There is only one adjective in Ben Jonson’s lines to the Reader of the First Folio: ‘gentle’ in the phrase ‘gentle Shakespeare’, which has become a byword. What did he mean by that solitary and therefore telling, qualification? Possibly it was no more than a conventional expression of esteem. But the tribe of Ben liked obituaries in which a keyword characterized both the man and his style. When he himself was commemorated in the next decade, Falkland and Duppa called their volume Jonsonus Virbius. ‘Virbius’ is, to be sure, as unusual as ‘gentle’ is usual; but they were dealing with a learned poet, and had to find a correspondingly learned word; and they used it to imply at once his learning, his two-man-size physique, and his literary ideal of chastity (of which the address To the Reader, refusing all adjectives but one, is an example). I believe that in the same comprehensive manner Jonson intended ‘gentle’ to recall Shakespeare’s struggle to establish his father’s gentle rank; to endorse the grant of the patent by the College of Arms; to recall the civil demeanour with which he attempted to impress his gentility on his acquaintance; and to record how the gentle style had first distinguished his writing from his rivals’, and had remained his most supple strength.

In the Shakespearian tradition, 'gentle' has been detached from the style and has come down to us only as a description of the man, forming that household image in which he appears wise and sympathetic. The purpose of these notes is, unavoidably, to resume some well-known details of biography, but more, to recover the history of an important Shakespearian style and to indicate its charm for an elite audience and its yet greater charm for the general audience. 'Gentle' is certainly associated with style in Jonson's more elaborate ode To the Memory of my Beloved, the Author; in the discovery of Shakespeare's 'brave notions, and gentle expressions'; and in the claim of Heminges and Condell that their dramatist 'as he was a happie imitator of Nature, was a most gentle expresser of it'.