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.