But did none of William Shakespeare's contemporaries suspect the harmless deception? There is no proof at hand, nor any evidence at all positive, that the intimates of the manager understood him to be, or to have ever pretended to have been, the original author of the text of the plays he gave to his players. Let us hasten to do William Shakespeare the justice to say that we can find nowhere any testimony to his having asserted a falsehood. But, if he did so pretend to his intimates, and if the dramas we now call "Shakespearean" were actually produced, in those days, on William Shakespeare's own stage, under that pretension, certainly some of them must have wagged their heads in secret. Surely, Ben Johnson, who bears testimony that his friend Shakespeare had "small Latin and less Greek," must have queried a little within himself as to where certain things he read in the text of his friend's plays came from, always supposing that he did not know perfectly well where they _did_ come from. It seems more than probable, as we have already said, that, whoever suspected or knew the source of the plays, and who also knew, if such was the fact, that they were claimed as Shakespeare's compositions {058}--had more cue to wink at than to expose the humbug. We find, indeed, that one, Robert Greene, by name, did protest against "an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers," (i. e. a borrower and adapter of other men's work, pretending to be a dramatist when he was not), "that, with his tygres heart wrapt in a player's hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and, beeing an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his owne conceyt the only Shake-scene in a countrey." That is to say, in language more intelligible at this day, that, being a sort of Jack-of-all-trades around the theater--holding horses, taking tickets, acting a little, putting pieces on the stage, and writing out their parts for the actors--he (Shakespeare) came in time to consider himself a dramatist, a manager, and a tragedian, all in one. Doubtless Greene was inspired by jealousy--for he was a writer of plays for the stage himself--in making and publishing this sneer. But, as he was endeavoring to make his remarks so personal to Shakespeare as to be readily recognized, he would not have alluded to him except by some well-known characteristic. So he calls him a "Jack-of-all-trades," that is, a man who did a little of everything. Is a Jack-of-all-trades about a theater the ideal poet, philosopher, and seer, who wrote the Shakespearean drama--the ideal of the Sliakespeareans?