If so, the play must show the hands of three, not two, men, Dekker, Chettle, and “Shakespeare,” the Great Unknown, or Bacon.  He collaborates with Dekker and Chettle, in a play for Lord Nottingham’s men (according to Sir Sidney Lee), {300a} but it is, later at least, played by Shakespeare’s company; and perhaps Bacon gets none of the 4 pounds paid {300b} to Dekker and Chettle.  Henslowe does not record his sale of the Dekker and Chettle play to Shakespeare’s or to any company or purchaser.  Without an entry of the careful Henslowe recording his receipts for the sale of the Dekker and Chettle play to any purchaser, it is not easy to see how Shakespeare’s company procured the manuscript, and thus enabled him to refashion it.  Perhaps no reader will fail to recognise his hand in the beautiful blank verse of many passages.  I am not familiar enough with the works of Dekker and Chettle to assign to them the less desirable passages.  Thersites is beastly:  a Yahoo of Swift’s might poison with such phrases as his the name and nature of love, loyalty, and military courage.  But whatsoever Shakespeare did, he did thoroughly, and if he were weary, if man delighted him not, nor woman either, he may have written the whole piece, in which love perishes for the whim of “a daughter of the game,” and the knightly Hector is butchered to sate the vanity of his cowardly Achilles.  If Shakespeare read the books translated by Chapman, he must have read them in the same spirit as Keats, and was likely to find that the poetry of the Achaean could not be combined with the Ionian, Athenian, and Roman perversions, as he knew them in the mediaeval books of Troy, in the English of Lydgate and Caxton.  The chivalrous example of Chaucer he did not follow.  Probably Will looked on the play as one of his failures.  The Editor, if we can speak of an Editor, of the Folio clearly thrust the play in late, so confusedly that it is not paged, and is not mentioned in the table of the contents.

“The Grand Possessors” of the play referred to in the Preface to one of the two quartos of 1609 we may suppose to be Shakespeare’s Company.  In this case the owners would not permit the publication of the play if they could prevent it.  The title provokes Mr. Greenwood to say, “Why these worthies should be so styled is not apparent; indeed the supposition seems not a little ridiculous.” {301a} Of course, if the players were the possessors, “grand” is merely a jeer, by a person advertising a successful piracy.  And in regard to Tieck’s conjecture that James I is alluded to as “the grand possessor, for whom the play was expressly written,” {301b} the autocratic James was very capable of protecting himself against larcenous publishers.

APPENDIX II—­CHETTLE’S SUPPOSED ALLUSION TO WILL SHAKSPERE