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