William Shakespeare as a sign that his acting career was nearing its end. The First Folio of 1623, however, lists Shakespeare as one of "the Principal Actors in all these Plays", some of which were first staged after "Volpone", although we cannot know for certain which roles he played. In 1610, John Davies of Hereford wrote that "good Will" played "kingly" roles. In 1709, Rowe passed down a tradition that Shakespeare played the ghost of Hamlet's father. Later traditions maintain that he also played Adam in "As You Like It", and the Chorus in "Henry V", though scholars doubt the sources of
Characters of Shakespear's Plays chapter "Poems and Sonnets". While he liked a few of the sonnets, for the most part Hazlitt found Shakespeare's nondramatic poetry to be artificial, mechanical, and, overall, "laboured, uphill work." On the whole, wrote Hazlitt, "Our idolatry of Shakespear [...] ceases with his plays." "Characters of Shakespear's Plays" argues against a century and a half of criticism that saw Shakespeare as a "child of nature", deficient in art and full of faults. To anchor his position, Hazlitt makes an observation by the poet Alexander Pope—despite Pope's being one of those very critics—his unifying theme: "every single character in Shakespear, is