The Complete Works of William Shakespeare - Israel Gollancz William Shakespeare [3555]
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I will something affect the letter, for it argues facility.
The preyful princess pierced and prick'd a pretty pleasing pricket;
Some say a sore, but not a sore, till now made sore with shooting.
The dogs did yell; put L to sore, then sorel jumps from thicket;
Or pricket sore, or else sorel; the people fall a-hooting.
If sore be sore, then L to sore makes fifty sores one sorel.
Of one sore I an hundred make by adding but one more L.
In a former publication I have shown that an antagonism had developed between Shakespeare and Chapman as early as the year 1594, and in a more recent one have shown Matthew Roydon's complicacy with Chapman in his hostility to Shakespeare, and also Shakespeare's cognizance of it. I have displayed Shakespeare's answers to the attacks of these scholars in his caricature of Chapman as Holofernes, and of the curate Roydon as the curate Nathaniel. Chapman's attack upon Shakespeare in 1593 in the early Histriomastix and his reflection of the Earl of Southampton as Mavortius give evidence that his hostility owed its birth to Shakespeare's success in winning the patronage and friendship of Southampton; unless Chapman and Roydon had already solicited this nobleman's patronage, or had at least come into contact with him in some manner, and considered themselves displaced by Shakespeare, both the virulence of their opposition to our poet, and the manner and matter of Chapman's slurs against him in Histriomastix, and in the dedications of his poems to Matthew Roydon in 1594-95, are unaccountable.
It is likely that Matthew Roydon was one of the theological poets—who wrote anonymously for the stage—mentioned by Robert Greene in the introduction to The Farewell to Folly, which was published in 1591. It is probable also that Roydon is referred to as a writer for the stage in Greene's Groatsworth of Wit, where, after indicating Marlowe, Peele, and Nashe, he says:
"In this I might insert two more who have both writ against (for) these buckram gentlemen."
Now seeing that both Roydon and Chapman are satirised by Shakespeare in Love's Labours Lost, it occurs to me that the "preyful Princess" verses quoted above (which display parody in every line) are intended by Shakespeare to caricature the known work of the author of the sweet song delivered to the Queen by the nymph, and consequently that this song was from the pen of one of this learned couple. As I have already noticed, in the records of the Queen's stay at the other noblemen's houses that she visited on this progress, many verses and songs appear which were written specially for these occasions, while no songs, nor verses, have been preserved from the Cowdray or Tichfield festivities, occasions when they would be likely to have been used, considering Southampton's interest in literary matters and the court paid to him by the writers of the day. Among the poems which I have collected that I attribute to Roydon, I have elsewhere noticed one that Shakespeare makes fun of at a later time in Midsummer Night's Dream—that is, The Shepherd's Slumber. This poem deals with the exact season of the year when the Queen was at Cowdray—"peascod time"—and also with the killing of deer,
"when hound to horn gives ear till buck be killed";
and in one verse describes just such methods of killing deer as is suggested, both in Love's Labours Lost and in Nichol's Progresses, which latter records the entertainment for the Queen at Cowdray House.
"And like the deer, I make them fall!
That runneth o'er the lawn.
One drops down here! another there!
In bushes as they groan;
I bend a scornful, careless ear,
To hear them make their moan."
May not this be the identical "sweet song" delivered by the nymph to the Queen, and the occasion of the progress to Cowdray, in 1591, indicate the entry of Roydon and Chapman into the rivalry between Shakespeare and the scholars inaugurated two years earlier by Greene and