As for Mr. Greenwood, he says that in Ben’s sentence about the players and their ignorant commendation, “we have it on Jonson’s testimony that the players looked upon William Shakspere the actor as the author of the plays and praised him for never blotting out a line.”  We have it, and how is the critic to get over or round the fact?  Thus, “We know that this statement” (about the almost blotless lines) “is ridiculous; that if the players had any unblotted manuscripts in their hands (which is by no means probable) they were merely fair copies . . . "

Perhaps, but the Baconians appear to assume that a “fair copy” is not, and cannot be, a copy in the handwriting of the author.

As I have said before, the Players knew Will’s handwriting, if he could write.  If they received his copy in a hand not his own, and were not idiots, they could not praise him and his unerring speed and accuracy in penning his thoughts.  If, on the other hand, Will could not write, in their long friendship with Will, the Players must have known the fact, and could not possibly believe, as they certainly did, “on Jonson’s testimony” in his authorship.

To finish Mr. Greenwood’s observations, “if they” (the players) “really thought that the author of the plays wrote them off currente calamo, and never” (or “hardly ever”) “blotted a line, never revised, never made any alterations, they knew nothing whatever concerning the real Shakespeare.” {258a}

Nothing whatever?  What they did not know was merely that Will gave them fair copies in his own hand, as, before the typewriting machine was invented, authors were wont to do.  Within the last fortnight I heard the error attributed to the players made by an English scholar who is foremost in his own field of learning.  He and I were looking at some of Dickens’s MSS.  They were full of erasions and corrections.  I said, “How unlike Scott!” whose first draft of his novels exactly answered to the players’ description of Will’s “copy.”  My friend said, “Browning scarcely made an erasion or change in writing his poems,” and referred to Mr. Browning’s MSS. for the press, of which examples were lying near us.  “But Browning must have made clean copies for the press,” I said:  which was as new an idea to my learned friend as it was undreamed of by the Players:- if what they received from him were his clean copies.

The Players’ testimony, through Jonson, cannot be destroyed by the “easy stratagem” of Mr. Greenwood.

Mr. Greenwood now nearly falls back on Bacon, though he constantly professes that he “is not the advocate of Bacon’s authorship.”  The author was some great man, as like Bacon as one pea to another.  Mr. Greenwood says that Jonson looked on the issue of the First Folio {259a} “as a very special occasion.”  Well, it was a very special occasion; no literary occasion could be more “special.”  Without the Folio, badly as it is executed, we should perhaps never have had many of Shakespeare’s plays.  The occasion was special in the highest degree.