The preface to Webster’s tragedy, “The White Devil,” which contains a slight mention of Shakespeare, was printed in 1612, after all the immortal plays were written and their reputed author had returned to Stratford, probably in 1611, in his forty-seventh year, where he lived idly for five years before his death. John Webster possessed a critical faculty and an independent judgment, but the way he makes mention of Shakespeare shows that he knew nothing about the individual man, or the work, called Shakespeare. The generous reference to “The laboured and understanding works of Master Jonson” gives a clear idea of the main characteristics of the work of Jonson, who, not having reached the fruition of his renown in 1611, but in the after time, came into Dryden’s view as “The greatest man of the last age, the most learned and judicious writer any theatre ever had.” John Webster writes of “the no less worthy composures of Beaumont and Fletcher” then in the morning of life. They present an admirable model for purity of vocabulary and simplicity of expression and were of “loudest fame.” “Two of Beaumont’s and Fletcher’s plays were acted to one of Shakespeare’s, or Ben Jonson’s,” in Dryden’s time. There is strong presumptive proof that printers and publishers in Elizabethan and Jacobin times were in the habit of selecting names or titles that would best sell their books. The most popular books or best sellers they printed were books of songs, love-tales, comedies and sonnets of the amorous, scented kind, and it mattered not to publishers if the name printed on the title-page was a personal name, or one impersonal. Title-pages were not even presumptive proof of authorship in the time of Queen Elizabeth and King James. The printers chose to market their publications under the most favorable conditions, and some writers chose the incognizable name “Shakespeare” which had been attached to the voluptuous poem “Venus and Adonis.” This was published by Richard Field, in whose name it had been entered in the Stationer’s Register in 1593. There was no name of an author on the title-page, but the dedication was to the Earl of Southampton and was signed “William Shakespeare.” This was the first appearance of the name “Shakespeare” in literature, being the non-de-plume, doubtless, of the writer who gave this erotic poem to the world—“The first heir of my invention.”