Nothing can possibly be more explicit, both as to the actor’s authorship of the plays, and as to the favour in which the two Earls held him.  Mr. Greenwood {110a} supposes that Jonson wrote the Preface, which contains an allusion to a well-known ode of Horace, and to a phrase of Pliny.  Be that as it may, the Preface signed by the two players speaks to Pembroke and Montgomery.  To them it cannot lie; they know whether they patronised the actor or not; whether they believed, or not, that the plays were their “servant’s.”  How is Mr. Greenwood to overcome this certain testimony of the Actors, to the identity of their late “Fellow” the player, with the author; and to the patronage which the Earls bestowed on him and his compositions?  Mr. Greenwood says nothing except that we may reasonably suppose Ben to have written the dedication which the players signed. {111a}

Whether or not the two Earls had a personal knowledge of Shakespeare, the dedication does not say in so many words.  They had seen his plays and had “favoured” both him and them, with so much favour, had “used indulgence” to the author.  That is not nearly explicit enough for the precise Baconians.  But the Earls knew whether what was said were true or false.  I am not sure whether the Baconians regard them as having been duped as to the authorship, or as fellow-conspirators with Ben in the great Baconian joke and mystery—­that “William Shakespeare” the author is not the actor whose Stratford friend, Collyns, has his name written in legal documents as “William Shakespeare.”

Anyone, however, may prefer to believe that, while William Shakspere was acting in a company (1592-3), Bacon, or who you please, wrote Venus and Adonis, and, signing “W.  Shakspeare,” dedicated it to his young friend, the Earl, promising to add “some graver labour,” a promise fulfilled in Lucrece.  In 1593, Bacon was chiefly occupied, we shall see, with the affairs of a young and beautiful Earl—­the Earl of Essex, not of Southampton:  to Essex he did not dedicate his two poems (if Venus and Lucrece were his).  He “did nothing but ruminate” (he tells the world) on Essex.  How Mr. Greenwood’s Unknown was occupied in 1593-4, of course we cannot possibly be aware.

I have thus tried to show that Will Shakspere, if he had as much schooling as I suggest; and if he had four or five years of life in London, about the theatre, and, above all, had genius, might, by 1592, be the rising player-author alluded to as “Shakescene.”  There remains a difficulty.  By 1592 Will had not time to be guilty of thirteen plays, or even of six.  But I have not credited him with the authorship, between, say, 1587 and 1593, of eleven plays, namely, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titus Andronicus, Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour’s Lost, King John, the three plays of Henry vi, and The Taming of the Shrew.  Mr. Greenwood {112a} cites Judge Webb for the fact that between the end of 1587 and the end of 1592 “some half-dozen Shakespearean dramas had been written,” and for Dr. Furnivall’s opinion that eleven had been composed.