However, In the Charlecote library we have a copy of “Shakespeare and Robert Greene: The evidence” by William H Chapman Hall (1912 – which must be among the last books added to the library). He states: ‘most, if not all, biographers of Shakespeare still lead the reader into the shadow of chaotic conjecture and might-have-been, and that Shakespearean literature still lacks a book on the personal life of William Shakespeare needed to cut out the reverie and guesswork which unfortunately have seduced the historian and misled the reader’.
Chapman-Hall considers Greene’s ‘upstart crow’ reference did not refer to Shakespeare at all and thinks the crow was William Kemp, an actor specialising in comic roles and one of the original player in early plays by Shakespeare. He was a celebrated Jig dancer and jester who extemporised and introduced improvisations and interpolations of his own into other plays. Greene loathed and despised this. His dancing of jigs at the close of a play gave him his chief popularity. The jigs were performed to musical accompaniment and included the singing of comic words. One or two actors at times supported Kemp in his entertainment, dancing and singing with him but Shakespeare did not approve. In Hamlet Act 3 scene 2 he says ‘Let those who play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them.

My esteemed colleagues from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Jo Wilding and Sylvia Morris, tell me that it is now regarded as almost certain that Greene was referring to Shakespeare so this is just another example of how difficult it is to get at the truth about Shakespeare.

Greene went on to assert that up until 1600 Shakespeare's plays were not particularly popular with the public and were not ‘the Talk of the Town’. Not one of them equalled in popularity Kid’s The Spanish Tragedy or Marlowe’s Dr Faustus. Highly popular and influential in its time, The Spanish Tragedy established a new genre in English theatre, the revenge play or revenge tragedy. Its plot contains several violent murders and includes as one of its characters a personification of Revenge. The Spanish Tragedy was often referred to (or parodied) in works written by other Elizabethan playwrights, including William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Christopher Marlowe. Many elements of The Spanish Tragedy, such as the play-within-a-play used to trap a murderer and a ghost intent on vengeance, appear in Shakespeare's Hamlet
Again Greene is thought to be unreliable. Shakespeare was popular in his own time as evidenced by how many of his plays were published in pirated editions.