Finally, Ratsey makes the player kneel down and pretends to ennoble him:

Rise up Sir Simon two shares and a halfe: Thou art now one of my Knights, and the first Knight that ever was Player in England.

In Shakespeare’s Impact on his Contemporaries (1982) E. A. J. Honigmann suggested that the player knighted by Ratsey alludes to Shakespeare. I agree, but I think the allusion is indirect. The player himself cannot be modelled on Shakespeare, for he is a second-rate performer with a mediocre company, whom no one could think capable of replacing Burbage in the part of Hamlet. Ratsey, a discerning critic, enjoyed the company’s music, but thought nothing of their play. Also, there is no suggestion that this player can write. He is cruelly taunted by Ratsey with the ironic suggestion that if Shakespeare, a player of modest provincial origins, could get rich in London, invest in country property, and finally aspire to knighthood, then so can he. Ratsey adds this gratuitous insult to the injury of having deprived the vagabond players of their entire “stocke” of money.

Read in conjunction with Davies’s allusions, these passages in Ratseis Ghost suggest that in the earliest years of James’s reign Shakespeare, along with Burbage, the celebrated performer of Hamlet, was being spoken of as aspiring to knighthood. A passage recently spotted by Andrew Gurr corroborates such a rumour. In Act I scene ii of The Woman Hater, performed at the Blackfriars in 1606, Francis Beaumont has the Count speak of “fine sights at Court”:

you shall see many legges too; amongst the rest you shall behold one payre, the feete of which, were in times past sockelesse, but are now through the change of time . . . very strangely become the legges of a Knight and a Courtier: another payre you shall see, that were heire apparent legges to a Glover, these legges hope shortly to bee honourable . . .

Gurr suggests that

Such an allusion to the eldest son (“heire apparent”) of a glover, the trade of Shakespeare’s father, matched with the pun on “sockelesse”, someone now wearing the comedian’s sock, could only have pointed to Shakespeare as a King’s Man and therefore in some respects a new courtier.

However, it seems to me that the allusion is to two King’s Men. The first pair of legs, sporting the comedian’s sock, are Burbage’s, while the second pair, those of a glover’s first-born son, are Shakespeare’s. Nor does Gurr fully explain the suggestions that “these legges hope shortly to be honourable”. I suggest that Beaumont, too, alludes to rumours that Burbage and Shakespeare aspire to become knights, with the former already passing himself off as one. This was not the only time the well-born Beaumont took a pot-shot at Shakespeare. In the Induction to The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1606–7), the grocer’s apprentice Rafe, invited to speak “a huffing part”, delivers a rather mangled version of Hotspur’s speech in 1 Henry IV:

By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap
To pluck bright honour from the pale-faced moon,
Or dive into the bottom of the seas
Where never fathom line touched any ground,
And pluck up drowned honour from the lake of hell.

Beaumont characterizes Shakespeare by a “huffing” speech expressing an ambition to procure “honour” at any price.

Davies, an associate of William and Philip Herbert, young aristocrats in high favour with the King, may have been well placed to hear rumours at Court. He expressed support for Shakespeare and Burbage in print when their honours failed to materialize. In contrast, Francis Beaumont and the author of Ratseis Ghost ridiculed the notion that a stage player could ever aspire to be a knight. By 1609, the publication year of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and of Davies’s Humors heav’n on earth, it must have become apparent that such promotion was not to be. Though James had bestowed hundreds of knighthoods in the early years of his reign, he may have been persuaded that honouring men who were stage players by profession would be unacceptable to most of the nobility. Robert Cecil, as Secretary, would have been likely to offer such advice.

From Sonnets 110–112 we may gather some of Shakespeare’s own response to this bitter disappointment. Having “gone here and there”, making himself a “motley to the view”, has debarred him from a life-transforming honour. Had he achieved it, he would have been on a more equal footing with the young nobleman to whom most of the sonnets are addressed. But prejudice against players was to continue. Not until 1895 did the humbly born Henry Irving become “the first Knight that ever was Player in England”.