" That is an entirely different question.
He is now starting quite another hare. Men of letters who alluded to
the plays and poems of William Shakespeare, meant the actor; that is
my position. That they may all have been mistaken: that "William
Shakespeare" was Bacon's, or any one's pseudonym, is, I repeat, a
wholly different question; and we must not allow the critic to glide
away into it through an "at any rate"; as he does three or four
times. So far, then, Mr. Greenwood's theory that it was impossible
for the actor Shakspere to have been the author of the plays,
encounters the difficulty that no contemporary attributed them to any
other hand: that none is known to have said, "This Warwickshire man
cannot be the author."
"Let us, however, examine some of these allusions to Shakspere, real
or supposed," says the critic. {138a} He begins with the hackneyed
words of the dying man of letters, Robert Greene, in A Groatsworth of
Wit (1592). The pamphlet is addressed to Gentlemen of his
acquaintance "that spend their wits in making plays"; he "wisheth
them a better exercise," and better fortunes than his own. (Marlowe
is supposed to be one of the three Gentlemen playwrights, but such
suppositions do not here concern us.) Greene's is the ancient feud
between the players and the authors, between capital and labour. The
players are the capitalists, and buy the plays out and out,--cheap.
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