Mr. Greenwood says that "we do not know why Greene should have been
so particularly bitter against the players, and why he should have
thought it necessary so seriously to warn his fellow playwrights
against them." {141a} But we cannot help knowing; for Greene has
told us. In addition to gaining renown solely through mouthing "OUR"
words, wearing "OUR feathers," they have been bitterly ungrateful to
Greene in his poverty and sickness; they will, in the same
circumstances, as cruelly forsake his friends; "yes, for they now
have" an author, and to the playwrights a dangerous rival, in their
own fellowship. Thus we know with absolute certainty why Greene
wrote as he did. He says nothing about the superior financial gains
of the players, which Mr. Greenwood suspects to have been the "only"
cause of his bitterness. Greene gives its causes in the plainest
possible terms, as did Ben Jonson later, in his verses "Poet-Ape"
(Playwright-Actor). Moreover, Mr. Greenwood gives Greene's obvious
motives on the very page where he says that we do not know them.
Even Mr. Greenwood, {141b} anxious as he is to prove Shake-scene to
be attacked as an actor, admits that the words "supposes himself as
well able to bumbast out a blank verse as the best of you," "do seem
to have that implication," {141c} namely, that "Shake-scene" is a
dramatic author: what else can the words mean; why, if not for the
Stage, should Shake-scene write blank verse?
Finally Mr.
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