Destitute as I am of legal training, I leave this notable way of
disposing of the evidence to the judgement of the Bench and the Bar, a
layman intermeddleth not with it. Still, I am, like other readers, on
the Jury addressed,—I do not accept the arguments. _Miror magis_, as Mr.
Greenwood might quote Latin. We have already seen one example of this
argument, when Heywood speaks of the author of poems by Shakespeare,
published in _The Passionate Pilgrim_. Heywood does nothing to identify
the actor Shakspere with the author Shakespeare, says Mr. Greenwood. I
shall prove that, elsewhere, Heywood does identify them, and no man knew
more of the world of playwrights and actors than Heywood. I add that in
his remarks on _The Passionate Pilgrim_, Heywood had no need to say “by
W. Shakespeare I mean the well-known actor in the King’s Company.” There
was no other William Shakspere or Shakespeare known to his public.
It is to no purpose that Mr. Greenwood denies, as we have seen above,
that the allusions “disprove the theory that the true authorship was
hidden under a pseudonym.” That is an entirely different question. He
is now starting quite another hare. Men of letters who alluded to the
plays and poems of William Shakespeare, meant the actor; that is my
position. That they may all have been mistaken: that “William
Shakespeare” was Bacon’s, or any one’s pseudonym, is, I repeat, a wholly
different question; and we must not allow the critic to glide away into
it through an “at any rate”; as he does three or four times. So far,
then, Mr. Greenwood’s theory that it was impossible for the actor
Shakspere to have been the author of the plays, encounters the difficulty
that no contemporary attributed them to any other hand: that none is
known to have said, “This Warwickshire man cannot be the author.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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