  A LOOKING-GLASS FOR LONDON AND ENGLAND GEORGE-A-GREENE, THE PINNER OF WAKEFIELD INTRODUCTION"Why should art answer for the infirmities of manners?" asks Thomas Nash in defending the memory of his dead comrade, Robert Greene, against the attacks of Gabriel Harvey. Some such consideration as this has been needed to rescue Greene's fame from the uncritical hostility of later times. It has been the misfortune of the man to be remembered by posterity chiefly through adverse personal documents. The assaults of a frustrate and dying man on a successful rival like curses soon turned home to roost. Gabriel Harvey, the Kenrick of his day, crowned the dead poet with bays more pathetic than the sordid wreath placed by Isam's hand. And to complete the tale of disfavour Greene himself tells his own story with a morbid self-consciousness only exceeding Bunyan's, and a thrifty purpose to turn even his sins to pence. Though during Greene's life and after his death circumstances were unmeet to dispassionate biography, it may promote the calmer mood of a later age to inquire into the conditions of his disordered career and the sources of his unique genius. "Debt and deadly sin, who is not subject to?" cries Nash. "With any notorious crime I never knew him tainted." Nash refers Greene back to human nature. With Nash, at the best but lukewarm, and with Symonds, no partisan of Greene's, one believes that circumstances as well as natural frailty made Greene what he came to be. And of truth he must be represented as no isolated figure, but as a man of his times, frail, no doubt, but frail with Marlowe and Peele, versatile with Sidney and Raleigh, reflective with Spenser, and lusty with Shakespeare. Robert Greene represents the Elizabethan age at its best and its worst. What was best in it he helped to consummate. Of the worst he was the victim as well as the exemplar. Greene's life comprises and almost defines the greatest era of expansion known in English drama. Shakespeare's debt to his predecessors is great not only on account of direct literary influences. The best things his forerunners had done for him were to free the drama from the regulations of a didactic art, to provide the dramatist a cultivated audience at home in the great popular play-houses of the metropolis, and somewhat to relieve the stage from the awful stigma that had rested on the callings of the actor and the playwright. When Greene was at preparatory school and at Cambridge didactic purpose still dominated popular plays. In The Conflict of Conscience (1560), King Darius (1565), The Life and Repentance of Mary Magdalene (1566), and Jacob and Esau (1568) moral drama was late represented. Even in tragedy, and serious drama on secular subjects, the didactic element persisted in Preston's Cambises (1569), and in Edward's Damon and Pithias (1571). Only in Gascoigne did pure art speak for itself. He indeed "broke the ice" for the greater poets who followed him, but he was a translator, and not an original dramatist. The most promising writer before 1586 was Robert Wilson. Critics have seen in his The Three Ladies of London (1584) the mingling of the old morality and the new art, yet Wilson shows his subserviency to the demands of his time by making this "a perfect pattern for all estates to look into," and by presenting the allegory of three abstractions—Lucre, Love and Conscience. Six years later his continuation of this play was frankly called a "Moral." Greene himself shows the same motive in A Looking-Glass for London and England and in James IV.; and the late appearance of such plays as A Warning for Fair Women (1599), and A Larum for London (1602) testifies to the vitality of the didactic element in drama long after the exponents of a new art had arisen. It is not strange, perhaps, that it was university men who served to free the drama to the better purposes of art. Themselves trained in the classics, and in the essentials of Italian culture, they were able to bring to bear on drama the force of the influence of Seneca, the pastoral, and the masque, and thereby greatly to increase the range of inspiration and the instruments of effective expression open to the playwrights. The fact is, however, worthy of remark that it is to the university playwrights that we have to credit the transference of the patronage of the drama out of the hands of the court into the hands of the people. Lyly had been the first great university dramatist. His plays, of which Campaspe and Sapho and Phao must have been composed before 1581, were written for court production. But Lyly's own melancholy story shows clearly enough that if dramatists were to flourish at all they needed means of support supplementary to the uncertain pension of a noble. It was for the sake of this further support that the playwrights and the actors proceeded to perform their court plays before the people, first in the inn-yards of the Cross Keys, the Bull and the Bell Savage, and finally in the Theatre and the Curtain, erected in 1576 and 1577 in Finsbury Fields. As an indication of the movement to transfer the support of the drama from the court to the public it is recorded that in 1575 "Her Majesty's poor players" were petitioning the Lord Mayor, through the Privy Council, for permission to play within the city, assigning as reasons the fact that they needed rehearsal properly to prepare for their court appearances, and that they needed to earn their livings. The answer of the city authorities, that plays should be presented by way of recreation by men with other means of subsistence, was manifestly an avoidance of the implications of the situation at hand. It was not until after the plague of 1586, and the return of the companies from the provinces, that the university playwrights rose to a commanding place in the life of the time. And then, though their plays were still performed at court, it was to the people that the dramatists made their appeal. Marlowe, and Greene, and Peele and Lodge now constituted the group of the university wits. The support that the court had before either withheld, or but fitfully given, was now vouchsafed liberally at the Theatre and the Curtain. The university dramatists knew well what was demanded of them. Dismissing the topics treated by Lyly, and by Peele in his early play, The Arraignment of Paris (1584), and discarding by degrees the allegorical and didactic as found in the popular drama of the preceding time, they began to dramatise the spirit of contemporary life in the form of stories built from legend and romance, and instinct with the leonine spirit of awakening England. Marlowe's Tamburlaine is as true to Elizabethan England as is Dekker's more realistic Shoemaker's Holiday; and Peele's Old Wives' Tale and Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay are both native in England's soil. In the years between 1584 and 1593 the number of companies greatly increased. Fleay mentions nine companies as performing at court between these dates. Besides the Queen's players, who comprised, perhaps, two or more companies, there were companies of my Lord Admiral, Pembroke, Sussex and other lords. Normally the playwrights wrote only for the company to which they were attached. It is believed that at one time Lodge, Peele, Marlowe and Greene were together as playwrights for the Queen's men playing at the Theatre. Later the first three went over to the support of the Admiral's men, and thereafter often changed their allegiance, but Greene probably wrote only for the Queen's players until his death. Soon other dramatists aligned themselves with the movements of the new drama, and out of the jealous rivalry aroused by the entrance into the field of dramatic authorship of such non-university playwrights as Kyd and Shakespeare there developed the maze of controversy and vituperation that has made the Elizabethan age famous as an era of personal pamphleteering. But though the drama was occupying an increasingly prominent place in the life of the time the professional actors and playwrights were in decided ill-repute. With the managers and with the actors the returns from the