With regard to the "Poetaster," it is now generally admitted that there is no evidence to support the assertion that, at the time this satirical play was written, its author was on bad terms with Shakespeare. In it Jonson announced his next production to be a tragedy, and in 1603 "Sejanus" followed at the Globe; Shakespeare was in the cast, and may have been also a collaborator. But the failure of this tragedy to please the patrons of the Globe may have led to a temporary estrangement from that theatre, for Jonson did not undervalue himself or forget that Chapman, as Mr. Acheson has clearly shown, was always a bitter opponent of Shakespeare, while it was characteristic of Jonson himself to be equally ready to defend or to quarrel with friends. Now in the "Poetaster" Jonson refers to Chapman and to his "divine" Homer, as, for instance, when he makes the father of Ovid say: "Ay, your god of poets there, whom all of you admire and reverence so much, Homer, he whose worm-eaten statue must not be spewed against but with hallowed lips and grovelling adoration, what was he? What was he?... You'll tell me his name shall live; and that, now being dead, his works have eternized him and made him divine" (Act I., Scene 1.) Again, the incident of the gods' banquet, although it is modelled by Ben Jonson upon the synod of the Iliad, is obviously a satire upon Chapman's ecstatic admiration for Homer's heroes. It may also refer to Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida," for if this comedy was acted in 1598 it might well have been suppressed after its first performance, since to the groundlings it must have been "caviare," and to Chapman's allies, the scholars, a malicious piece of "ignorance and impiety," while the Court would have been sure to take offence at the Essex incidents. Besides Jonson, in the "Poetaster," seems to be defending someone from attacks who has dared to laugh at Chapman's idol. This appears in such witty expressions as "Gods may grow impudent in iniquity, and they must not be told of it" ... "So now we may play the fool by authority" ... "What, shall the king of gods turn the king of good fellows, and have no fellow in wickedness? This makes our poets that know our profaneness live as profane as we" (Act IV., Scene 3.) Continually in this play is Jonson attacking Chapman for the same reason that Shakespeare did, and, more than this, Jonson proclaims that the poet Virgil is as much entitled to be regarded "divine" as Homer, while the word "divine" is seized hold of for further satire in the remark, "Well said, my divine deft Horace."