In brief I will deliver: for the Bard
Has sent me here as pleader, not as Prologue;
You he declares his judges, me his counsel:
And yet as counsel nothing can I speak
More than the Author teaches me to say,
Who wrote th’ oration which I now recite.
As to reports, which envious men have spread,
That he has ransack’d many Grecian plays,
While he composes some few Latin ones,
That he denies not, he has done; nor does