stage were sufficient to salve the hurt of the odium under which their profession rested. Richard Burbage died a rich man, and Alleyn, who played in at least one of Greene's plays, became so wealthy that he could found a college. So also, as we learn from the slighting references to them by the dramatists, the actors were well able to line their pockets with the returns of their calling. But the pamphlet literature of the time reveals the extraordinary hostility with which all connected with the theatre were viewed. Gosson's School of Abuse (1579), A Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Plays and Theatres (1580), Stubb's Anatomy of Abuses (1583), and Babington's Exposition of the Commandments (1583) contain vigorous attacks on the stage as an institution and on all who follow its fortunes. Distrust and jealousy were common within the ranks of the actors and playwrights. So Chettle does not know Marlowe and does not wish to know him; Nash, though he defends Greene against Harvey, expressly disclaims any intimacy; and we shall learn that Greene was jealous of Marlowe during a large portion of his period of dramatic authorship. But the playwrights abominated the actors even more than they distrusted each other. Frequently they refer to actors as puppets and apes dressed up in another's feathers. Greene, in Never too Late, calls the actor "Esop's crow," and in A Groatsworth of Wit, in the famous passage referring to Shakespeare, he calls the actors "burrs," "puppets that speak from our mouths," and "antics garnished in our colours." The author of The Return from Parnassus (1602) calls them "mimic apes," and Florio, in his preface to Montaigne's Essays (translated 1603) refers to actors as "base rascals, vagabond abjects, and porterly hirelings." Though proud of their calling as literary men the dramatists looked with shame on their writing for the stage. Lodge, who in 1580 had defended poetry and plays against Gosson, in ScillÆ's Metamorphosis of 1589 declared his determination "to write no more of that whence shame doth grow." If Greene refers to plays at all he calls them "vanities"; connects their composition with the basest efforts of life, and arraigns dependence on "so mean a stay." Even Shakespeare "in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes" beweeps alone his "outcast state" (Sonnet XXIX), and exclaims "For I am shamed by that which I bring forth" (Sonnet LXXII). Conditions like these are not likely to bring the better social adjustments into play, or to call into a profession those who value name and fame supremely. Schelling[1] calls attention to the fact that playwriting took a higher position at the beginning of the seventeenth century than it had taken at the end of the previous century, and compares Marlowe, Shakespeare, Greene and Jonson, the sons of low life, with Beaumont, Fletcher, Chapman, Middleton and Marston, the sons of gentlemen. By the time the sons of gentlemen were ready to take to playwriting the path had been made ready for them by their predecessors. Society of the times in which Greene lived was not ready to treat either a playwright or an actor as a good citizen. And a son of a nobleman, entering the ranks of the pioneers, would have given his life as a sacrifice just as did Marlowe and Greene. Lodge was the son of a Lord Mayor, Peele's father was a man of some education, and Lyly had influential connections at court; yet the only man of the entire school of "university wits" who escaped a life of misery and a death of want was Lodge, and he in 1596 deserted literature for medicine. We cannot consider Greene's "memory a blot"[2] on a time that is truly represented as well by the tragical as the heroic outlines of his character and history. The sources of our knowledge and deduction concerning Greene's life are of four classes—records, autobiographical pamphlets and allusions, contemporary references, legends. To the indubitable records belong the university registers, the stationers' registers, and the title pages to his printed books. From the first we learn that Greene was entered as a sizar at St John's College, Cambridge, 26th November 1575, that he was admitted to the degree of B.A. some time in 1578, that he proceeded to the degree of M.A., after residence at Clare Hall, Cambridge, in 1583; from the second we learn that his first book was the first part of Mamillia, entered for publication 3rd October 1580, though not published until 1583, and other facts concerning the time of publication of his successive books and plays; from the signature to the Maiden's Dream, "R. Greene, Nordericensis," and to the address to Lodge's Euphues Shadow, "Robert Greene Norfolciensis," we learn that Greene was born in Norfolk. Of a lower order of certainty as to their application to Greene, yet still satisfying the closest scrutiny, is the record in the parish register of St Leonard's, Shoreditch, of the burial of Greene's illegitimate child, Fortunatus Greene, 12th August 1593; and the record in the register of St George, Tombland, uncovered and interpreted by Collins, indicating that the dramatist himself was the second child of Robert Greene, a saddler, and Jane his wife, and was baptised the 11th of July 1558. To the second class of biographical materials belong Greene's own prose works, the Mourning Garment, Never too Late, with the second part, Francesco's Fortunes, the Groatsworth of Wit, all partly autobiographical; and The Repentance of Robert Greene, confessedly autobiographical, but, until lately, of questioned authenticity. The biographical material in these works is ample, but its value is discounted by certain considerations involved in the motives of Greene's pamphlet composition. When Greene began to write, art was not yet strong enough to command a popular hearing without the assistance of a didactive motive. Adapting himself to the conditions with a tact that made him the most broadly read writer of his time, Greene made edification the end of his writing from the first. His second work to be entered on the Stationers' Register, March 1581, had a distinct moral purpose: "Youth, seeing all his ways so troublesome, abandoning virtue and leaning to vice, recalleth his former follies with an inward repentance." In choosing topics for popular pamphlets Greene tells such a story as that derived from Ælian in Planetomachia (1585), or he tells over the story of the prodigal son as in the Mourning Garment. And throughout his life moral purpose remained a factor in his prose and drama. He turned from romances to the composition of the conny-catching pamphlets, in the trust "that those discourses will do great good, and be very beneficial to the commonwealth of England." A Looking-Glass for London and England is a pure moral interlude. Often he moralises when it is unnecessary to do so, or when he has to change his original to introduce a didactic motive. Even the Palmer who tells the tale of Never too Late is himself penitent for his past sins. In Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay the jolly friar of Brazen-nose is made at the end to surrender his calling through motives of remorse as far as possible from the spirit of his life, and James IV. ends with a penitent sovereign begging forgiveness for his sins. These facts show, if they show anything, that the motive of repentance was a conventional thing with Greene, and that however faithful it may have been to his own experience not the least advantage in its use lay in its popularity. That it was a popular motive is shown by the vogue of such books as Tarlton's News out of Purgatory (1590), and by the fact that T. Newman, in a dedication to Greene's Vision (1592), asserts that "many have published repentances in his name." That much of Greene's autobiographical material is veracious we have corroborative evidence to prove; we should, however, not be justified in accepting it all without question. There is a bland shamelessness in the confession of sins that is itself one of the best signs of health. When Greene says, "I saw and practised such villainy as is abominable to declare," he