However, Pickleherring might be wrong to say so. I confess that I never liked either Mr Ben Jonson or his inky plays. Shall I just say that we boiled at different temperatures, before leaving the subject?
In any case, the sharpest mocking of Shakespeare was done not by Jonson but by John Marston in his Histrio-Mastix or The Player Whipt. (Yes, madam, it is the same name as that pamphlet of Prynne's which I gave you in the last chapter, but believe me that does not mean I am making all this up! If this were fiction, I could change the name, so that there would be no possibility of confusion. But real life is like this, full of meaningless coincidence. Consider the other Reynoldses in my narrative ...)
Marston was no albino giant. He had red hair and short legs, and in due course he gave up poetry to become a priest. But in his unregenerate days he had much fun at Mr S's expense with his character called Post Haste.
Post Haste is a playwright in a hurry. He is hasty, he is muddled, and he has to turn out play after play for his company. He is always eager to offer his services to the Truly Great, and glad to give a performance in exchange for a good dinner and a night's sleep in a swansdown bed at any Lordship's house. His repertoire parodies that passage in Hamlet where Polonius lists the accomplishments of the itinerant players:
The Lascivious Knight and Lady Nature
The Devil and Dives (a comedy)
A Russet Coat and a Knave's Cap (an infernal)
A Proud Heart and a Beggar's Purse (a pastoral)
The Widow's Apron Strings (a nocturnal)
Mother Gurton's Needle (a tragedy)
What's more, like Mr Shakespeare, Post Haste always has in hand a new play, a piece which he is just finishing, something never yet seen but which he intends to stage without delay.
When Post Haste appears on stage his companions bow low. They count on his talents for their cakes and ale. He consents to give the actors a foretaste of his latest work, The Prodigal Son, but his voice is so broken by sobs that he can't go on reading. Nothing daunted, he declares that he is equal to improvising a prologue appropriate to every occasion. Post Haste, in fact, has up his sleeve a Universal Prologue and a Universal Epilogue.
Here is the Universal Prologue:
Lords, we are here to show you what we are;
Lords, we are here although our clothes be bare.
Instead of flowers in season
Ye shall gather Rime and Reason.
And this is the Universal Epilogue:
The glass is run, our play is done:
Hence: Time doth call; we thank you all.
However, what Post Haste has in hand for this particular occasion is a play on the subject of Troilus and Cressida, and in case anyone should so far have missed the object of the lampoon, when we get to Cressida bestowing her colours on her champion we have Troilus hammering home a pun on Shakespeare's name:
When he shakes a furious spear
The foe in shivery fearful sort
May lay him down in death to snort.
I think this is quite enough to show that Marston certainly had it here in mind to mock both our hero's character and his more perfunctory dramatic procedures. The satire is not without bite, and the feeling of it may even have a touch of affection. Shakespeare's portrait in the person of Post Haste does bear some resemblance to the man I knew.
Talking of which, and since it was at this point in his life's fame that I first met him, let me explain how it happened that Mr Shakespeare was in Cambridge rather than London that day when I jumped off the wall for him in 1596. The Puritans amongst the magistrates of the city of London had just at that time managed to get an order forbidding all plays in the city and its suburbs, on the pretext that large assemblies would create a public danger by increasing the risk of infection with the plague. That there was in that year no plague in London, or anywhere near London, did not deter them. But then in my definition a Puritan is one who objects to bull and bear baiting, not in pity for bull or bear, but in aversion to and envy at the pleasure of the spectators. In a word, a KILL-JOY.
The ban did not last long, yet it was a presage of things to come, when under Cromwell the same spirit triumphed, shutting down every playhouse in the country.
Still, I am grateful to those kill-joys for what they did in the summer of my thirteenth year. Without their mean antics, the Lord Chamberlain's Servants would never have been touring the provinces, their shoes full of gravel and their old, blind nag laden down with baskets full of costumes, and I would never have met Post Haste and become a player myself. In which case, I suppose, it is unlikely that I would now be sitting in the attic of a Southwark brothel, munching pickled mulberries and watching the moon rise over the roofs of the stews. She makes these roofs silver. I wonder how anything can be so white, so perfectly white.
Chapter Eighty-Two Pickleherring's poem
Last night I dreamt that I was an urchin and Polly was a waif. We were the same age, the two of us, younger than she is now, and we came in together off the street hand-in-hand to present ourselves to Pompey Bum and Lucy Negro.
'Whose house is this?' I asked them.
'It belongs to her,' said Pompey Bum. 'Her name is Madam Mitigation.'
Polly jumped up and down. She was wearing a short white dress, and a ribbon of white velvet in her hair. 'Goody! Goody!' she cried. 'You buy children, don't you?'
They smiled and nodded, nodded and smiled, but Lucy Negro was holding a long whip. 'We do,' she said.
'Jump up on the table and let's have a look at you,' said Pompey Bum.
So Polly and I climbed up on the table in my dream. But I was frightened. 'Why do you buy children?' I enquired.
'For love,' said Lucy Negro.
She was pinching and stroking my calf.
Pompey Bum spread wide his pale-pink hands. He looked like a pork butcher. 'That's right,' he said. 'For love. What else?'
Polly pouted. 'Will we have to work?' she asked suspiciously.
'You will work for love, my moppet,' said Lucy Negro.
I didn't like the sound of this, though it seemed not to displease Polly. She gave a twirl where she stood, beside me on the table top, showing the adults her bottom. She was not wearing drawers.
'Do you have a lot of love then?' she asked them, giggling.
'My house is made of love,' said Lucy Negro.
She cracked her whip as she said this. I was scared. But Polly jumped up and down and clapped her hands together. 'Oh, how soon can we have some?' she cried out.
Lucy Negro cracked the whip again, but it was Pompey's fat hand that slapped pretty Polly's impertinent arse. 'Stand still when you're up for sale!' the whoremaster commanded. 'I can't abide a kid that keeps jigging about before the price is settled.'