Of course if Will were unable to write even his name, as an enthusiastic Baconian asserts, Mr. Greenwood sees that Will could not easily pass for the Author. {18a} But his own bookless actor with a _patois_ seems to him, as author of _Venus and Adonis_, almost inconceivable. Yet, despite Will’s bookless rusticity, this poem with _Lucrece_, which displays knowledge of a work of Ovid not translated into English by 1593, was regarded as his own. I must suppose, therefore, that Will was _not_ manifestly so ignorant of Latin as Mr. Greenwood thinks. “I think it highly probable,” says this critic, “that he attended the Grammar School at Stratford” (where nothing but Latin was taught) “for four or five years, and that, later in life, after some years in London, he was probably able to ‘bumbast out a line,’ and perhaps to pose as ‘Poet-Ape that would be thought our chief.’ Nay, I am not at all sure that he would not have been capable of collaborating with such a man as George Wilkins, and perhaps of writing quite as well as he, if not even better. But it does not follow from this that he was the author either of _Venus and Adonis_ or of _Hamlet_.” {19a} Nothing follows from all this: we merely see that, in Mr. Greenwood’s private opinion, the actor might write even better than George Wilkins, but could not write _Venus and Adonis_. Will, therefore, though bookless, is not debarred here from the pursuits of literature, in partnership with Wilkins. We have merely the critic’s opinion that Will could not write _Hamlet_, even if, like Wordsworth, “he had the mind,” even if the gods had made him more poetical than Wilkins. Again, “he had had but little schooling; he had ‘small Latin and less Greek’” (as Ben Jonson truly says), “but he was a good _Johannes Factotum_; he could arrange a scene, and, when necessary, ‘bumbast out a blank verse.’” {19b} The “_Johannes Factotum_,” who could “bumbast out a blank verse,” is taken from Robert Greene’s hackneyed attack on an actor-poet, “Shake-scene,” published in 1592. “Poet-Ape that would be thought our chief,” is from an epigram on an actor-poet by Ben Jonson (1601–16?). If the allusions by Greene and Jonson are to our Will, he, by 1592, had a literary ambition so towering that he thought his own work in the new art of dramatic blank verse was equal to that of Marlowe (not to speak of Wilkins), and Greene reckoned him a dangerous rival to three of his playwright friends, of whom Marlowe is one, apparently.