THE THEATRE AS HE FOUND IT

We cannot say certainly when or how Shakespeare's connexion with the theatre began. But by 1592 he is known both as actor and playwright, and Venus and Adonis will be published in 1593. He is twenty-eight years old.

There is now sufficient agreement as to which of the plays in the First Folio may be called early work, but discussion still as to whether the earliest of these are wholly or only partly or merely nominally Shakespeare's. The question is unanswerable in exact terms; but the discussion will be enlightening if it lets us divine even dimly the processes of the work, the ways of the workshop, and the dramatist himself in the making.

In Greene's detraction of him–of the upstart crow beautified with our feathers…his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide…who supposes himself as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you…who is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country—we discover, as one often may in such detraction, the very reasons of his success. He is actor and playwright both. He is at home in the theatre, that is to say, as Greene and his fellows, for all their ‘rare wits’, have never been. A third advantage, still unperceived, is to carry him to something better than success.