ABSTRACT
But hist! with him, crabbed Websterio, The playwright-cartwright (whether either!). Ho! No further. Look as you'd be looked into; Sit as ye would be read. Lord! who would know him? Was ever man so mangled with a poem? See how he draws his mouth awry of late, How he scrubs, wrings his wrists, scratches his pate. A midwife, help! By his brain's coitus Some centaur strange, some huge Bucephalus, Or Pallas, sure, engendered in his brain, Strike Vulcan, with thy hammer once again. This is the critic that of all the rest I'd not have view me, yet I fear him least. Here's not a word cursively I have writ But he'll industriously examine it, And in some twelve months hence, or thereabout, Set in a shameful sheet my errors out. But what care I? It will be so obscure That none shall understand him I am sure.(l)
1 For Webster's differences with the lawyers at Lincoln's Inn, see M.C. Bradbrook's 'John Webster' (1980), pp. 167-9.