is expressing in phrase strikingly similar to Hamlet's words to Ophelia, "I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me," a characteristic moral attitude of the times. What do we learn from the romances concerning Greene's life? The Mourning Garment is a modernised version of the prodigal son story, and its relation to Greene's own history may be slight or even factitious. The story of Never too Late touches Greene more closely. In this there is recounted the fortunes of "a gentleman of an ancient house, called Francesco; a man whose parentage though it were worshipful, yet it was not indued with much wealth; insomuch that his learning was better than his revenues, and his wit more beneficial than his substance." This Francesco, "casting his eye on a gentleman's daughter that dwelt not far from Caerbranck," named Isabel, fell in love with her, and married her against the opposition of Fregoso, her father. For five years "they laboured to maintain their loves, being as busy as bees, and as true as turtles, as desirous to satisfy the world with their desert as to feed the humours of their own desires." At the end of this time they were reconciled with Fregoso, and "they counted this smile of fortune able to countervail all the contrary storms that the adverse planets had inflicted upon them." Now after two years "it so chanced that Francesco had necessary business to dispatch certain his urgent affairs at the chief city of that island, called Troynovant: thither, with leave of his father, and farewell to his wife, he departed after they were married seven years." In the city he surrendered to the lures of a courtesan, Infida, and "seated in her beauty, he lived a long while, forgetting his return to Caerbranck." For three years the two lovers "securely slumbered in the sweetness of their pleasures," ignoring the womanly complaints of Isabel and neglectful of the passage of time. Then finding that "all his corn was on the floor, that his sheep were dipt, and the wool sold," Infida turned him out of doors. Francesco laments his hard fortune in an invective against courtesans that stings with the passion of the author's personal feeling. In his "perplexity he passed over three or four days till his purse was clean empty" and he was compelled "to carry his apparel to the brokers, and with great loss to make money to pay for his diet." "In this humour he fell in amongst a company of players, who persuaded him to try his wit in writing of comedies, tragedies, or pastorals, and if he could perform anything worth the stage, then they would largely reward him for his pains. Francesco, glad of this motion, seeing a means to mitigate the extremity of his want, thought it no dishonour to make gain of his wit or to get profit by his pen: and therefore, getting him home to his chamber, writ a comedy; which so generally pleased all the audience that happy were those actors in short time that could get any of his works, he grew so exquisite in that faculty." The remainder of the story relates Isabel's repulse of the seductions of an admirer, Infida's unsuccessful efforts at reconciliation with the now prosperous Francesco, and the latter's penitent return to his faithful wife. The story told in A Groatsworth of Wit quite closely resembles that of Never too Late and is clearly autobiographical. To this fact Greene bears witness when, near the end of the story, he writes: "Here, gentlemen, break I off Roberto's speech, whose life in most part agreeing with mine, found one self punishment as I have done. Hereafter suppose me the said Roberto, and I will go on with that he promised." In this story, "an old new-made gentleman" named Gorinius, living in an island city "made rich by merchandise, and populous by long space," had two sons, the one a scholar, named Roberto, married and but little regarded, the other named Lucanio, the heir-apparent of his father's ill-gathered goods. On his death-bed Gorinius bequeathed his entire property to Lucanio: "only I reserve for Roberto, thy well-read brother, an old groat (being the stock I first began with), wherewith I wish him to buy a groatsworth of wit." Upon the death of Gorinius, and the distribution of the property according to will, Roberto "grew into an inward contempt of his father's unequal legacy, and determinate resolution to work Lucanio all possible injury." As Lucanio "was of a condition simple, shamefast, and flexible to any counsel," Roberto seemed on a fair way to success, until Lamilia, a courtesan with whom he had plotted for Lucanio's undoing, repudiated the understanding and informed the heir of the plot against his gold. Forbidden the house, "Roberto, in an extreme ecstasy, rent his hair, curst his destiny, blamed his treachery, but most of all exclaimed against Lamilia, and in her against all enticing courtesans." ... "With this he laid his head on his hand, and leant his elbow on the ground, sighing out sadly, 'Heu patior telis vulnera facta meis!'" Roberto's lamentations were overheard by one sitting on the other side of the hedge, who, getting over, offered such comfort as his ability would yield, doing so "the rather," as he said, "for that I suppose you are a scholar, and pity it is men of learning should live in lack." Greatly wondering Roberto asked how he might be employed. "'Why, easily,' quoth he, 'and greatly to your benefit; for men of my profession get by scholars their whole living.' 'What is your profession?' said Roberto. 'Truly, sir,' said he, 'I am a player.' 'A player!' quoth Roberto; 'I took you rather for a gentleman of great living; for if by outward habit men should be censured, I tell you, you would be taken for a substantial man.' 'So am I where I dwell,' quoth the player, 'reputed able at my proper cost to build a windmill.'" Roberto now again asked how he was to be used. "'Why, sir, in making plays,' said the other; 'for which you shall be well paid, if you will take the pains.' Roberto, perceiving no remedy, thought it best to respect his present necessity, (and), to try his wit, went with him willingly." As Roberto's fortunes improved Lucanio's drooped, until finally "Roberto hearing of his brother's beggary, albeit he had little remorse of his miserable state, yet did he seek him out, to use him as a property; whereby Lucanio was somewhat provided for." The character and miserable end of Roberto as a result of the profession he had assumed may be given in Greene's own words: "For now when the number of deceits caused Roberto to be hateful almost to all men, his immeasurable drinking had made him the perfect image of the dropsy, and the loathsome scourge of lust tyrannised in his bones. Living in extreme poverty, and having nothing to pay but chalk, which now his host accepted not for current, this miserable man lay comfortlessly languishing, having but one groat left (the just proportion of his father's legacy), which looking on, he cried, 'O, now it is too late, too late to buy wit with thee; and therefore will I see if I can sell to careless youth what I negligently forgot to buy.'" To a somewhat different class of testimony belongs The Repentance of Robert Greene, probably an authentic exemplar of that very popular class of deathbed repentance that was multiplied by other hands after Greene's death. Little can be found in this work but admonitions to a higher life and caveats against lust. Such details as are given are presented with no chronology. Of his early life Greene tells us that "being at the University of Cambridge, I light amongst wags as lewd as myself, with whom I consumed the flower of my youth; who drew me to travel into Italy and Spain, in which places I saw and practised such villainy as is abominable to declare.... At my return into England, I ruffled out in my silks, in the habit of malcontent, and seemed so discontent that no place would please me to abide in, nor no vocation cause me to stay myself in: but after I had by degrees proceeded Master of Arts, I left the university and away to London; where (after I had continued some short time, and driven myself out of credit with sundry of my friends) I