To the jaundiced mind of Robert Greene, the accumulation of means by an actor was a crime in itself, but that a mere mummer should dare to compete with the scholar and the poet in the composition of plays--more, that he should write plays that exceeded in popularity those of the superior person, the student--was a personal affront. On his death-bed, in 1592, Greene found an outlet for his resentment in writing an ill-natured farewell to life, in which he girded bitterly at the new dramatist, whose early plays had already brought him into public notice. He warns his three brother playwrights--Marlowe, Nash, and Peele--against the “upstart crow, the only Shake-scene in the country” who “supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you.” How it is possible to interpret these words to mean that the “upstart crow” was not an author, “but only an actor who pretended to be an author also,” the oldest inhabitant of Colney Hatch and Mr. Theobald must decide between them. These anything but “cryptic” words, as Mr. Theobald describes them, can have but one interpretation, and that is the one their author intended. They do not imply that Shakespeare, the “upstart crow,” is not the author of the plays imputed to him, but that he considers his plays as good as those of the older dramatists. His profession of authorship is not questioned, but the quality of his work is savagely challenged. Any other construction put upon the passage is sheer nonsense. Mr. Theobald appeals to the “most gentle and gentlemanly critics” to be patient and tolerant with the Baconians--“men as sound in judgment and as well equipped in learning as yourselves”--but it is high time that this kind of wilful misrepresentation and perversion of common sense should be condemned in plain language. If Greene had believed that Shakespeare was wearing feathers that did not rightfully belong to him, if he were pretending to be what he really was not; if, in Mr. Theobald’s confident explanation, he had no right to profess himself an author at all, we may be quite certain that Greene would have said so outright--he would not have adopted a “cryptic” style, and left it for Mr. Theobald to decipher his meaning.