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
The Plays of William Shakespeare a commentary on Sir Thomas Hanmer, 4th Baronet's edition of Shakespeare's plays, as "Miscellaneous Observations" or "Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth" on 6 April 1745 by Edward Cave. Hanmer produced an edition of Shakespeare's plays for the Clarendon Press in October 1744, and Johnson felt that he could attract more attention to his own work by challenging some of Hanmer's points. Johnson criticised Hanmer for editing Shakespeare's words based on subjective opinion instead of objective fact. In particular, Johnson writes: He appears to find no difficulty in most of those passages which I have represented as unintelligible, and