The point is that Kempe recognises Shakespeare as both actor and author.

All this “is quite consistent with the theory that Shake-speare was a pseudonym,” {147a} says Mr. Greenwood.  Of course it is, but it is not consistent with the theory that Shakespeare was an uneducated, bookless rustic, for, in that case, his mask would have fallen off in a day, in an hour.  Of course the Cambridge author only proves, if you will, that he thought that Kempe thought, that his fellow player was the author.  But we have better evidence of what the actors thought than in the Cambridge play.

In 1598, as we saw, Francis Meres in Palladis Tamia credits Shakespeare with Venus and Adonis, with privately circulated sonnets, and with a number of the comedies and tragedies.  How the allusions “negative the hypothesis that Shakespeare was a nom de plume is not apparent,” says Mr. Greenwood, always constant to his method.  I repeat that he wanders from the point, which is, here, that the only William Shak(&c.) known to us at the time, in London, was credited with the plays and poems on all sides, which proves that no incompatibility between the man and the works was recognised.

Then Weaver (1599) alludes to him as author of Venus, Lucrece, Romeo, Richard, “more whose names I know not.”  Davies (1610) calls him “our English Terence” (the famous comedian), and mentions him as having “played some Kingly parts in sport.”  Freeman (1614) credits him with Venus and Lucrece.  “Besides in plays thy wit winds like Meander.”  I repeat Heywood’s evidence.  Thomas Heywood, author of that remarkable domestic play, A Woman Killed with Kindness, was, from the old days of Henslowe, in the fifteen-nineties, a playwright and an actor; he survived into the reign of Charles I. Writing on the familiar names of the poets, “Jack Fletcher,” “Frank Beaumont,” “Kit Marlowe,” “Tom Nash,” he says,

“Mellifluous Shakespeare whose enchanting quill Commanded mirth and passion, was but ‘Will.’”

Does Heywood not identify the actor with the author?  No quibbles serve against the evidence.

We need not pursue the allusions later than Shakespeare’s death, or invoke, at present, Ben Jonson’s panegyric of 1623.  As to Davies, his dull and obscure epigram is addressed “To our English Terence, Mr. Will Shake-speare.”  He accosts Shakespeare as “Good Will.”  He remarks that, “as some say,” if Will “had not played some Kingly parts in sport,” he had been “a companion for a king,” and “been a King among the meaner sort.”  Nobody, now, can see the allusion and the joke.  Shakespeare’s company, in 1604, acted a play on the Gowrie Conspiracy of 1600.  King James suppressed the play after the second night, as, of course, he was brought on the stage throughout the action:  and in very droll and dreadful situations.  Did Will take the King’s part, and annoy gentle King Jamie, “as some say”?  Nobody knows.