Poet Ape

The behaviour and role that the actor Shakespeare played is strongly suggested in two poems, Epigram 56 by Ben Jonson and the last of the three anonymous satirical comedies entitled The Return from Parnassus. Both poems appear to refer to the actor Shakespeare as an ‘ape’ – a ‘mimick ape’ or ‘poet ape’ – thereby strongly echoing Robert Greene's complaint in Greene's Groats-worth of Witte.

The Return from Parnassus comedies were acted during the Christmas revels of 1601-2 by the students of St John’s College, Cambridge. In the third Return from Parnassus there are several lines that appear to refer not only to actors in general but to Shakespeare in particular, since it is Shakespeare who is mentioned so prominently in the play and it is he who had just inherited his father’s heraldic arms and title of esquire when his father died in September 1601 – the actor having made this possible in the first place by purchasing New Place in Stratford-upon-Avon and applying for a coat-of-arms:

But ist not strange this mimick apes should prize
Unhappy Schollers at a hireling rate.
Vile world, that lifts them up to hye degree,
And treades us downe in grovelling misery.
England affordes those glorious vagabonds,
That carried earst their fardels on their backes,
Coursers to ride on through the gazing streetes,
Sooping it in their glaring Satten sutes,
And Pages to attend their maisterships:
With mouthing words that better wits have framed,
They purchase lands, and now Esquires are named.

The Returne from Pernassus or The Scourge of Simony, Pt 2, V, i.
Published by John Wright, printed by G. Eld, London, 1616.

Jonson likewise refers to an actor who apes the poets, and identifies him as one who ‘would be thought our chief’:

Poor Poet Ape, that would be thought our chief,
Whose works are e’en the frippery of wit,
From Brokage is become so bold a thief
As we, the robbed, leave rage and pity it.
At first he made low shifts, would pick and glean,
Buy the reversion of old plays, now grown
To a little wealth, and credit on the scene,
He takes up all, makes each man’s wit his own,
And told of this, he slights it. Tut, such crimes
The sluggish, gaping auditor devours;
He marks not whose ‘twas first, and aftertimes
May judge it to be his, as well as ours.
Fool! as if half-eyes will not know a fleece
From locks of wool, or shreds from the whole piece.

Ben Jonson, ‘On Poet-Ape,’ Epigrams (1616), No 56.

Jonson infers that the poets do have a ‘chief’ – meaning either a poet who is the supreme poet of them all or a poet who is the leader of the group of poets to which Jonson belongs, or most likely both. This makes it very probable that Jonson is satirising the actor Shakespeare, since it would almost certainly have been the author Shakespeare who was the chief of the poets’ Shake-scene mentioned by Greene.

Peter Dawkins, 2006

(See the author's book, The Shakespeare Enigma)

The Francis Bacon Research Trust