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
History of the Shakespeare authorship question also claims that he participated in numerous other historical events. Michael Dobson takes Pimping Billy to be a joke about Ben Jonson, since he is said to be the son of a character in Jonson's play "Every Man in his Humour". In the early twentieth century a document—since identified as a forgery—appeared to demonstrate that a Warwickshire clergyman, James Wilmot, had been the earliest person to explicitly assert that Shakespeare was not the author of the canon. He was also the first proponent of Baconian theory, the view that Francis Bacon was the true author of Shakespeare's works. He was