ove whole fields of corn and highest woods."

_Histriomastix_--

"Whose glory which thy solid virtues won
Shall honour Europe while there shines a sun."

_Poem to Harriot_--

"When thy true wisdom by thy learning won
Shall honour learning while there shines a sun."

Chapman in several instances in this play echoes Greene's slurs against
Shakespeare and, in the same manner as Peele in the _Honour of the
Garter_, repeats the actual phrases and epithets used by Greene and
Nashe.

_Histriomastix_--

"I scorn a scoffing fool about my throne--
An artless idiot (that like AEsop's daw
Plumes fairer feathered birds)."

These lines evince Chapman's knowledge of Nashe's phrase "idiot
art-master," and of Greene's "upstart crow beautified with our
feathers," and clearly pertain to the play in its earlier form (1593)
when Greene's _Groatsworth of Wit_ (published late in 1592) was still a
new publication. In fact, it is not improbable that Nashe collaborated
with Chapman in the early form of this play.

Again when Chapman writes the following lines:

_Histriomastix_--

"O age, when every Scriveners boy shall dippe
Profaning quills into Thessalies spring;
When every artist prentice that hath read
The pleasant pantry of conceipts shall dare
To write as confident as Hercules;
When every ballad-monger boldly writes," etc.

It is apparent that he again echoes Nashe's and Greene's attacks upon
Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd, all of which, however, he appears to have
thought (as have later critics) were directed against Shakespeare.

The lines quoted above evidently reflect Chapman's knowledge of Nashe's
preface to Greene's _Menaphon_ in the expressions "Scriveners boy,"
"artist prentice," and "ballad-monger," while the words

"shall dippe
Profaning quills into Thessalies spring"

refer to Shakespeare's _Venus and Adonis_, and the lines from Ovid with
which he heads that poem.

In 1593 when, as I have indicated, _Histriomastix_ in its early form was
written, Shakespeare had published _Venus and Adonis_ and dedicated it
to the Earl of Southampton. In the composition of this poem Shakespeare
undoubtedly worked from Arthur Golding's translation of Ovid's
_Metamorphoses_. He prefixed to the poem two lines from Ovid's fifteenth
Elegy:

"Vilia miretur vulgus; mihi flavus Apollo
Pocula Castalia plena ministret a