ed them.

It is evident that Shakespeare had something to do with the acceptance
by the Burbages of plays by Marlowe and Kyd, and that Greene believed
his own lack of patronage by the companies playing at the Theatre was
due to Shakespeare's adverse influence. Knowing Shakespeare to be _the
son of a Stratford butcher, educated at a grammar school and recently a
bonded servitor to Burbage_, this "Master of Arts in Cambridge"
questions the literary and dramatic judgment of the grammar school
youth, and late serving-man, and employs his fellow university scholar,
Thomas Nashe, to ridicule him and his critical pretensions.

Nashe returned to England in 1589, after a two years' absence upon the
Continent, and cannot have acquired at first hand the knowledge he shows
of dramatic affairs in London during the preceding year. It is evident
that this knowledge was gained from Greene for that purpose. Mr. Fleay
has demonstrated that Nashe, in his preface to Greene's _Menaphon_,
alludes satirically to Thomas Kyd as the author of _The Taming of a
Shrew_, and of the old _Hamlet_. Both of these plays were owned by Lord
Strange's (now the Lord Chamberlain's) company in 1594, when, as I have
suggested, they had recently taken them over from Pembroke's company,
which was undoubtedly a Burbage company--using some of the Burbage
properties and plays while under Shakespeare's management in 1591-94.
Being Burbage properties, these plays were acted by Lord Strange's
company between 1589 and 1591. Besides satirically indicating these
plays and their author, Nashe goes on to criticise the "idiot
art-masters" who make choice of such plays for the actors. "This
affectation of actors and audience," writes Nashe--meaning this suiting
of plays to the crude taste of the actors and the cruder taste of the
public--"is all traceable to their idiot art-masters that intrude
themselves as the alchemists of eloquence, who (mounted on the stage of
arrogance) think to outbrave better pens with the swelling bombast of
bragging blank verse, indeed it may be the ingrafted overflow of some
killcow conceit, etc. Among this kind of men that repose eternity in the
mouth of a player I can but engross some _deep read school men or
grammarians, who have no more learning in their skull than will serve to
take up a commodity, nor art in their brains than was nourished in a
serving man's idleness_, will take upon them to be ironical censurers of
all when God and poetry d