have taken offence at Marston's portrait of him, intended to be complimentary, as Chrisoganus in _Histriomastix_. In the same year he criticized Marston's style in _E. M. O._ In 1600 Marston satirized Jonson as Brabant Senior in _Jack Drum's Entertainment_, and in 1601 as Lampatho Doria in _What You Will_. Jonson in turn brought Marston into _Poetaster_ (1601) as Crispinus, and added Dekker as Demetrius. Dekker retorted a month or two later with his caricature of Jonson as Horace in _Satiromastix_. Some unascertained part in the 'purge' given to Jonson is ascribed in _3 Parnassus_ (1601) to Shakespeare. Jonson and Marston seem to have been reconciled by 1603; but the dispute had not been merely a paper one, for Jonson, _Conversations_, 11, 20, claims that he 'beat Marston, and took his pistol from him'.]

[Footnote 1064: Small, 67, has an excellent analysis of _Histriomastix_. He dates it in 1596, but not convincingly. It might just as well be 1588-90. The text is in R. Simpson, _The School of Shakespeare_, ii. 1, and needs re-editing. Moreover, Simpson thought that Posthaste was Shakespeare. The actor-scenes are i. 112-62; ii. 70-147, 188-344; iii. 179-243, 265-78; iv. 159-201; v. 61-102, 238-43; vi. 187-240. Of these I think that ii. 247-80; iii. 179-217, 265-78 may belong to the Marstonian revision.]

[Footnote 1065: Cf. _Hamlet_, II. ii. 415, 'The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited'.]

[Footnote 1066: _Poetaster_, III. iv; IV. iv; V. iii. 108-38.]

[Footnote 1067: Can the Aesop episode be a reminiscence of the part played by Augustine Phillips in the Essex innovation? Cf. vol. ii, p. 205.]

[Footnote 1068: _2 Return from Parnassus_, iv. 3; v. 1.]

[Footnote 1069: In certain other plays which have actors amongst their dramatis personae (e.g. _Midsummer-Night's Dream_ and Middleton's _Mayor of Queenborough_) the point is reversed, and it is the regular companies who satirize provincial companies or amateurs.]

[Footnote 1070: Thus in 1618 the Mayor of Exeter complained of a company travelling under Daniel's patent for the Children of Bristol (q.v.) that, though the patent was for children, the company consisted of men, with only five youths amongst them.]

[Footnote 1071: Cf. ch. xii, introduction.]

[Footnote 1072: Cf. App. C, No. lviii.]

[Footnote 1073: Murray, ii. 235, 400, 410.]

[Footnote 1074: Ibid. 199, 231, 264, 312, 341, 384, &c.]

[Footnote 1075: The Order was appended to _A Declaration of the Lords and Commons Assembled in Parliament, For the appeasing and quietting of all unlawfull Tumults and Insurrections in the severall Counties of England, and Dominion of Wales_ (1642). The whole pamphlet is facsimiled in J. Knight's edition of J. Downes, _Roscius Anglicanus_ (1886).]

[Footnote 1076: Hazlitt, _E. D. S._ 65.]

[Footnote 1077: Wright, _Historia Histrionica_, 409, 411.]

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+---------------------------------------------------------------+ | TRANSCRIBER NOTES. | | | | P. xvii 'Litteratur' changed to 'Literatur'. | | P. xxxiii 'Antient' changed to 'Ancient'. | | P. xxxiv 'O. S.' changed to 'C. S.'. | | P. xxxviii. 'Smith' changed to 'Strype'; moved alphabetically.| | P. xxxix 'Stow' changed to 'Stowe'. | | Footnote numbers that were left off are added on pages 95-97. | | P. 315. Added missing footnote number. | | P. 330. Added missing footnote number. | | P. 363. Added missing footnote number. | | Corrected various punctuation. | +---------------------------------------------------------------+