bombastic efforts in _The Spanish
Tragedy_, and it is quite possible that they were directly suggested by
an almost identical episode in a lost _Hamlet_ by the same author.'
Shakespeare elsewhere shows acquaintance with Kyd's work. He places in
the mouth of Kit Sly in the _Taming of the Shrew_ the current phrase 'Go
by, Jeronimy,' from _The Spanish Tragedy_. Shakespeare quotes verbatim a
line from the same piece in _Much Ado about Nothing_ (I. i. 271): 'In
time the savage bull doth bear the yoke;' but Kyd practically borrowed
that line from Watson's _Passionate Centurie_ (No. xlvii.), where
Shakespeare may have met it.

{222} Cf. Gericke and Max Moltke, _Hamlet-Quellen_, Leipzig, 1881. The
story was absorbed into Scandinavian mythology: cf. _Ambales-Saga_,
edited by Mr. Israel Gollancz, 1898.

{224} Cf. _Hamlet_--parallel texts of the first and second quarto, and
first folio--ed. Wilhelm Vietor, Marburg, 1891; _The Devonshire Hamlets_,
1860, parallel texts of the two quartos edited by Mr. Sam Timmins;
_Hamlet_, ed. George Macdonald, 1885, a study with the text of the folio.

{226a} Arber's _Transcript of the Stationers' Registers_, iii. 226.

{226b} _Ib._ iii. 400.

{228} Less satisfactory is the endeavour that has been made by Mr. F. G.
Fleay and Mr. George Wyndham to treat _Troilus and Cressida_ as
Shakespeare's contribution to the embittered controversy of 1601-2,
between Jonson on the one hand and Marston and Dekker and their actor
friends on the other hand, and to represent the play as a pronouncement
against Jonson. According to this fanciful view, Shakespeare held up
Jonson to savage ridicule in Ajax, while in Thersites he denounced
Marston, despite Marston's intermittent antagonism to Jonson, which
entitled him to freedom from attack by Jonson's foes. The appearance of
the word 'mastic' in the line (1. iii. 73) 'When rank Thersites opes his
mastic jaws' is treated as proof of Shakespeare's identification of
Thersites with Marston, who used the pseudonym 'Therio-mastix' in his
_Scourge of Villainy_. It would be as reasonable to identify him with
Dekker, who wrote the greater part of _Satiro-mastix_. 'Mastic' is
doubtless an adjective formed without recondite significance from the
substantive 'mastic,' _i.e._ the gum commonly used at the time for
stopping decayed teeth. No hypothesis of a polemical intention is needed
to account for Shakespeare's conception of Ajax or Thersites. There is
no tra