a_t_rain

Indeed! They went to Shakespeare school for years; of course they could write! (And Jonson school. The less-loony permutation of this theory has Jonson as their ghost-writer, on the grounds that there are some similar turns of phrase in Jonson's works -- but this seems totally explicable, given that 1) H&C acted in a whole bunch of Jonson plays, and probably also saw or read most of the ones they didn't act in, and 2) Jonson presumably owned a copy of the First Folio, read the front matter, and could easily have nicked a line or two in his later works from them.)