He also falsely criticized several plays, especially ''Julius Caesar. The obvious answer is envy, and resentment of the only poet and playwright he knew to be his superior. Yet in February -- with Shakespeare still living! Did this lessen Jonson's envy of his rival? No, the passage declaring his love of Shakespeare continues with an attack: ''Many times he fell into those things could not escape laughter,'' Jonson wrote, ''as when he said in the person of Caesar, one speaking to him, 'Caesar, thou dost me wrong'; he replied: 'Caesar never did wrong but with just cause'; and suchlike, which were ridiculous.
With no way of checking not that he would have , he cites lines he thought he heard in performance. He was wrong. The short scene he was describing occurs just before the conspirators stab Caesar, when Metellus Cimber grovels on his knees, begging Caesar to lift his brother's banishment. Nowhere does Metellus say, ''Thou dost me wrong,'' as Jonson claims. His version of the lines makes no sense. Of course he loathed the play, which was a smash hit, while his own Roman play, ''Sejanus, His Fall,'' was a flop.
In Shakespeare had given him a much-needed helping hand with ''Every Man in His Humour,'' his first theatrical success, when he was Not only did the Globe produce it, but Shakespeare was in the cast. Jonson should have loved him and no doubt did, in his all-too-human and contradictory way.
The vicar of the Stratford church, John Ward, wrote that the trio of poets -- Ben Jonson, Michael Drayton and Shakespeare -- met in April for ''a merry meeting and it seems drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted. Of course we shall never know.
Jonson is the unanswerable argument against idiotic beliefs that Shakespeare's plays were written by somebody else, like the Earl of Oxford who died in , before ''Lear'' and ''The Tempest'' were written. In his essay ''Morose Ben Jonson,'' Edmund Wilson calls him ''anal erotic'' and traces his lifelong resentment to ''two sources -- first, the grievance of the man of good birth unjustly deprived of his patrimony; second, the sulky resentment of the man who can only withhold, against the man who can freely lavish'' -- meaning Shakespeare.
