The Implanting Of Marston's Obsession With The 'scourge' Of Satire

By Author: jocelyn
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This was an attempt, already in part established by the implanting of Marston's obsession with the 'scourge' of satire in the pastiche evidence that Crispinus vomits up, to ward off future assault. The 'Poetomachia' did not of course end here, and accusations of libel, scandal and envy continued to be traded. There was no court of literary authority of the kind envisaged in the play, and the haphazard application of the laws of seditious libel was not up to the Roman standards of Jonson's fantasy. Dekker (probably with Marston's help) returned the favour with precisely the kind of metaphorical whipping Jonson had tried to prevent, in Satiromastix: or the Untrussing of the Humorous Poet (1602). Dekker's play picks up and inverts many of the motifs of Jonson's. Crispinus and Demetrius gravely reprove Horace for the arrogance and officiousness of his self-appointed satiric pose. They 'come like your Phisitions, to Omega Replica Watches purge your sicke and daungerous minde of her disease'. Tucca is even more offended, and a cowering Horace offers to ...
... 'quaffe downe, the poyson'd Inke, in which I dipt your name'. In the last scene Horace is brought before the King, to be judged and sentenced by Crispinus, in a direct inversion of Jonson's arraignment:

This was not all. In the anonymous Second Part of the Return from Pernassus, the clown from Shakespeare's company, Will Kempe, speaks to Richard Burbage of the quarrel as if Shakespeare had been drawn into it: 'O that Ben lonson is a pestilent fellow, he brought up Horace giving the Poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare hath giuen him a purge that made him bewray his credit'. In response to these return attacks, Jonson included an 'apologetical dialogue' in his Folio Works. The 'author' is found in his study, displaying the same high-minded contempt for Replica Omega Seamaster libels as Horace in the play, but with a darker, Juvenalian bitterness, reminding the world that he could, like Archilochus, 'write iambics Should make the desperate lashers hang themselves'. But this was merely an answer to a libel by way of refusal to answer, a confession of the failure of satire to do its work. As it turned out, Jonson was soon enough reconciled to Marston to co-author (with additional help from George Chapman) Eastward Hoe (1604), a play which Pope owned. That play landed Jonson back in jail for sedition; nonetheless he would, eventually, become a court figure, responsible for court iconography, part of Pope's inherited mythology of divine kingship. Pope's own Queen was dead and the arrival of a foreign king had done nothing for him.

Curll, who had responded to the change of regime by adopting a not wholly convincing loyal pose, did not personally respond to the vomit episode in writing until much later, when he stated, in terms oddly reminiscent of the Jonsonian quarrel, 'I then despised the Action, and have since, in another manner, sufficiently Purged the Author of it'. The 'manner' of this purgation of Pope consisted of stepping up the publication of unauthorised items and direct attacks on his work, in more or less the way envisaged in Pope's pamphlet attacks on Curll. From 5 April 1716 onwards Curll routinely advertised the Court Poems as Pope's. Writers of the Oldmixon persuasion treated Pope's Iliad instalments as 'Mr. Pope's Popish Translation' that is, covert Jacobite propaganda, to be associated with the captured Preston rebels. A relatively innocuous poem of Pope's about the quack John Moore and his worming remedy seemed to Curll worth noisy publication (1 May) in the context of his recent quasi-medical experience. On 31 May The Catholick Poet, or Protestant Barnaby's Lamentation, a broadsheet travesty reconfiguring Pope's less than sympathetic portrait of his own bookseller (Bernard Lintot) as 'Barnaby' (his actual second name), weeping over the low revenue of the 'hunch-back'd Papist' Pope's Iliad translation. On the same day Curll issued Dennis's A True Character of Mr. Pope and his Writings, with its vengeful focus on Pope's symbolic physique.