The meaning is pellucid.  “Do not trust the players, my fellow playwrights, for the reasons already given, for they, in addition to their glory gained by mouthing our words, and their ingratitude, may now forsake you for one of themselves, a player, who thinks his blank verse as good as the best of yours” (including Marlowe’s, probably).  “The man is ready at their call ("an absolute Johannes Factotum").  “In his own conceit” he is “the only Shake-scene in a country.”  “Seek you better masters,” than these players, who have now an author among themselves, “the only Shake-scene,” where the pun on Shakespeare does not look like a fortuitous coincidence.  But it may be, anything may happen.

The sense, I repeat, is pellucid.  But Mr. Greenwood writes that if Shake-scene be an allusion to Shakespeare “it seems clear that it is as an actor rather than as an author he is attacked.” {140a} As an actor the person alluded to is merely assailed with the other actors, his “fellows.”  But he is picked out as presenting another and a new reason why authors should distrust the players, “For there is” among themselves, “in a player’s hide,” “an upstart crow”—­who thinks his blank verse as good as the best of theirs.  He is, therefore, necessarily a playwright, and being a factotum, can readily be employed by the players to the prejudice of Greene’s three friends, who are professed playwrights.

Mr. Greenwood says that “we do not know why Greene should have been so particularly bitter against the players, and why he should have thought it necessary so seriously to warn his fellow playwrights against them.” {141a} But we cannot help knowing; for Greene has told us.  In addition to gaining renown solely through mouthing “Our” words, wearing “Our feathers,” they have been bitterly ungrateful to Greene in his poverty and sickness; they will, in the same circumstances, as cruelly forsake his friends; “yes, for they now have” an author, and to the playwrights a dangerous rival, in their own fellowship.  Thus we know with absolute certainty why Greene wrote as he did.  He says nothing about the superior financial gains of the players, which Mr. Greenwood suspects to have been the “only” cause of his bitterness.  Greene gives its causes in the plainest possible terms, as did Ben Jonson later, in his verses “Poet-Ape” (Playwright-Actor).  Moreover, Mr. Greenwood gives Greene’s obvious motives on the very page where he says that we do not know them.

Even Mr. Greenwood, {141b} anxious as he is to prove Shake-scene to be attacked as an actor, admits that the words “supposes himself as well able to bumbast out a blank verse as the best of you,” “do seem to have that implication,” {141c} namely, that “Shake-scene” is a dramatic author:  what else can the words mean; why, if not for the Stage, should Shake-scene write blank verse?

Finally Mr. Greenwood, after saying “it is clear that it is as an actor rather than as an author that ‘Shake-scene’ is attacked,” {142a} concedes {142b} that it “certainly looks as if he” (Greene) “meant to suggest that this Shake-scene supposed himself able to compose, as well as to mouth verses.”  Nothing else can possibly be meant.  “The rest of you” were authors, not actors.