Those biographers and critics who have written concerning Shakspere and Greene misapprehensively compound an integrate letter and pamphlet. It should be made clear that Greene’s letter to his fellow poets is not an integral part of “Groats Worth of Wit,” though appended towards the end of this pamphlet. The letter is strikingly personal and impressive, not a continuance of a pamphlet describing the folly of youth, but a mere appendage not properly constituting a portion of it. It was the classical commentator, Thomas Tyrwhitt (1730-85), we believe, who first made current the groundless opinion that purports to identify Shakspere as the one pointed at, but most, if not all, recent biographers and commentators state as a “proven fact” that Robert Greene was the first to bail Shakspere out of obscurity by the “reprehensive reference” to an “upstart crow.” The effect of conjectural reading is to raise a tempest of depreciation by which Shakspere’s biographers and commentators have succeeded in handing down to posterity Greene’s reputation as a preposterous combination of infamy and envy, harping with fiendish delight on the irregularities and defects of Robert Greene’s private life, which were not even shadowed in his writings. The writings of Greene “whose pen was pure” are exceptionally clean. Why then this unmerited abuse so malignant in disposition and passion? We answer that it is because the biographers of Shakspere have been seduced from truth by a vagrant conjecture into the belief that William Shakspere was the object and recipient of Greene’s censure. It is apparent that the statement which affirms this is false, and we shall endeavor to show that Robert Greene’s detractors are on the wrong trail. II