But Mr. Greenwood, to disable Davies’s recognition of Mr. Will as a playwright, “Our English Terence,” quotes, from Florio’s Montaigne, a silly old piece of Roman literary gossip, Terence’s plays were written by Scipio and Laelius.  In fact, Terence alludes in his prologue to the Adelphi, to a spiteful report that he was aided by great persons.  The prologue may be the source of the fable--that does not matter.  Davies might get the fable in Montaigne, and, knowing that some Great One wrote Will’s plays, might therefore, in irony, address him as “Our English Terence.”  This is a pretty free conjecture!  In Roman comedy he had only two names known to him to choose from; he took Terence, not Plautus.  But if Davies was in the great Secret, a world of others must have shared le Secret de Polichinelle.  Yet none hints at it, and only a very weak cause could catch at so tiny a straw as the off-chance that Davies knew, and used “Terence” as a gibe. {149a}

The allusions, even the few selected, cannot prove that the actor wrote the plays, but do prove that he was believed to have done so, and therefore that he was not so ignorant and bookless as to demonstrate that he was incapable of the poetry and the knowledge displayed in his works.  Mr. Greenwood himself observes that a Baconian critic goes too far when he makes Will incapable of writing.  Such a Will could deceive no mortal. {150a} But does Mr. Greenwood, who finds in the Author of the plays “much learning, and remarkable classical attainments,” or “a wide familiarity with the classics,” {150b} suppose that his absolutely bookless Will could have persuaded his intimates that he was the author of plays exhibiting “a wide familiarity with the classics,” or “remarkable classical attainments.”  The thing is wholly impossible.

I do not remember that a single contemporary allusion to Shakespeare speaks of him as “learned,” erudite, scholarly, and so forth.  The epithets for him are “sweet,” “gentle,” “honeyed,” “sugared,” “honey-tongued”—­this is the convention.  The tradition followed by Milton, who was eight years of age when Shakespeare died, and who wrote L’Allegro just after leaving Cambridge, makes Shakespeare “sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child,” with “native wood-notes wild”; and gives to Jonson “the learned sock.”  Fuller, like Milton, was born eight years before the death of Shakespeare, namely, in 1608.  Like Milton he was a Cambridge man.  The First Folio of Shakespeare’s works appeared when each of these two bookish men was aged fifteen.  It would necessarily revive interest in Shakespeare, now first known as far as about half of his plays went:  he would be discussed among lovers of literature at Cambridge.  Mr. Greenwood quotes Fuller’s remark that Shakespeare’s “learning was very little,” that, if alive, he would confess himself “to be never any scholar.” {151a} I cannot grant that Fuller is dividing the persons of actor and author.  Men of Shakespeare’s generation, such as Jonson, did not think him learned; nor did men of the next generation.  If Mr. Collins’s view be correct, the men of Shakespeare’s and of Milton’s generations were too ignorant to perceive that Shakespeare was deeply learned in the literature of Rome, and in the literature of Greece.  Every one was too ignorant, till Mr. Collins came.