Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown, page 140 by Andrew Lang
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, if he edited or caused to be edited the Folio, thought that his revision, improvement, and dressing up of the plays gave him a right to claim their authorship--and Mr. Greenwood, a dozen times and more, denies to him their authorship.
One is seriously puzzled to discover the critic's meaning. The Taming of a Shrew, Titus, Henry VI, and King Lear, referred to in Henslowe's "Diary," are not "Shakespearean," we are repeatedly told. But "my own conviction is that . . . " these plays were "revised, improved, and dressed by some one whom they called Shakespeare." But to be revised, improved, and dressed by some one whom they called Shakespeare, is to be as truly "Shakespearean" work as is any play so handled "by Shakespeare." Thus the plays mentioned are as truly "Shakespearean" as any others in which "Shakespeare" worked on an earlier canvas, and also Titus "is not SHAKESPEAREAN at all." Mr. Greenwood, I repeat, constantly denies the "Shakespearean" character to Titus and Henry VI. "The conclusion of the whole matter is that Titus and The Trilogy of Henry VI are not the work of Shakespeare: that his hand is probably not to be found at all in Titus, and only once or twice, if at all, in Henry VI,
Part I, but that he it
probably was who altered and remodelled the two parts of the old Contention of the Houses of York and Lancaster, thereby producing Henry VI, Parts II and III." {228a}
Yet {228b} Titus and Henry VI appear as "revised, improved, and dressed" by the mysterious "some one whom they called Shakespeare." If Mr. Greenwood's conclusion {228c} be correct, "Shakespeare" had no right to place Henry VI,
Part I, and Titus in his Folio. If his
"conviction" {228d} be correct, Shakespeare had as good a right to them as to any of the plays which he revised, and improved, and dressed. They MUST be "Shakespear