became an author of plays, and a penner of love-pamphlets, so that I soon grew famous in that quality, that who for that trade grown so ordinary about London as Robin Greene?" Once, Greene tells us, he felt a terror of God's judgment. This followed a lecture by a "godly learned man" in St Andrew's Church in the city of Norwich. But when his companions fell upon him, in a jesting manner calling him Puritan and precisian, and wished he might have a pulpit, what he had learned went quite out of his remembrance. "Soon after I married a gentleman's daughter of good account, with whom I lived for a while; but ... after I had a child by her, I cast her off, having spent up the marriage money which I had obtained by her. "Then left I her at six or seven, who went into Lincolnshire, and I to London; where in short space I fell into favour with such as were of honourable and good calling." But though he knew how to get a friend he "had not the gift or reason how to keep a friend." Further he tells us that he had wholly betaken himself to the planning of plays, that "these vanities and other trifling pamphlets I penned of love and vain fantasies was my chiefest stay of living," and that he had refrained his wife's company for six years. What may be the value of the third class of biographical material, that derived from contemporary references, is, perhaps, best revealed by reviewing the history of the controversy with Gabriel Harvey. In 1590 Richard Harvey, the second of three brothers, attacked all poets and writers, and Lyly and Nash particularly, in a pamphlet entitled The Lamb of God, terming them "piperly make-plays and make-bates," and comparing them with Martin. Though not himself attacked, Greene, because "he writ more than four others," retorted in defence of his brother dramatists in A Quip for an Upstart Courtier (1592), making a satirical thrust at the Harveys as the sons of a rope-maker. At the request of Greene's physician the most offensive lines were expunged from all except possibly the first edition. But the harm had been done. Greene died before the Harveys could or would make answer. Then, in Gabriel Harvey's Four Letters (1592), the memory of Greene was attacked in one of the most venomous pamphlets known to the literature of vilification. Harvey's four epistles were followed by Nash's Strange News, and other controversial pamphlets, in which Nash attempts, rather light-heartedly, to defend Greene's memory. Other writers who take occasion to speak a good word for Greene, after his death, are Chettle in A Kind Hart's Dream (1593), a certain R. B., author of Greene's Funerals (1594), and Meres in Palladis Tamia (1598). Strange as it may seem it is impossible to decide that Harvey seriously wronged Greene in his accounts of fact. Like Greene, Harvey has been too much abused on account of his unfortunate quarrels with men whom history was to discover were his superiors. His pedantry, his egotism, and the very virulence of his hatred seem to nullify the effect of his assault, without greatly militating against the truth of the account he gives. Nash, who is vigorous in his expressions of respect for his friend, is notably weak in his rebuttals of fact. With the exception of some manifest exaggerations, Harvey's account of Greene's death-bed, of his association with Cutting Ball and his sister, and of his son Fortunatus, must be accepted as substantially a true one. Harvey's account will not be given here but it is epitomised when "we come to finish up his life." There remain for consideration, and in most part for dismissal, a few traditions that have grown up about the name of Greene. Early biographers, among whom was Dyce, attempted to show that Greene had at one time been a minister. This opinion was partly based upon the two manuscript notes on a copy of George-a-Greene: "Written by ... a minister who acted the piner's pt in it himselfe. Teste W. Shakespeare," and "Ed. Juby saith that ye play was made by Ro. Greene." Aside from the fact that these notes are not shown to have any authority, and may, in fact, contradict each other, the probabilities are all against the hypothesis that Greene was ever a minister. Nowhere in his singularly open personal revelations does he suggest that he ever acted as such. Indeed, his expressions are inconsistent with such an idea. "In all my life I never did any good," he writes in his Repentance, and in the same tract he tells of that incipient conversion that was nipped in the bud by the ridicule of his fellows. Surely this account does not sound like the confession of an ex-minister, and these same copesmates would certainly not have maintained silence had they known that Greene had held a living. Considerations of time make it impossible that Greene should have been the Robert Greene who, in 1576, was one of the Queen's chaplains, for at this time he could not have been more than eighteen years old; nor is it at all likely that he is the Greene who, in 1584-5, was vicar of Tollesbury in Essex, for in these years he was engaged in the unclerical exercise of preparing for printing The Mirror of Modesty, Morando The Tritameron of Love, The Card of Fancy, and Planetomachia. The theory that Greene was an actor is traced back to the manuscript notes already quoted, and to some ambiguous remarks by Harvey in his Four Letters. Fleay's ingenious conjecture that Greene is identical with that Rupert Persten who accompanied Leicester's company to Saxony and Denmark in 1585-87, and that this name is equivalent to "Robert the Parson," is discredited on philological grounds as well as for its general lack of weight. That Greene may have now and then assumed a part upon the stage is quite possible; but that he never associated himself with the actor's calling is made quite clear from his contemptuous treatment of actors in the passages already quoted. It is perhaps not entirely necessary to dismiss the theory, based on the entry on the title-page of Planetomachia, "By Robert Greene, Master of Arts and student in physic," that Greene had intended to study medicine, and was hindered from pursuing his purpose by his success in literature. It is likely, however, that Greene here uses the term "physic" in the sense of "natural philosophy," as it was used by Chaucer and Gower, and that he had particular desire to defend his ability to treat an astronomical topic such as that of Planetomachia. We have, in a disjointed manner, no doubt, presented Greene's life under the heads of the sources from which our information is gained, rather than in regular chronological sequence, in order that due discrimination may be used in constructing the finished scheme of his life's activities. To the imaginative reader there is material enough and to spare, but to the exact scientist there is a bare modicum. Without rash assumptions it seems safe to imagine that Greene's father, like Rabbi Bilessi and Gorinius, was well-to-do; that with the exception of the duration of his domestic life, Greene's married life is substantially represented by the story of Isabel and Francesco; that as a playwright Greene experienced the vicissitudes suggested in Never too Late and A Groatsworth of Wit; and that his death is substantially represented by Harvey in Four Letters. Attempting a bare outline of Greene's life one would feel safe in assuming that he was born not earlier than 1558; that he took his bachelor's degree at St John's College, Cambridge, in 1578; thereafter toured the continent, probably after the 3rd of October 1580, at which date the first part of Mamillia was registered; that returning he took his M.A. at Clare Hall in 1583, and immediately began the composition of love pamphlets and comedies, the latter being now lost; that he married not later than 1585, lived with his wife until after the birth of a child, in 1586 deserted her, and went to London never to return. There undertaking the composition of serious plays, the first extant play is produced in 1587 or 1588, he is incorporated Master of Arts at Oxford in July 1588, and continues "that high and loose course of living which poets generally