Shakespeare played one of the parts. Then Jonson fell out with his fellow
actors, and wrote _The Poetaster_ (acted by a rival company) to
ridicule them and their work. Shakespeare was silent, but the cudgels were
taken up by Marston and Dekker, the latter of whom wrote, among other and
better plays, _Satiromastix_, which was played by Shakespeare's
company as a counter attack on Jonson.

[Illustration: BEN JONSON]

The value of Jonson's plays is that they give us vivid pictures of
Elizabethan society, its speech, fashions, amusements, such as no other
dramatist has drawn. Shakespeare pictures men and women as they might be in
any age; but Jonson is content to picture the men and women of London as
they appeared superficially in the year 1600. His chief comedies, which
satirize the shams of his age, are: _Volpone, or the Fox_, a merciless
exposure of greed and avarice; _The Alchemist_, a study of quackery as
it was practiced in Elizabethan days; _Bartholomew Fair_, a riot of
folly; and _Epicoene, or the Silent Woman_, which would now be called
a roaring farce. His chief tragedies are _Sejanus_ and
_Catiline_.

In later life Jonson was appointed poet laureate, and wrote many masques,
such as the _Masque of Beauty_ and the unfinished _Sad Shepherd_.
These and a few lyrics, such as the "Triumph of Charis" and the song
beginning, "Drink to me only with thine eyes," are the pleasantest of
Jonson's works. At the end he abandoned the drama, as Shakespeare had done,
and lashed it as severely as any Puritan in the ode beginning, "Come leave
the loathed stage."

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