If not, why, in a whole company of actors, should “Shake-scene” alone be selected for a special victim?  Shake-scene is chosen out because, as an author, a factotum always ready at need, he is more apt than the professed playwrights to be employed as author by his company:  this is a new reason for not trusting the players.

I am not going to take the trouble to argue as to whether, in the circumstances of the case, “Shake-scene” is meant by Greene for a pun on “Shake-speare,” or not.  If he had some other rising player-author, the Factotum of a cry of players, in his mind, Baconians may search for that personage in the records of the stage.  That other player-author may have died young, or faded into obscurity.  The term “the only Shake-scene” may be one of those curious coincidences which do occur.  The presumption lies rather on the other side.  I demur, when Mr. Greenwood courageously struggling for his case says that, even assuming the validity of the surmise that there is an allusion to Shakspere, {143a} “the utmost that we should be entitled to say is that Greene here accuses Player Shakspere of putting forward, as his own, some work, or perhaps some parts of a work, for which he was really indebted to another” (the Great Unknown?).  I do more than demur, I defy any man to exhibit that sense in Greene’s words.

“The utmost that we should be entitled to say,” is, in my opinion, what we have no shadow of a title to say.  Look at the poor hackneyed, tortured words of Greene again.  “Yes, trust them not; for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his TYGER’S heart wrapped in A player’s hide, 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.”

How can mortal man squeeze from these words the charge that “Player Shakspere” is “putting forward, as his own, some work, or perhaps some parts of a work, for which he was really indebted to another”?  It is as an actor, with other actors, that the player is “beautified with our feathers,”—­not with the feathers of some one not ourselves, Bacon or Mr. Greenwood’s Unknown.  Mr. Greenwood even says that Shake-scene is referred to “as beautified with the feathers which he has stolen from the dramatic writers” ("our feathers").

Greene says absolutely nothing about feathers “Which he has stolen.”  The “feathers,” the words of the plays, were bought, not stolen, by the actors, “anticks garnished in our colours.”

Tedious it is to write many words about words so few and simple as those of Greene; meaning “do not trust the players, for one of them writes blank verse which he thinks as good as the best of yours, and fancies himself the only Shake-scene in a country.”

But “Greene here accuses Player Shakspere of putting forward, as his own, some work, or perhaps some parts of a work, for which he was really indebted to another,” this is “the utmost we should be entitled to say,” even if the allusion be to Shakspere.  How does Mr. Greenwood get the Anti-Willian hypothesis out of Greene’s few and plain words?