• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 21140 0

"They which smiled at the theatre in Rome might as soon scoff at the rudeness of the scene as give a plaudite at the perfection of the acting." While it is Burbage's Theatre that is here referred to, it is evident that his quarrel was not now with the actors—whom both he and Nashe praise in their quality—but with the plays, their authors, and the theatrical managers who patronised them.

It is evident that Shakespeare had something to do with the acceptance by the Burbages of plays by Marlowe and Kyd, and that Greene believed his own lack of patronage by the companies playing at the Theatre was due to Shakespeare's adverse influence. Knowing Shakespeare to be the son of a Stratford butcher, educated at a grammar school and recently a bonded servitor to Burbage, this "Master of Arts in Cambridge" questions the literary and dramatic judgment of the grammar school youth, and late serving-man, and employs his fellow university scholar, Thomas Nashe, to ridicule him and his critical pretensions.

Nashe returned to England in 1589, after a two years' absence upon the Continent, and cannot have acquired at first hand the knowledge he shows of dramatic affairs in London during the preceding year. It is evident that this knowledge was gained from Greene for that purpose. Mr. Fleay has demonstrated that Nashe, in his preface to Greene's Menaphon, alludes satirically to Thomas Kyd as the author of The Taming of a Shrew, and of the old Hamlet. Both of these plays were owned by Lord Strange's (now the Lord Chamberlain's) company in 1594, when, as I have suggested, they had recently taken them over from Pembroke's company, which was undoubtedly a Burbage company—using some of the Burbage properties and plays while under Shakespeare's management in 1591-94. Being Burbage properties, these plays were acted by Lord Strange's company between 1589 and 1591. Besides satirically indicating these plays and their author, Nashe goes on to criticise the "idiot art-masters" who make choice of such plays for the actors. "This affectation of actors and audience," writes Nashe—meaning this suiting of plays to the crude taste of the actors and the cruder taste of the public—"is all traceable to their idiot art-masters that intrude themselves as the alchemists of eloquence, who (mounted on the stage of arrogance) think to outbrave better pens with the swelling bombast of bragging blank verse, indeed it may be the ingrafted overflow of some killcow conceit, etc. Among this kind of men that repose eternity in the mouth of a player I can but engross some deep read school men or grammarians, who have no more learning in their skull than will serve to take up a commodity, nor art in their brains than was nourished in a serving man's idleness, will take upon them to be ironical censurers of all when God and poetry doth know they are the simplest of all."

This attack of Nashe's upon Shakespeare was recognised by all of the scholastic clique, and certain of its phrases are re-echoed in later attacks upon him by other scholars for several years afterwards; in fact, Nashe's diatribe proved to be a cue for Shakespeare's future detractors. In the expression "killcow," Nashe alludes to Shakespeare's father's trade. A few years later—1594—Chapman refers to Shakespeare as "judgements butcher," and later still, in 1598, Florio in his dedication of the Worlde of Wordes, and, in 1600, Ben Jonson in Every Man out of his Humour, also refer satirically to the supposed fact that Shakespeare's father was a butcher. In 1593 Chapman, in attacking Shakespeare in the early Histriomastix, re-echoes the term "idiot art-master." The phrase "ingrafted overflow of a killcow conceit" refers to Shakespeare's additions to, or revisions of, plays owned by his company that were originally written by such scholars as Greene. "Deep read school men or grammarians" is a reference to Shakespeare's grammar school education. "No more learning than will serve to take up a commodity" refers to Shakespeare's business management of Burbage's affairs, and "a serving man's idleness" to his recently