s remark:

Know, Caesar doth not wrong, nor without cause
Will he be satisfied

(III. i. 47-8). The rhythm and sense seem to require the reinsertion
after the word 'wrong' of the phrase 'but with just cause,' which Jonson
needlessly reprobated. Leonard Digges (1588-1635), one of Shakespeare's
admiring critics, emphasises the superior popularity of Shakespeare's
_Julius Caesar_ in the theatre to Ben Jonson's Roman play of _Catiline_,
in his eulogistic lines on Shakespeare (published after Digges's death in
the 1640 edition of Shakespeare's _Poems_):

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 laboured, Catiline.

{221} I wrote on this point in the article on Thomas Kyd in the
_Dictionary of National Biography_ (vol. xxxi.): 'The argument in favour
of Kyd's authorship of a pre-Shakespearean play (now lost) on the subject
of Hamlet deserves attention. Nash in 1589, when describing [in his
preface to _Menaphon_] the typical literary hack, who at almost every
point suggests Kyd, notices that in addition to his other accomplishments
"he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragical
speeches." Other references in popular tracts and plays of like date
prove that in an early tragedy concerning Hamlet there was a ghost who
cried repeatedly, "Hamlet, revenge!" and that this expression took rank
in Elizabethan slang beside the vernacular quotations from [Kyd's
sanguinary tragedy of] _Jeronimo_, such as "What outcry calls me from my
naked bed," and "Beware, Hieronimo, go by, go by." The resemblance
between the stories of _Hamlet_ and _Jeronimo_ suggests that the former
would have supplied Kyd with a congenial plot. In _Jeronimo_ a father
seeks to avenge his son's murder; in _Hamlet_ the theme is the same with
the position of father and son reversed. In _Jeronimo_ the avenging
father resolves to reach his end by arranging for the performance of a
play in the presence of those whom he suspects of the murder of his son,
and there is good ground for crediting the lost tragedy of _Hamlet_ with
a similar play-scene. Shakespeare's debt to the lost tragedy is a matter
of conjecture, but the stilted speeches of the play-scene in his _Hamlet_
read like intentional parodies of Kyd's