That this promising young man, “when he came to London, spoke the Warwickshire dialect or patois is, then, as certain as anything can be that is incapable of mathematical proof.” {17d} “Here is the young Warwickshire provincial . . . " {17e} producing, apparently five or six years after his arrival in town, Venus and Adonis . . .  “Is it conceivable that this was the work of the Stratford Player of whom we know so little, but of whom we know so much too much?  If so we have here a veritable sixteenth-century miracle.” {17f} Moreover, “our great supposed poet and dramatist had at his death neither book nor manuscript in his possession, or to which he was legally entitled, or in which he had any interest whatever.” {17g}

If it be not conceivable now that the rustic speaking in a patois could write Venus and Adonis, manifestly it was inconceivable in 1593, when Venus and Adonis was signed “William Shakespeare.”  No man who knew the actor (as described) could believe that he was the author, but there does not exist the most shadowy hint proving that the faintest doubt was thrown on the actor’s authorship; ignorant as he was, bookless, and rude of speech.  For such a Will as Mr. Greenwood describes to persuade the literary and dramatic world of his age that he did write the plays, would have been a miracle.  Consequently Mr. Greenwood has to try to persuade us that there is no sufficient evidence that Will did persuade, say Ben Jonson, of his authorship and we shall see whether or not he works this twentieth-century miracle of persuasion.

Of course if Will were unable to write even his name, as an enthusiastic Baconian asserts, Mr. Greenwood sees that Will could not easily pass for the Author. {18a} But his own bookless actor with a patois seems to him, as author of Venus and Adonis, almost inconceivable.  Yet, despite Will’s bookless rusticity, this poem with Lucrece, which displays knowledge of a work of Ovid not translated into English by 1593, was regarded as his own.  I must suppose, therefore, that Will was not manifestly so ignorant of Latin as Mr. Greenwood thinks.  “I think it highly probable,” says this critic, “that he attended the Grammar School at Stratford” (where nothing but Latin was taught) “for four or five years, and that, later in life, after some years in London, he was probably able to ‘bumbast out a line,’ and perhaps to pose as ’Poet-Ape that would be thought our chief.’  Nay, I am not at all sure that he would not have been capable of collaborating with such a man as George Wilkins, and perhaps of writing quite as well as he, if not even better.  But it does not follow from this that he was the author either of Venus and Adonis or of Hamlet.” {19a}

Nothing follows from all this:  we merely see that, in Mr. Greenwood’s private opinion, the actor might write even better than George Wilkins, but could not write Venus and Adonis.  Will, therefore, though bookless, is not debarred here from the pursuits of literature, in partnership with Wilkins.  We have merely the critic’s opinion that Will could not write Hamlet, even if, like Wordsworth, “he had the mind,” even if the gods had made him more poetical than Wilkins.