is libellers, and he advises the administration of
purging pills to the offenders."

This neat little chain of evidence would have no weak link, if it were
not for a passage in the play, "The Return from Parnassus," acted by
the students in St. John's College the same year, 1601. In this there is
a dialogue between Shakespeare's fellow-actors, Burbage and Kempe.
Speaking of the University dramatists, Kempe says:

"Why here's our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down; aye, and Ben
Jonson, too. O! that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow. He brought up
Horace, giving the poets a pill; but our fellow Shakespeare hath given
him a purge that made him bewray his credit." Burbage continues, "He is
a shrewd fellow indeed." This has, of course, been taken to mean that
Shakespeare was actively against Jonson in the Dramatists' and Actors'
war. But as everything else points, as we have seen, to the contrary,
one accepts gladly the loophole of escape offered by Mr. Lee. "The words
quoted from 'The Return from Parnassus' hardly admit of a literal
interpretation. Probably the 'purge' that Shakespeare was alleged by the
author of 'The Return from Parnassus' to have given Jonson meant no more
than that Shakespeare had signally outstripped Jonson in popular
esteem." That this was an actual fact is proved by the lines of Leonard
Digges, an admiring contemporary of Shakespeare's, printed in the 1640
edition of Shakespeare's poems, comparing "Julius Caesar" and Jonson's
play "Cataline:"

"So have I seen when Caesar would appear,
And on the stage at half-sword parley were
Brutus and Cassius--oh, how the audience
Were ravish'd, with what wonder they went thence;
When some new day they would not brook a line
Of tedious, though well-labored, Cataline."

This reminds one of the famous witticism attributed to Eudymion Porter
that "Shakespeare was sent from Heaven and Ben from College."

If Jonson's criticisms of Shakespeare's work were sometime not wholly
appreciative, the fact may be set down to the distinction between the
two here so humorously indicated. "A Winter's Tale" and the "Tempest"
both called forth some sarcasms from Jonson, the first for its error
about the Coast of Bohemia which Shakespeare borrowed from Greene.
Jonson wrote in the Induction to "Bartholemew Fair;" "If there be never
a servant-monster in the Fair, who can help it he says? Nor a nest of
Antics. He is loth to make nature afraid in his plays