follow" (Anthony Wood), writing love pamphlets until about 1590, and then, in obedience to a promise repeatedly made by himself, pressing forward the exposure of the devices used by cozeners and conny-catchers, until his untimely death on 3rd September 1592. During the last twelve years of a short but varied and active life Greene was more or less prominently before the public eye. For much of this time he was easily the most widely read of English writers. His literary activities were scattered over a broad range of topics and styles. In his work there are represented the wit, the romance, the bombast, the Euphuism, the Arcadianism, and no less the new naturalism of his time. He expressed himself in novellas, in pamphlets, in controversial broadsides, in comedies, in serious plays, and in Italianate verse. He was in fact the first litterateur[3] of England, and his prose fiction represents what Herford has called "for English-speaking contemporaries the most considerable body of English narrative which the language yet contained." Twenty-seven romances and prose tracts were published during Greene's lifetime, excluding The Defence of Conny-catching, which cannot with certainty be ascribed to him; and nine tracts and plays, including the doubtful George-a-Greene, were published after his death. Aside from Greene's remarkable versatility and rapidity of workmanship,[4] his most striking characteristic as an author is his ability immediately to adapt himself to the changing literary demands of the hour. This will be seen to have particular significance in connection with the question of the chronology of his plays, yet it is pertinent here as pointing the dividing line between his earlier and later interests in composition. At the end of Never too Late (1590) Greene says, "And therefore as soon as may be, gentlemen, look for Francesco's further fortunes, and after that my Farewell to Folly, and then adieu to all amorous pamphlets." And in the dedication of Francesco's Fortunes (Part II. of Never too Late) he advised his gentlemen readers to look for "more deeper matters." So also at the end of his Mourning Garment (1590) Greene announces that he will write no more love pamphlets. This work must serve as the first-fruits of his new labours and the last farewell to his fond desires. Again, in the dedicatory epistle to Farewell to Folly, licensed in 1587 but not published until 1591, about which time it is reasonable to suppose the epistle was written, he says this is "the last I mean ever to publish of such superficial labours." That he is sincere in this promise is clear from the fact that, while he published Philomela in 1592, he is careful in doing so to explain that it had been hatched long ago and was now given his name at the solicitation of his printer. We have here fixed a point about the year 1590 for the beginning of new and more serious work. Two theories have been advanced to explain the nature of this work. The one theory, which has among its adherents Collins, the latest editor of Greene's complete plays, supposes that Greene must refer to the beginning of his play-writing. Against this theory there are the strong objections that Greene must have written plays before he made any promise to engage in more serious writing, the strong circumstantial and internal evidence that several of the extant plays ante-date such a promise, and the no less significant fact that Greene had no pride in his work as a playwright and no respect for the calling as a serious occupation. The second theory is that Greene had long contemplated the exposure of the arts and devices of the under-world of prey, and that the year 1590 represents approximately the time at which he ceased the composition of romantic and mythologising pamphlets, which associated him with Lyly and Sidney and the more affected of the university writers, and began the composition of realistic studies in the rogue society of his own time. There is no reason to suppose that Greene was not sincere in his desire to present an edifying picture of the dangers surrounding London youth and the weaknesses and vanities in English society.[5] The first pamphlet, A Notable Discovery of Cosenage, was printed in 1591, and was "written for the general benefit of all gentlemen, citizens, apprentices, country farmers and yeomen." Thereafter followed The Second Part of Conny-catching, The Third and Last Part of Conny-catching, A Disputation Between a He Conny-catcher and a She Conny-catcher, and others of the same type, of equal or less authenticity. All of these are very far from the old romance in content, in method and in language; Greene is now bold, slashing and fearless, and wields something of the scorpion whip of Nash in his taunting cruelty of assault. Changing his attitude he now stands very near his subject; he writes from among the society he castigates. There is some unusual significance in this new attitude of Greene's, particularly for drama. We shall find, it is believed, the same distinction between Greene's earlier and later plays, not as clearly marked as the change in prose, but definite enough to establish within the dramatic work of Greene a line of cleavage separating the mythology-loaded language and unnatural incident of the Tamburlaine and Spanish Tragedy type of play from the plays of simple poetry and homely rural atmosphere that were to prepare the way for the domestic drama of Heywood and Dekker and Munday and Chettle, and to have a real influence on the dramaturgy of Shakespeare. Upon the question of the chronology of Greene's plays no editor can afford to be dogmatic. Yet so carefully have the varied spiritual forces of Greene's life been studied in connection with the manifest literary influences of his time, and so painstaking have been the deductions from those facts with which we are provided, that one feels safe in laying down, upon the researches of such scholars as Dyce, Fleay, Storojenko, Gayley and Collins,[6] an almost certain scheme of succession and chronology of Greene's extant dramas. A point of departure is provided by the theory of Collins, often vigorously insisted upon, that Greene did not begin to write plays until about 1590. In this belief Collins is joined by C. H. Hart,[7] who adduces the passage from Greene's Farewell to Folly, quoted two pages above, as a reason for thinking Greene took up playwriting near the end of his life. Against any such theory there are strong specific as well as important general objections. It would require that all of Greene's plays, in addition to half a dozen pamphlets, should have been written between the opening of 1591 and the time of Greene's death in 1592. In A Groatsworth of Wit Greene all but certainly refers to himself as an "arch play-making poet," and in The Repentance of Robert Greene he says, "I became an author of plays and a penner of love pamphlets." Certainly that total dissolution that follows the practices of his calling could not have taken place in two years, nor would one who thus joins the composition of plays and poems have waited until ten years after the licensing of his first tract in 1580 to write his first play. If Never too Late and A Groatsworth of Wit have any autobiographical value whatever those portions that treat of playwriting experience are worthy the most credence, and the theory that Greene should have taken up playwriting late is quite inconsistent with the purport of both of them. But aside from any such considerations as these, there are certain general principles having to do with the customs of literary composition of the time, and particularly of the group in which Greene moved, that make it quite improbable that Greene should have waited until 1590 before beginning to write plays. Nothing is clearer than that the movements of these pre-Shakespearean groups were not movements of the individual but of the mass. There is in the work of this era the utmost possible play and interplay of influence. Marlowe was the only strikingly originative writer of the times, yet the facets of his contact with the literary life of England and the Continent