learning as the plays exhibit. Every one must judge for himself.
Mr. Greenwood fervently believes in what I disbelieve. {22a}

"Very few Englishmen . . . in Elizabethan times, concerned themselves
at all, or cared one brass farthing, about the authorship of plays .
. . " says Mr. Greenwood.

Very few care now. They know the actors' names: in vain, as a rule,
do I ask playgoers for the name of the author of their entertainment.
But in Elizabeth's time the few who cared were apt to care very much,
and they would inquire intensely when the Stratford actor, a
bookless, untaught man, was announced as the author of plays which
were among the most popular of their day. The seekers never found
any other author. They left no hint that they suspected the
existence of any other author. Hence I venture to infer that Will
seemed to them no unread rustic, but a fellow of infinite fancy,--no
scholar to be sure, but very capable of writing the pieces which he
fathered.

They may all have been mistaken. Nobody can prove that Heywood and
Ben Jonson, and the actors of the Company, were not mistaken. But
certain it is that they thought the Will whom they knew capable of
the works which were attributed to him. Therefore he cannot possibly
have been the man who could not write, of the more impulsive
Baconians; or the bookless, and probably all but Latinless, man of
Mr. Greenwood's theory. The positions already seem to me to be
untenable.