It is much safer for him to say that “Shake-scene” is not meant for Shakespeare.  Nobody can prove that it is; the pun may be a strange coincidence,—­or any one may say that he thinks it nothing more; if he pleases.

Greene nowhere “refers to this Shake-scene as being an impostor, an upstart crow beautified with the feathers which he has stolen from the dramatic writers ("our feathers")” {145a}—­that is, Greene makes no such reference to Shake-scene in his capacity of writer of blank verse.  Like all players, who are all “anticks garnisht in our colours,” Shake-scene, as player, is “beautified with our feathers.”  It is Mr. Greenwood who adds “beautified with the feathers which he has stolen from the dramatic writers.”  Greene does not even remotely hint at plagiarism on the part of Shake-scene:  and the feathers, the plays of Greene and his friends, were not stolen but bought.  We must take Greene’s evidence as we find it,—­it proves that by “Shake-scene” he means a “poet-ape,” a playwright-actor; for Greene, like Jonson, speaks of actors as “apes.”  Both men saw in a certain actor and dramatist a suspected rival.  Only one such successful practising actor-playwright is known to us at this date (1592-1601),—­and he is Shakespeare.  Unless another such existed, Greene, in 1592, alludes to William Shak(&c.) as a player and playwright.  This proves that the actor from Stratford was accepted in Greene’s world as an author of plays in blank verse.  He cannot, therefore, have seemed incapable of his poetry.

Let us now briefly consider other contemporary allusions to Shakespeare selected by Mr. Greenwood himself.  No allusion can prove that Shakespeare was the author of the work attributed to him in the allusions.  The plays and poems may have been by James vi and I, “a parcel-poet.”  The allusions can prove no more than that, by his contemporaries, Shakespeare was believed to be the poet, which is impossible if he were a mere rustic ignoramus, as the Baconians aver.  Omitting some remarks by Chettle on Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, {146a} as, if grammar goes for all, they do not refer to Shakespeare, we have the Cambridge farce or comedy on contemporary literature, the Return from Parnassus (1602?).  The University wits laugh at Shakespeare,—­not an university man, as the favourite poet, in his Venus and Adonis, of a silly braggart pretender to literature, Gullio.

They also introduce Kempe, the low comedy man of Shakespeare’s company, speaking to Burbage, the chief tragic actor, of Shakespeare as a member of their company, who, as an author of plays, “puts down” the University wits “and Ben Jonson too.”  The date is not earlier than that of Ben’s satiric play on the poets, The Poetaster (1601), to which reference is made.  Since Kempe is to be represented as wholly ignorant, his opinion of Shakespeare’s pre-eminent merit only proves, as in the case of Gullio, that the University wits decried the excellences of Shakespeare.  In him they saw no scholar.