have by no means as yet been numbered. Any new style of composition immediately assumed the dignity of a school. Lyly's style became so popular that Euphuism became a convention. So the appearance of the Arcadia, of Tamburlaine, of a romance by Greene, was followed by a flood of imitative works. Greene's Tully's Love is used in Every Woman in Her Humour, a comedy of humours after the model of Jonson; the author of Sir John Oldcastle borrows from The Pinner of Wakefield the swallowing of the seals; Harvey accuses Nash of being "the ape of Greene," and Greene of being the "ape of Euphues"; Tamburlaine is imitated again and again, sometimes in whole, as in Alphonsus of Arragon, Selimus, and The Battle of Alcazar, but more often through the unconscious influence of its affected language and dramatic types. As much can be said of the imitation of Kyd's Spanish Tragedy. Traces of the same source-book appear in Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and Marlowe's Dr Faustus, and identical lines appear in Greene's Orlando Furioso and Peele's Old Wives' Tale. The same comedy appears in A Looking-Glass for London and England, Locrine and Selimus, and The Taming of a Shrew contains lines from Tamburlaine and Dr Faustus. Shakespeare borrows from Greene, Oberon for A Midsummer Night's Dream; features of the story of Euphues, his Censure to Philautus for Troilus and Cressida; features of Farewell to Folly for Much Ado About Nothing; characters from the Mourning Garment for Polonius and Laertes, and innumerable reminiscent lines. Sometimes the influence is more complicate still. Greene in Pandosto borrows from Lyly's Campaspe, and Shakespeare, borrowing from Greene for his Winter's Tale, approximates Lyly's form; and Greene, ridiculing Marlowe's Tamburlaine, makes some allusions that indicate that he as well as Marlowe must have been acquainted with Primaudaye. Cases of this kind are so frequent that they seem to have no individual bearing, but to refer to the general conditions of art composition of the day. In such a system of community of ideas Greene was entirely at home. Of this we have abundant evidence in his often displayed ability to feel the popular pulse, and to make himself a part of every growing movement. His first works were written under the influence of the Italian school. In these early works there is a strong strain of Euphuism, which is made explicit in his Euphues, his Censure to Philautus (1587). Two years later a new style had arisen through the composition of Sidney's Arcadia (published in 1590), and Greene aligns himself with the new pastoral movement in his Menaphon. Not content with the tacit desertion of the conceits of Lyly he gives his new work the sub-title Camilla's Alarum to Slumbering Euphues, and attacks his old models for artificiality. So also Greene is quick to utilise contemporary events to add to the popular appeal of his writings. From the publication of the Spanish Masquerado (1589), celebrating the victory over the Spanish Armada, there is every reason to believe Greene received his warmest recognition at court; and sincere as were his conny-catching pamphlets we may be sure that their value was not lessened in Greene's eyes by their popular appeal. Greene was neither more nor less of an imitator than his fellows; his ideals and methods of composition were, no doubt, those of his time, and if we cannot claim for him that he consistently broke ground in new domains of expression, we may at any rate be certain that he did not fall far behind in the progressive motion of the art of his era. The significance of these things in the study of the chronology of Greene's plays should be manifest. There were during Greene's literary life three extraordinary dramatic successes on the London stage—Tamburlaine, Dr Faustus and The Spanish Tragedy. It is reasonable to suppose that the man who, in prose composition, always struck when the iron was hot, would, as a playwright, use the same expedition to take advantage of a popular wave of enthusiasm. That Greene's Alphonsus of Arragon was written under the inspiration of Marlowe's Tamburlaine, and that Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay was written as a reflex from Dr Faustus is so certain as to require no demonstration. And it is only less certain that we have in Orlando Furioso a reminiscence of Tamburlaine and of The Spanish Tragedy, and that James IV. was inspired as a pseudo-historical play by the growing popularity of the chronicle type. According to the best authority obtainable Tamburlaine appeared in 1587, The Spanish Tragedy before 1587, and Dr Faustus in 1588. With these conditions before us, and in the light of Greene's known character and the habits of the times, it is scarcely possible to think that Greene should have waited until Dr Faustus had somewhat dimmed the lustre of Tamburlaine before imitating the latter; or that he should have ignored the undoubted vigour of the magician motive to imitate a form that had enjoyed prior popularity, only to take up for treatment a drama in the occult spirit, when this type in its turn had been laid on the shelf in favour of the newer form of chronicle play. Ignoring then for the present A Looking-Glass for London and England, which is not entirely Greene's own composition, and George-a-Greene, concerning which doubts must exist, we are provided with the order of succession of the four remaining plays in the order of publication of their prototypes: Alphonsus of Arragon, Orlando Furioso, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, James IV. Further investigation provides more explicit chronological data. Alphonsus of Arragon is the earliest of Greene's extant plays. Its date has been set at 1587 or 1588 by Gayley, who has carefully worked over the conclusions of Fleay, Storojenko and others. That Greene had been interested in Alphonsus as early as 1584 is clear from his mention[Pg xxxiii] of the name in the dedication to The Card of Fancy. The play was not written before Tamburlaine, for that hero is mentioned in it; on the other hand there are several considerations that seem to show that it was written soon after Tamburlaine in an effort to share some of that play's popularity. Greene's words in the prologue: "Will now begin to treat of bloody Mars, seem to announce a purpose to begin a new warlike vein. The play resembles Tamburlaine in bombast, in rant, in comparing a victorious warrior with the gods, in the motive of Asiatic and Mohammedan conquest, and in its double original design. Unlike Tamburlaine only one of the parts was completed. There is a possibility that the two plays are mentioned in conjunction by Peele in his well-known "Farewell" verses to Sir John Norris and his companions (1589): "Bid theatres and proud tragedians, By the ingenuity of Mr Fleay we are able to conjecture that "Mahomet's Poo" probably refers to the brazen head, or poll, through which the Prophet speaks in the fourth act of the play. That Alphonsus was not successful on the stage seems likely when one compares the play with the successful productions of the day. Its failure is indicated by the fact that, though a second part was promised in the epilogue, no such part is known to have been written. More interesting still, for the light it throws on the fortunes of this play, and on Greene's relationship with his contemporaries, is the study of the antagonism that suddenly appears in all of Greene's allusions to Marlowe. This feeling apparently dates from the beginning of 1588, or about the time of the probable first performance of Alphonsus of Arragon. It is first marked in the very satirical allusion to Tamburlaine contained in the address to the gentleman readers prefixed to Perimedes (1588). In this the author expresses a purpose to "keep my old course to palter up something in prose using mine old poesie still Omne tulit punctum, although lately two Gentlemen Poets made two madmen of Rome beat it out of their paper bucklers, and had it in derision for that I could not make my verses jet upon the stage in tragical buskins, every word filling the mouth like