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And been a King among the meaner sort."

Arrogance towards social inferiors, as well as servility to superiors, is always manifested most offensively in the manners of those who are themselves conscious of equivocal social standing. I shall adduce evidence to prove that from the time we first begin dimly to apprehend Shakespeare in his London environment, in 1588-89, until his final return to Stratford in about 1610, he was continuously and spitefully attacked and vilified by a coterie of jealous scholars who, while lifted above him socially by the arbitrary value attaching to a university degree, were in no other sense his superiors either in birth or breeding. It was evidently, then, the contemptuous attitude of his jealous scholastic rivals, as well as the accruing material advantages involved, that impelled Shakespeare in 1596 to apply, through his father, to the College of Heralds for official confirmation of a grant of arms alleged to have been made to his forebears.

Shakespeare's earliest scholastic detractor was Robert Greene, who evidently set much store by his acquired gentility, as he usually signed his publications as "By Robert Greene, Master of Arts in Cambridge," and who, withal, was a most licentious and unprincipled libertine, going, through his ill-regulated course of life, dishonoured and unwept to a pauper's grave at the age of thirty-two. After the death of Greene, when his memory was assailed by Gabriel Harvey and others whom he had offended, his friend Nashe, who attempted to defend him, finding it difficult to do so, makes up for the lameness of his defence by the bitterness of his attack on Harvey. Nashe, in fact, resents being regarded as an intimate of Greene's, yet his, and Greene's, spiteful and ill-bred reflections upon Shakespeare's social quality, education, and personal appearance, between 1589 and 1592, were received sympathetically by the remainder of the "gentlemen poets,"—as they styled themselves in contradistinction to the stage poets,—and used thereafter for years as a keynote to their own jealous abuse of him.

John Florio, in his First Fruites, published in 1591, and after he had entered the service of the Earl of Southampton, though not yet assailing Shakespeare personally, as did these other scholars, appears as a critic of his historical dramatic work.

In 1593 George Peele, in his Honour of the Garter, re-echoes the slurs against Shakespeare voiced by Greene in the previous year. In the same year George Chapman, who thereafterwards proved to be Shakespeare's arch-enemy among the "gentlemen scholars," caricatures him and his affairs in a new play, which he revised, in conjunction with John Marston, six years later, under the title of Histriomastix, or The Player Whipt. Neither the authorship, date of production, nor satirical intention of the early form of the play has previously been known.

In 1594 Chapman again attacks Shakespeare in The Hymns to the Shadow of Night, as well as in the prose dedication written to his colleague, Matthew Roydon. In the same year Roydon enters the lists against Shakespeare by publishing a satirical and scandalous poem reflecting upon, and distorting, his private affairs, entitled Willobie his Avisa. From this time onward until the year 1609-10, Chapman, Roydon, and John Florio—who in the meantime had joined issue with them—continue to attack and vilify Shakespeare. Every reissue, or attempted reissue, of Willobie his Avisa was intended as an attack upon Shakespeare. Such reissues were made or attempted in 1596-1599-1605 and 1609, though some of them were prevented by the action of the public censor who, we have record, condemned the issue of 1596 and prevented the issue of 1599. As no copies of the 1605 or 1609 issues are now extant, it is probable that they also were estopped by the authorities. In 1598-99 these partisans (Chapman, Roydon, and Florio) are joined by John Marston, and a year later, also by Ben Jonson, when, for three or four years, Chapman, Jonson, and Marston collaborate in scurrilous plays against Shakespeare and friends who