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Shakespeare's Portrait of Ajax in Troilus and Cressida
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
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- Comment and Criticism
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1948
References
1 A Chronicle History of the Life and Work of William Shakespeare (London, 1886), pp. 45-6, 221; A Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama 1559-1642 (London, 1891), I, 366; ii, 189. Cf. R. A. Small, The Stage-Quarrel between Ben Jonson and the So-called Poetasters (Breslau, 1899), supporting Fleay. See also J. H. Penniman, The War of the Theatres (Boston, 1897) and Penniman, ed., Poetaster, etc., Belles-lettres Series (Boston, 1913).
2 J. Q. Adams, A Life of William Shakespeare (Boston, 1923), p. 353.
3 ?. B. Paradise (New Haven, 1927), pp. 172-3.
4 “The Siege of Troy in Elizabethan Literature, expecially in Shakespeare and Heywood”, PMLA, xxx (1915), 726-34. Tatlock's arguments will be considered below. 5 W. D. Macray, ed. (Oxford, 1886), II. 1809-13.
6 Edward Arber, ed., English Scholar's Library, No. 6 (London, 1879), pp. ix-xii. Cf. ?. ?. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford, 1923), iv, 39.
7 Poetaster, ed. H. S. Mallory, Yale Studies in English, No. xxvii (New York, 1905), p. xxx.
8 Cf. Chambers, William Shakespeare (Oxford, 1930), i, 72.
9 Return, II. 1261, 1320, 1435; II Return, 11. 876, 946, 1235, 1530, 1812.
10 Nashe, in 1596, uses “beray” and “Ajax” together in his attack on Gabriel Harvey, Have with yov to Sajfron-walden, giving “the picture” of his enemy “as hee is readie to let fly vpon Aiax”, for the benefit of readers “so disposed to take a view of him… with his gowne cast off, vntrussing, and readie to beray himselfe, vpon the newes of the going in hand of my booke.” Works, ed. R. B. McKerrow (London, 1905), in, 38; cf. ibid., m, 11, “… the most contemptible Mounsier Aiaxes of excrementall conceipts.…” Cf. Sir John Harington, Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596), Ulysses upon Ajax (1596), Anatomy of the Metamor-phosed Ajax (1596), etc. In Troilus, cf. iii. iii. 244; and ii. i. 70, 79,120; ii, iii. 275; iii. iii. 235. Cf. also LLL. v. ii. 581. In the dialogue of Troilus, the name Ajax occurs forty-five times; is it fanciful to imagine an Elizabethan audience smiling when the word Ajax, pronounced A-jakes, was heard? References are to the Globe Shakespeare.
11 Poetaster, ed. Herford and Simpson (Oxford, 1932), iii. iv. 278-84, 295-306, 354. According to T. W. Baldwin, The Organization and Personnel of the Shakespearean Company (Princeton, 1927), pp. 232-3 n., Jonson here alludes to the principal actors of the Chamberlain's company. It is certain that these are Chamberlain's men since Histrio, their representative, is addressed in Poetaster as follows: “… and you stage me,… your mansions shall sweat for't,… varlets, your Globes,…” (iii. iv. 199-201).
12 Lines 81-127. Cf. Herford and Simpson, i, 417; iv, 193, and Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, ta, 365-6. If, in 11.141-52 of the “Dialogue”, Shakespeare is to be found among the “better natures, by the rest so drawne / To run in that vile line”, we possibly have Jonson's own word that Shakespeare retaliated against him for the attack on the players in Poetaster.
13 Alexander, “ Troilus and Cressida,' 1609”, The Library, 4th Ser., ix (1929), 277-9; Campbell, Ccmicall Satyre and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida (San Marino, 1938), pp. 191-3.
14 Op. cit., p. 734.
15 Ben Jottson, ed. Herford and Simpson, i, 151.
16 Ibid., i, 139,140.
17 Lines 1678-79, ed. Hans Scherer, Materialen, Bd. 20 (Louvain, 1907).
18 On Jonson's valor, see, in addition to Drummond above, Poetaster, iv. vii. 17-8, and Satiromastix, 11.1668-69; for Jonson's churlishness, no evidence is lacking; and Ajax's slowness, likened by Shakespeare to that of the elephant, was a stock charge against Jonson's sluggish muse. Thersites, in ii, iii, 2-3, calls Ajax “the elephant Ajax.” It is noteworthy that in Jasper Mayne's lines “To the Memory of Ben Jonson”, in Jonsonus Virbius, 1638, p. 30 (cited in Herford and Simpson, i, 186), the elephant comparison appears again :
Scorne then their censures, who gav't out, thy Will
As long upon a Comosdie did sit
As Elephants bring forth;
Cf. 77 Return (11. 300-1), and the Apologetical Dialogue to Poetaster (11. 193-4), where Jonson admits the charge. Cf. also the tradition, reported in Fuller's Worthies, that Jonson, in wit-combats with Shakespeare, was “Slow in his performances.”
19 Jonson's unmistakable tagline to the audience, of course. Fleay, Chronicle History, pp. 45-6, points out that “the character of Ajax… hits off Jonson exactly, and is a good-humoured reply to Jonson's self-estimate as Crites in Cynthia's Revels (ii. 1), ? creature of a most divine temper, one in whom the elements and humours are peaceably met,' &c.”
20 Cf. Drummond, “he is passionately kynde and angry”, op. cit., i, 151.
21 i, ii. 19-31.
22 For an ample list of supposed allusions to Shakespeare's works in Jonson, see H. P. Stokes, An Attempt to Determine the Chronological Order of Shakespeare's Plays (London, 1878), pp. 177-8.
28 Dekker echoes this remark in his preface to Satiromastix: “… if his [Jonson's] Criti-call Lynx had with as narrow eyes, obseru'd in himselfe, as it did little spots vpon others…” Among other passages in Troilus which may have a bearing upon Jonson are the following: (1) ii. iii. 246-50, mentioning Ajax's pride, covetousness of praise, surliness, and eccentricity; (2) ii. iii. 252-4, where “She that gave thee suck” may be Jonson's famous stoic mother, “thy tutor”, Camden, and “thy parts of nature / Thrice-famed beyond, all erudition”, Jonson's self-vaunted learning, without benefit of university; (3) II. iii. 227-30, where a patent theatrical allusion occurs. It is worth noting that Tucca in Poetaster speaks of members of the Chamberlain's company as shareholders. Adams (Life, p. 282) points out that, according to the original organization of the “housekeepers” of the Globe, there were to be ten shares in the stock company. Ulysses, then, is contradicting Nestor: Ajax would bear not only half, but all the pride; and (4) ii. i. 18-9 Ajax's inability to read a proclamation, and the reference to prayer without book, may be a sly glance at Jonson's reading to save bis neck from the hangman, which is alluded to in Satiromastix (11. 383-4), “Thou… readst as leageably as some that haue bin sau'd by their neck-verse.” It is significant that the faults for which Jonson is satirized in Satiromastix (1601), where there is no doubt about his identity, include those for which he is ridiculed in Troilus.