the faburden of Bo-Bell, daring God out of heaven with that Atheist Tamburlaine or blaspheming with the mad priest of the sun." He ends this passage as follows: "If I speak darkly, gentlemen, and offend with this digression, I crave pardon, in that I but answer in print what they have offered on the stage." Just who the two poets and two madmen of Rome may have been it is now impossible to say. What stands out clear is that Greene has been attacked on the stage for failing to make his "verses jet upon the stage in tragical buskins," after the manner of Marlowe's Tamburlaine; and as Marlowe was the atheist, and not Tamburlaine, it is also clear that Greene has a feeling of resentment against his brother poet. The explanation that seems most sensible is that Greene has attempted to write a play in Marlowe's vein, has failed, and being publicly taunted for his failure, either by Marlowe himself or by his partisans, expresses his determination to continue writing in prose, the form of composition that has already brought him fame. Greene's animosity toward Marlowe continued for several years. In Nash's address prefixed to Greene's Menaphon (1589)[8] the same feeling is manifested, possibly at the instigation of Greene. Here Nash, perhaps to throw contempt on Marlowe as a writer of plays, vaunts Greene as a writer of romance. Menaphon, he holds, excels the achievements of men who, unable to write romance, "think to outbrave better pens with the swelling bombast of a bragging blank verse." The same attack is persistently pushed in the poem, also prefixed to Menaphon, by Thomas Barnaby (signing himself by anagram Brabine), in the words "the pomp of speech that strives to thunder from a stage man's throat." Again and again Greene and his friends return to the attack on Marlowe, now in Francesco's Fortunes, in a slighting reference to the trade of Marlowe's father,[9] now in Greene's Vision, and finally in A Groatsworth of Wit, in which, though in more friendly guise, Greene reproves Marlowe for his atheism.[10] There can be little doubt that thus was displayed the rancour of the unsuccessful as against the successful dramatist. The play of Alphonsus of Arragon is in fact quite unworthy to be placed beside Marlowe's Tamburlaine in any comparison for literary excellence. Whether Greene recognised this or not he was undoubtedly influenced in his later play composition by the failure of his first effort. Without immediately striking out in any new vein he now proceeds to burlesque and to parody where first he had imitated. About 1585 there was produced Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, a tragedy of blood, of madness, and revenge, with many ingredients of the Senecan plays. This play and Marlowe's Tamburlaine were the chief sensations of the English stage of the sixteenth century. No single play of Shakespeare's can be said to have had the instantaneous popular success and the immediate and widespread imitation given to both of these plays. In the next play that Greene wrote unaided after the failure of his Alphonsus of Arragon there is discernible an entire change in the author's attitude. He is no more originative than he was before, but he does not again attempt to treat an imitative drama in the spirit of its original. Certain of the scenes of Alphonsus of Arragon were ridiculous enough, but they were undertaken in no apparent spirit of burlesque. In Orlando Furioso Greene proceeds to parody the two most popular types holding the boards in his day. The real hero of Orlando Furioso is not the mad French knight, Orlando, but Sacripant. And Sacripant is a foiled Tamburlaine, a high aspiring king whose ambition comes to nothingness. In the spirit of Macbeth, who himself had something of Tamburlaine's lust of conquest, are the words of Sacripant: "I hold these salutations as ominous; for saluting me by that which I am not, he presageth what I shall be." And in the musings of Sacripant there operates the spirit of Tamburlaine. "Sweet are the thoughts that smother from conceit," he reflects; his chair presents "a throne of majesty"; his thoughts "dream on a diadem"; he becomes "co-equal with the gods." The lines beginning "Fair queen of love," spoken by Orlando (p. 187 of this edition) remind us of the lofty yearning love of Tamburlaine for Zenocrate. As a play Orlando Furioso is Tamburlaine by perversions, and purposely so. Its chief martial spirit strives for high ends by ignoble means. He fails to win his mistress, and he fails to win his throne; done out of both by a madman. If this play is a perversion of the Tamburlaine motive, it is also a burlesque on the tragedy of blood. There are indications that Greene would have been quite willing to ridicule Kyd. Nash, in the same preface to Menaphon in which he had ridiculed Marlowe, satirises Kyd in the famous[Pg xxxvii] lines, "blood is a beggar," and "whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragical speeches." Kyd, as a non-university man, represented that rising coterie, of which Shakespeare was the master, against whom the jealous shafts of the university wits were directed. The signs of the influence of the tragedy of blood type are many. In the balanced and parallel lines of Senecan character, and found little elsewhere in Greene: "Only by me was lov'd Angelica, and "'Angelica doth none but Medor love,' in the allusions to Orestes, "Orestes was never so mad in his life as you were"; in the symbols of a classic Hades, Pluto and Averne; in the interspersed quotations from Latin and Italian; in the vague continental setting; in the use of a chorus; in the unheroic revenge motive; in the burlesque death, and the tearing of limb from limb; in "Orlando's sudden insanity and the ridiculously inadequate occasion of it, the headlong dÉnouement, the farcical technique, the mock heroic atmosphere, the paradoxical absence of pathos, the absurdly felicitous conclusion,—all seemingly unwitting,"[11] we have either imitated or burlesqued the characteristics of the popular revenge and blood play. That Orlando Furioso was not written after 1591 is clear from a passage in A Defence of Conny-catching (1592) in which Greene is charged with selling the play twice, once to the Queen's players for twenty nobles, and, when these had gone to the provinces, to the Admiral's men for as many more. As the Queen's players left the court 26th December 1591, the play must have existed before that date. A reference to the Spanish Armada provides 30th July 1588 as a posterior limit. No valid conclusions can be drawn from certain resemblances between[Pg xxxviii] lines in this play and lines in Peele's Old Wives' Tale,[12] on account of uncertainty as to the date of the latter play. There seems no reason to doubt that Gayley is right in pointing out 26th December 1588 as the date of the first performance of the play before the Queen at court. About the time that Greene's Orlando Furioso appeared there was presented, perhaps at the same play-house, the Theatre, Marlowe's play, Dr Faustus. In this play Marlowe treated with characteristic intensity the tragical story of a magician who aspired for wisdom as Tamburlaine had aspired for power. Magic and witchcraft were popular in English literature. The story of Dr Faustus was issued in German in 1587, and an English translation was probably made about the same time. The prose narrative of The Famous History of Friar Bacon must also have been well known. Magic and incantation had already been used by Greene in the Brazen Head of Alphonsus of Arragon, in Melissa of Orlando Furioso, and in the priests of Rasni in A Looking-Glass for London and England. But that Marlowe was the first to see a large dramatic motive in the conventional magic is certain. Here again we must accept it that Marlowe was the leader and Greene the adapter. We must agree with Collins that "the presumption in favour of Faustus having preceded Greene's play is so overwhelmingly strong that we cannot suppose that Marlowe borrowed from Greene." But Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay is by no means an imitation of Dr Faustus, nor is it a mere