[NPM] today's poem

[angevin2]

On Poet-Ape
Ben JonsonPoor Poet-Ape, that would be thought our chief

Comments

[lnhammer]

Heh.

Do we know/suspect who this was aimed at?

---L.

[angevin2]

There's a tradition that it's Shakespeare, largely because the poem is similar to what Robert Greene says about him in Greene's Groatsworth of Wit, but it's not in keeping with everything else Jonson said about Shakespeare, both in his published work and in his ostensibly private conversation with William Drummond (which Drummond wrote down). Drummond records Jonson as being a bit snarky about Shakespeare, but he doesn't accuse him of plagiarism, which is the sin committed by the poem's target -- Jonson's critiques of Shakespeare tend to take him to task for sloppiness, silly plots, and factual inaccuracy, not plagiarism

[lnhammer]

I was wondering, given the disconnect between Drummond's account and Greene's little barbs, whether anyone had tried pinning it on Will regardless.

I also wonder whether there's a version of this in Martial's works.

---L.

[eglantine_br]

I always suspected that Jonson was saying it about Greene!

Their ideas about plagiarism were a little looser than ours-- but they sure knew how to hurt feelings.

[angevin2]

Greene was too dead to be the target of this poem, though -- he'd died in 1592, well before Jonson's career got started.

[eglantine_br]

Oh, duh. I sort of knew that. They had a big die off in the 90s. And Ben Jonson was younger-- the next cohort, really.

You know, reading it again it might well be WS. He did have a way of picking up things that others dropped. (Like Kyd's Hamlet?) And when he did well with them, and made money, it was enough to make anyone want to gnash teeth.

Thank you for speaking up to straighten my facts out.