The external evidence of other people's writings, however, is the most convincing proof.

1592. The earliest printed notice which alludes to Shakspere is in Greene's Groat's-worth of Wit, where he, in an oft-quoted passage, evidently aims at Shakspere's growing fame as an actor, and his entrance on a dramatic career as the critic and adapter of other men's dramas, and calls him “an absolute Johannes Factotum” and “the only Shakescene in a country.” Besides quoting from one of Shakspere's plays, Greene suggests that he also assisted in stage-management, and points to the fact that he was dominant by that time, and that other witty writers were subject to his pleasures.

Greene's scorn of the actors, the “puppits,” the “buck-ram gentlemen,” seems embittered by the fact that one of them should be “able to bumbast out a blanke verse as well as the best of you.” As a rival of Shakspere it is wonderful he had so little else to say against him; and yet it came very badly from him, who only just before, in Greene's Quip for an Upstart Courtier, had translated wholesale, from verse into his prose, The Delate between Pride and Lowliness, by T. F., probably Francis Thynne, printed by Charlewood several years before Greene's pamphlet.