Ben Jonson successfully persuaded the centuries which followed that Shakespeare had many virtues but that classical learning was not among them. Jonson's poem of commendation, prefixed to the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays, is a psychologically tormented affair, masquerading, as is usual with Jonson, as bluff benevolence. The opening words splinter as we read them.

‘Envy’ here bears the old sense, ‘ill will’, ‘hostility’. Before he has got under way Jonson hastens to reassure us: ‘I am not hoping to sow the seeds of hostility here.’ It is a strange way to begin, so strange as to provoke at once a shrewd unbelief in the reader. The words instantly become an inadvertent occupatio – that figure of rhetoric in which the speaker negates or denies things which he knows will nevertheless lodge in the hearer's mind (‘I shall pass over the fact that my honourable friend has been stealing from central funds for years’). So here we think, ‘Hah, so there is a case for hostility is there?’ But Jonson is not in clear command of this effect. Within a few lines he is eagerly distancing himself from those who ‘pretend’ praise and ‘think to ruin, where it seemed to raise’ (11–12). The impression somehow grows stronger with each denial that something in Jonson wishes to do exactly this.