SECTION 3 - The Greenwood theory

Summary

Before I proceed to the discussion of the sources of the Stratford Legend I am drawn into a bypath by the attractive and ablyargued theory of Sir G. G. Greenwood that the Plays and Poems of ‘Shakespeare’ were not the work of the man who wrote his name ‘Shakspere,’ who was born and died at Stratford, and was merely a popular actor. Inasmuch as the actor was a Warwickshire man and the Plays are full of Warwickshire, the divagation is not so irrelevant as at first view it may seem.

Sir George Greenwood is by no means out to substitute an impossible Bacon for an actual but unwriting Shakespeare. In one contention I hold that, for all that the Orthodox have alleged against it, he is signally right. I agree with him that William Shakespeare, as he figures in the Stratford Apocrypha, was not, and could not be, the William Shakespeare who wrote the Plays and Poems.

But, if not Bacon, then Who? Sir George offers us only an unknown and neuter Tertium Quid. What I want, and what in reason everybody demands, is a Tertius Quis. Can we realise no more of the author of Hamlet and Lear than we do of the something called Homer? In the dual Shakspere-Shakespeare of his begetting, Sir George, by not confounding the persons but dividing their substance, imperils my faith in human individuality.