A Chronicle History of the Life and Work of William Shakespeare. Frederick Gard Fleay
It was a common practice to utilise the altered copies of plays acted at Court by allowing their publication. Yet another play acted by the King's men this year was Jonson's Sejanus, for which he was accused of Popery and treason by Northampton. When he published it (2d November 1604, S. R.), he stated that "this book in all numbers is not the same with that which was acted on the public stage; wherein a second pen had good share: in place of which I have rather chosen to put weaker, and no doubt less pleasing of mine own, than to defraud so happy a genius of his right by my loathed usurpation." The only known writers for the King's men at this date were Wilkins, W. S. (? Sly), Shakespeare, and possibly Tourneur. Of these there can be no doubt that Shakespeare is the only one that could have been the second pen alluded to. Not that necessarily he was a coadjutor to Jonson in this play. It is more likely that as he acted one of the principal parts in it he inserted or altered scenes in which he himself appeared. It is clear that "the second pen," whoever he was, objected to his share in the play being published, and no wonder, seeing how its main author had been accused on account of it. This probably explains why the book was kept in the press six months, from November 1604 to April 1605. When it was issued Jonson's Volpone was just coming on the stage, and it is noticeable that Shakespeare did not act in that play, and that immediately after Jonson quitted the King's men and joined Chapman and Marston in writing Eastward Ho for the Revels children, in which Hamlet is ridiculed. All this seems to point to a quarrel between Jonson and Shakespeare, and certainly Jonson's behaviour in the Sejanus matter is not, as Gifford calls it, manly. To drag in unnecessarily an allusion to a friend whose personality must have been known to the public of that time, into an address prefixed to a work accused of Popery and sedition was unmanly; and, as his friend had objected to it, was discreditable. No intercourse can be shown between Shakespeare and Jonson after 1603.
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