the stages? And what could have been the nature of this "purge"?
Among several suggestions, "Troilus and Cressida" has been thought by
some to be the play in which Shakespeare thus "put down" his friend,
Jonson. A wiser interpretation finds the "purge" in "Satiromastix,"
which, though not written by Shakespeare, was staged by his company,
and therefore with his approval and under his direction as one of the
leaders of that company.

The last years of the reign of Elizabeth thus saw Jonson recognised as
a dramatist second only to Shakespeare, and not second even to him as
a dramatic satirist. But Jonson now turned his talents to new fields.
Plays on subjects derived from classical story and myth had held the
stage from the beginning of the drama, so that Shakespeare was making
no new departure when he wrote his "Julius Caesar" about 1600. Therefore
when Jonson staged "Sejanus," three years later and with Shakespeare's
company once more, he was only following in the elder dramatist's
footsteps. But Jonson's idea of a play on classical history, on the one
hand, and Shakespeare's and the elder popular dramatists, on the other,
were very different. Heywood some years before had put five straggling
plays on the stage in quick succession, all derived from stories in Ovid
and dramatised with little taste or discrimination. Shakespeare had
a finer conception of form, but even he was contented to take all his
ancient history from North's translation of Plutarch and dramatise his
subject without further inquiry. Jonson was a scholar and a classical
antiquarian. He reprobated this slipshod amateurishness, and wrote
his "Sejanus" like a scholar, reading Tacitus, Suetonius, and
other authorities, to be certain of his facts, his setting, and his
atmosphere, and somewhat pedantically noting his authorities in the
margin when he came to print. "Sejanus" is a tragedy of genuine dramatic
power in which is told with discriminating taste the story of the
haughty favourite of Tiberius with his tragical overthrow. Our drama
presents no truer nor more painstaking representation of ancient
Roman life than may be found in Jonson's "Sejanus" and "Catiline his
Conspiracy," which followed in 1611. A passage in the address of the
former play to the reader, in which Jonson refers to a collaboration
in an earlier version, has led to the surmise that Shakespeare may have
been that "worthier pen." There is no evidence to determine the matter.

In 1605,