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Her arbours, thickets, and her wondrous game,

(A huntress being never match'd in fame,)

Presume not then ye flesh-confounded souls,

That cannot bear the full Castalian bowls,

Which sever mounting spirits from the senses,

To look into this deep fount for thy pretenses."

In these lines, besides indicating Shakespeare's recent Ovidian excursion in Venus and Adonis by his reference to "Castalian bowls," Chapman shows knowledge of Shakespeare's intention, in the composition of Love's Labour's Lost, of exhibiting Queen Elizabeth as a huntress. Chapman's Cynthia of The Shadow of Night is plainly a rhapsodised idealisation of the Queen. Later on I shall elaborate the fact that Love's Labour's Lost was written late in 1591, or early in 1592, as a reflection of the Queen's progress to Cowdray House, the home of the Earl of Southampton's maternal grandfather, Viscount Montague, and that the shooting of deer by the Princess and her ladies fancifully records phases of the entertainments arranged for the Queen during her visit.

Assuming, then, from the foregoing evidence and inferences that Chapman composed the early Histriomastix in 1593, let us examine the play further in order to trace its fuller application to Shakespeare and his affairs in that year.

Though Histriomastix was revised as an attack upon Shakespeare in 1599 by Chapman and Marston, who had commenced to collaborate in dramatic work in the previous year, its original plot and action remain practically unaltered. In its revision its early anti-Shakespearean intention was merely amplified and brought up to date by a few topical allusions, fitting circumstances in the lives of the persons caricatured, pertaining to the later period. The substitution of Troilus and Cressida for The Prodigal Child, as the play within the play presented by Sir Oliver Owlet's company, is also due to the period of revision. All of the passages of the play which are suggestive of the period of revision are palpably in the style of John Marston.

Among the persons of the early play is Chrisoganus, a scholar and mathematician, who has set up an academy to expound the seven liberal Sciences: Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy, all of which are introduced as persons in the first act. Chrisoganus was undoubtedly intended for Chapman's friend Thomas Harriot, the mathematician and astronomer, who was so prominent in the academical movement of 1592-93. The name Chrisoganus is evidently a reflection of Harriot's Ephemeris Chrisometra, a MS. copy of which is preserved in Zion College. Chapman's poem to Harriot, prefixed to his Achilles Shield (1599), expresses many of the same ideas voiced in Histriomastix and in much the same language, and indicates Chapman's collaboration with Marston in the revision of the play in that year.

In the early Histriomastix Chapman represents himself in the character of Peace. When the utterances of Peace are compared with certain of Chapman's poems, such as his Euthymia Raptus, or The Tears of Peace (1609), his poem to Harriot (1598), The Shadow of Night (1594), and Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595), in all of which he breaks away from his subject-matter at intervals to extol his own virtues and bewail his poverty and his neglect by patrons, it becomes evident that he transfigures himself in Histriomastix as Peace; which character acts as a chorus to, or running commentary on, the action of the play.

The whole spirit and purpose of this play is reproduced in The Tears of Peace, which is a dialogue between Peace and an interlocutor, who discuss at great length exactly the same ideas and subjects, dramatically treated, in Histriomastix, i.e. the neglect of learning and the learned, and "the pursuit of wealth, glory, greatness, pleasure, and fashion" by "plebian and lord alike," as well as the unaccountable success of an ignorant playwright who writes plays on any subject that comes into his head:

"And how they trot out in their lines the ring

With idly iterating oft one thing,

A new fought combat, an affair at sea,