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Updated: September 3, 2025
Some fifteen years ago, in a little book on Dryden, I called Kirke White a "miserable poetaster," and was rebuked for it by those who perhaps knew Byron's lines and nothing more. Quite recently Mr. Gosse was rebuked more loudly for a less severe denunciation. I determined that I would read Kirke White again; and the above judgment is the mildest I can possibly pronounce after the reading.
Now, after this wholesale species of poetical massacre, this rifling of old Etruscan tombs of their honourable spoil, a very pleasant ninny would that poetaster stand forth, whose inanely conceited daring exhibited specimens from his own mint, as medals in fit contrast with those slandered "things of base alloy."
Jonson, it is true, tells Drummond that he had written his Poetaster against Marston. Everything points to the figure of Ovid being a mask for Marston. Jonson perhaps chose the name of Ovid for him because he, too, had written Metamorphoses.
It greatly vexed me that, on an occasion when a really talented man read something which was full of true wit, and admirably appropriate to the occasion, all the people yawned, and grew impatient of it; whilst they were charmed and delighted by the marrowless, spiritless trash of a conceited young poetaster.
O Poetaster! That in Milan didst buckle on thy wreath Composed of salad, sausage, and the pepper-caster."
But his vein was rather the result of classical culture working on a slight original talent than anything better, and he did not rise beyond a pleasant competence in verse which was never that of a poetaster, but hardly ever that of a distinct poet. In which respect he may appear here as the representative of no scanty company dead and living.
7: Satiromastix, 1602. 8: Collier's Drama, i. 334. 9: Poetaster. 10: Compare his Dedication in Volpone, of which we shall have more to say. 11: Drummond's Conversations. 12: Of all styles, Jonson liked best to be named 'Honest; and he 'hath ane hundred letters so naming him. Conversations with Drummond. 13: Life of Dryden, p. 265. 14: By Aubrey called 'Jack Young.
In 'The Poetaster, which in 1601 was acted by the children of the Queen's Chapel, Jonson made an attack upon three poets. We hope to be able to prove that the one most bitterly abused, and who is bidden to swallow the 'pill, is no other than Shakspere, whilst the two remaining ones are John Marston and Thomas Dekker.
They also introduce Kempe, the low comedy man of Shakespeare's company, speaking to Burbage, the chief tragic actor, of Shakespeare as a member of their company, who, AS AN AUTHOR OF PLAYS, "puts down" the University wits "and Ben Jonson too." The date is not earlier than that of Ben's satiric play on the poets, The Poetaster , to which reference is made.
As I remember him, he was a kind of half-baked poetaster or he-bulbul, a Johannes Factotum in the province of dilettanteism, a universal Smart Alec who knew less about more things than any other animal in England. He was one of those persistently pestiferous insects tersely called by Carlyle "critic flies" a descendant of that placed by aesop in St. Paul's cupola.
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