It is to no purpose that Mr. Greenwood denies, as we have seen above, that the allusions “disprove the theory that the true authorship was hidden under a pseudonym.”  That is an entirely different question.  He is now starting quite another hare.  Men of letters who alluded to the plays and poems of William Shakespeare, meant the actor; that is my position.  That they may all have been mistaken:  that “William Shakespeare” was Bacon’s, or any one’s pseudonym, is, I repeat, a wholly different question; and we must not allow the critic to glide away into it through an “at any rate”; as he does three or four times.  So far, then, Mr. Greenwood’s theory that it was impossible for the actor Shakspere to have been the author of the plays, encounters the difficulty that no contemporary attributed them to any other hand:  that none is known to have said, “This Warwickshire man cannot be the author.”

“Let us, however, examine some of these allusions to Shakspere, real or supposed,” says the critic. {138a} He begins with the hackneyed words of the dying man of letters, Robert Greene, in A Groatsworth of Wit (1592).  The pamphlet is addressed to Gentlemen of his acquaintance “that spend their wits in making plays”; he “wisheth them a better exercise,” and better fortunes than his own. (Marlowe is supposed to be one of the three Gentlemen playwrights, but such suppositions do not here concern us.) Greene’s is the ancient feud between the players and the authors, between capital and labour.  The players are the capitalists, and buy the plays out and out,—­cheap.  The author has no royalties; and no control over the future of his work, which a Shakspere or a Bacon, a Jonson or a Chettle, or any handyman of the company owning the play, may alter as he pleases.  It is highly probable that the actors also acquired most of the popular renown, for, even now, playgoers have much to say about the players in a piece, while they seldom know the name of the playwright.  Women fall in love with the actors, not with the authors; but with “those puppets,” as Greene says, “that speake from our mouths, these anticks, garnished in our colours.”  Ben Jonson, we shall see, makes some of the same complaints,—­most natural in the circumstances:  though he managed to retain the control of his dramas; how, I do not know.  Greene adds that in his misfortunes, illness, and poverty, he is ungratefully “forsaken,” by the players, and warns his friends that such may be their lot; advising them to seek “some better exercise.”  He then writes—­and his meaning cannot easily be misunderstood, I think, but misunderstood it has been—­“Yes, trust them not” (trust not the players), “For there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his TYGER’S heart WRAPT in A player’s hide” ("Player’s” in place of “woman’s,” in an old play, The Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York, &c.), “supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blank verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.”