The Figure Of Crispinus Has Been Recognised As A Caricature Of John Marston

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The figure of Crispinus has long been recognised as not merely a classic straw man, the low-grade poet, but (in part at least) a caricature of John Marston; the 'evidence' read out against him is a patchwork by Jonson of the worst excesses of Marston's neologisms and bombast, just as the words attributed to Demetrius Fannius are a travesty of Thomas Dekker's plainness, rendered as banality. Jonson admitted to William Drummond that 'he had many quarrells with Marston beat him and took his Pistol from him, wrote his Poetaster on him the beginning of them was that Marston represented him in the stage'. Marston 'staged' Jonson in a plays such AS Jack Drum's Entertainment (1600) and what you Will (1601); Poetaster was written in Replica Breitling prophylactic urgency against the threat of being staged as 'Horace'. While the defensive handling of the Horace figure acts to portray Jonson as nobly aloof, immune to detraction, loyal to a virtuous prince and to the court of true poets, the highest comic moment of the play settles a personal score in a much ...
... more direct fashion.

The motif of the vomiting poetaster does not actually derive from Horace; Jonson has borrowed it from Lexiphanes, a dialogue by Lucian. The dandy Lexiphanes insists on reading out his own most recent book, stuffed with neologisms and verbosity, to Lycinus, who is rescued by a physician who drugs Lexiphanes; with the help of some fingers down the throat, the lexicon of bombast is vomited up. Pope knew this story from another source. In 1697 Richard Bentley denounced the Epistles of Phalaris as a late forgery, citing Lexiphanes as one (amongst many thousand) sources of evidence. In their response, the High Church wits (principally Francis Atterbury), reminded the scholar of the virtues of plain style and Breitling Replica Watches the avoidance of jargon: 'Lexiphanes is the Name of a Famous Pedant, fond of Hard Words, and Affected Expressions. Lucian, in a Dialogue of his, gives a Vomit to him, and brings 'em all up, one after another! They recommend it as a regimen: 'If he would read it often, take the good Advice that Lucian gives there, of Sacrificing to the Graces, and to Perspicuity... and suffer some Skilful Friend to administer to him the Emetic Draught there prescrib'd, it would do him a World of Service: by the help of this Physick, and these Directions, well pursu'd, he might in time become a Sound Man agen, and speak and write like the rest of his Neighbors.'

Pope was very close to Atterbury and would continue the assault on Bentleian scholarship, not least because of the textual innovations of Bentley's edition of Horace (1711). Pope also owned Certain Select Dialogues of Lucian (1663) and Part of Lucian Made English (1664), and though Lexiphanes is not among the dialogues translated there it is mentioned in the 'Epistle Dedicatorie' to the latter work.