low 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

There now arises the crucial enquiry concerning the charge that William Shakspere was thus lampooned in 1592 by Robert Greene in his celebrated address "To those Gentlemen of his own "fellowship that spend their wits making "plaies"-inferentially, Marlowe, Nash and Peele. The exigency of the case demands, in the opinion of Shakspere's modern biographers, the appropriation of Greene's reproachful reference to Shakspere, (though no name is mentioned) yet the actor referred to by Greene the children in London streets well knew and acclaimed; and every student of Elizabethan literature, history and bibliography, should know that the reference is identifiable with William Kemp, the celebrated comic actor, jigdancer, and jester, who was, in his own. conceit, the "only Shake-scene (dance"scene) in a country," "Shake-scene"

and (dance-scene) being interchangeable compounds in the old meaning; but the votaries of Shakspere, posing as his biographers, in the urgency of their desire to remove doubts which had existed respecting the beginning of Shakspere's early literary productivity as play-maker, or as an elaborator of the works of other men, prior to the year 1592, crave some notation of literary activity in the young man who went up from Stratford to London in 1587 (probably).

As the immortal plays were coming out anonymously and surreptitiously, there is a very strong desire to appropriate or embezzle "the only Shake-scene" reference, for, in the similarity and sound of the compound word "Shake-scene" in one of its elements there is that which fits it to receive a Shakespearean connotation, thus catching the popular fancy of Shakespere's biographers and academic commentators. The compound word "Shakescene" is made by the joining of two words generic in both its elements, and, in

combination having generic characteristics pertaining to a large or comprehensive class-that is to say, the words "shake" and "scene" bear a sense in which they are descriptive of all the various things to which they are applied, and of all other things that share their common properties. The fanciful biographers of William Shakspere rely on these words of reproof and censure as being the initial notice of his worth and work which was to lift him from his place of obscurity in the year 1592. The meaning of Greene's words in the idiom of the times, as in their contextural and natural sense, yield nothing which is confirmatory of such contention; for "dance" is connoted under the term "shake," answering to the first element in "Shake-scene," which in the old meaning meant "dance," generic for quick action; and "scene" meant "stage" instead of "scenery" as in the modern meaning, for the theatres were then in a state of absolute nudity-in other words, "Shake-scene" meant a