The sense, I repeat, is pellucid. But Mr. Greenwood writes that if Shake-scene be an allusion to Shakespeare “it seems clear that it is as an actor rather than as an author he is attacked.” {140a} As an _actor_ the person alluded to is merely assailed with the other actors, his “fellows.” But he is picked out as presenting another and a new reason why authors should distrust the players, “_for_ there is” among themselves, “in a player’s hide,” “an upstart crow”—who thinks his blank verse as good as the best of theirs. He is, therefore, necessarily a playwright, and being a _factotum_, can readily be employed by the players to the prejudice of Greene’s three friends, who are professed playwrights. Mr. Greenwood says that “we do not know why Greene should have been so particularly bitter against the players, and why he should have thought it necessary so seriously to warn his fellow playwrights against them.” {141a} But we cannot help knowing; for Greene has told us. In addition to gaining renown solely through mouthing “_our_” words, wearing “_our_ feathers,” they have been bitterly ungrateful to Greene in his poverty and sickness; they will, in the same circumstances, as cruelly forsake his friends; “yes, for they now have” an author, and to the playwrights a dangerous rival, in their own fellowship. Thus we know with absolute certainty why Greene wrote as he did. He says nothing about the superior financial gains of the players, which Mr. Greenwood suspects to have been the “only” cause of his bitterness. Greene gives its causes in the plainest possible terms, as did Ben Jonson later, in his verses “Poet-Ape” (Playwright-Actor). Moreover, Mr. Greenwood gives Greene’s obvious motives on the very page where he says that we do not know them. Even Mr. Greenwood, {141b} anxious as he is to prove Shake-scene to be attacked as an actor, admits that the words “supposes himself as well able to bumbast out a blank verse as the best of you,” “do seem to have that implication,” {141c} namely, that “Shake-scene” is a dramatic author: what else can the words mean; why, if not for the Stage, should Shake-scene write blank verse? Finally Mr. Greenwood, after saying “it is clear that it is as an actor rather than as an author that ‘Shake-scene’ is attacked,” {142a} concedes {142b} that it “certainly looks as if he” (Greene) “meant to suggest that this Shake-scene supposed himself able to compose, as well as to mouth verses.” Nothing else can possibly be meant. “The rest of you” were authors, not actors. If not, why, in a whole company of actors, should “Shake-scene” alone be selected for a special victim? Shake-scene is chosen out because, as an author, a factotum always ready at need, he is more apt than the professed playwrights to be employed as author by his company: this is a new reason for not trusting the players.