parody. Through his new mastery of technique Greene was deriving a method of his own that was to make him an effective and independent story-teller. Also there was developing in his art a refinement and sanity that revolted from the broadly-drawn conceits and exaggerated passion of Marlowe's early style. There is something suggestively ironical in the opposition of the titles of the two plays, the honourable history of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, as compared with the tragical history of Dr Faustus. So also there must be some delicate satire in the comic summoning of Burden and the Hostess as opposed to the impressive evocation of Alexander and Helen. And one of the chief episodes in the play may have a jocose oblique reference to Dr Faustus. "It is hardly too great an assumption," says Ward, "to regard Bacon's victory over Vandermast as a cheery outdoing by genuine English magic of the pretentious German article," represented in the play of Dr Faustus. In Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay we have the first extant expression of Greene's independent genius working along characteristic lines. Though Marlowe provides him his starting-point, the treatment is Greene's alone. While lacking in originativeness this play reveals that clearly-marked individual attitude toward art and the people of his brain that was to give Greene's plays a pronounced influence in the development of domestic comedy. And, according to Henslowe's records, the play was as great a success as Dr Faustus had been. It seems likely that Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay appeared the year following the production of Dr Faustus in 1588. The year 1589 is also indicated by other evidence. In theme the play resembles Greene's Tully's Love of that year. In verse it is not unlike Orlando Furioso, which had appeared in 1588. A striking piece of collateral evidence is adduced by Fleay, who, noting Edward's remark in Act I., "Lacy, thou know'st next Friday is Saint James'," is able to show that 1589 is the only year between 1578 and 1595 in which St James's day falls on Friday. Further confirmation of this date arises from a satirical thrust by Greene at the now unknown author of Fair Em, the Miller's Daughter of Manchester, in his letter prefixed to Farewell to Folly. Fair Em bears about the same relationship to Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay that this play bears to Dr Faustus. In other words, while it is not exactly an imitation, it is in many respects a reflection and a parody of the earlier play. The chief points in which Fair Em parodies Greene's play are in the title, in which the author, "somewhat affecting the letter," plays upon Greene's "Fair Maid of Fressingfield"; in the relationship of a king with his courtier in the courtship of a mistress, in Lubeck's fidelity to William the Conqueror in the matter of his love for Mariana contrasted with Lacy's treachery to Edward in courting Margaret; in Em's scornful refusal to return to Mandeville after he has discarded her contrasted with Margaret's hasty forgiveness of Lacy after his unkind desertion; and in the fact that, while in Friar Bacon Lacy is put into disguise to pursue his love suits, in Fair Em it is the king who masquerades to gain a mistress. Greene no more relished the imitation of his work in 1591 than he did the following year, when he wrote A Groatsworth of Wit. His allusion to this play in his Farewell to Folly epistle is identified by his quoting two lines that occur toward the end of the play, "A man's conscience is a thousand witnesses," and "Love covereth the multitude of sins." Upon such sentiments in the drama Greene throws ridicule in the following words: "O, 'tis a jolly matter when a man hath a familiar style and can indite a whole year and never be beholding to art! But to bring Scripture to prove anything he says, and kill it dead with the text in a trifling subject of love, I tell you is no small piece of cunning." The most important point in these lines is the indication that a year had been spent in the composition of the play Greene was ridiculing. If we are to accept it that Fair Em is in any respect an imitation of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay we must count at least a year before the production of Fair Em to find the date of Greene's play. Accepting early 1591 as the point after which Fair Em could not have been written,[13] Friar Bacon must have been produced at least a year before that time, in 1589, or early in 1590. Supposing, on account of the beautiful eulogy to Elizabeth at the close of the play, that it must have been intended for presentation at court, Gayley suggests St Stephen's day, 26th December 1589, as the probable date of the play's production. There is an element in the play of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay which, viewed in the light of the dramatic influences of the times, reveals again Greene's quickness of apprehension of a significant new strain in the drama. It is the introduction of Prince Edward, the King of England, and the Emperor of Germany, into the fabric of his plot. This play must precede Marlowe's Edward II. by several months, and at this point we are able finally to dissociate Greene's genius from the direct influence of his great contemporary. In order to develop this point it may be well to glance hastily at the history of the chronicle type of play in England to the time of Greene's James IV. Plays on subjects drawn from English history had been more or less common since the production of Gorboduc in 1562. Three Latin plays, Byrsa Basilica and the two college plays by Thomas Legge, Richardus Tertius, had come somewhat near to the true chronicle type. But it was not until the latter years of the ninth decade of the century that dramatists began on any large scale to utilise the history and mythology of England's kings and wars for the celebrating of her contemporary glories. Even before the Spanish Armada England had become conscious of her own power and eager for the display of her prowess. It was under the stimulus of this growing consciousness of might that the first true chronicle play, The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, was written. In this play a dramatist for the first time displays an adequate sense of the objective value of the materials derived from history, combined with that insight into human nature and largeness of imaginative power that are necessary to make of the dry records of Holinshed and Stow a moving dramatic story. The Life and Death of Jack Straw, which also probably preceded the Armada in its first production, is, while not so good as The Famous Victories, a play of vigorous characterisation and native English colouring of historical events. But we are probably not far from the truth in supposing that it was the year 1588 that brought the complete development of the chronicle type. From this year dates the production of the two parts of The Troublesome Reign of King John of England, the date being indicated by the allusion to Tamburlaine in the prologue. The First Part of the Contention betwixt two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, etc., and The True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York, etc., upon which are based the second and third parts of Shakespeare's Henry VI. trilogy, must be dated little, if any, later. The Troublesome Reign is known to have been performed by the Queen's men after the other university men had left Greene alone as representative of this company. The theory that connects Greene's name with the composition is, however, so much a matter of conjecture that nothing can be gained from its consideration. Following these two works, almost certainly not preceding them, as some have thought, comes Marlowe's Edward II., the faultless masterpiece of his dramatic composition, produced probably in 1590. And within a few years, in quick succession, there came Edward III., Richard II., and Richard III., the Henry VI. trilogy, and the culminating trilogy of the two parts of Henry IV. and Henry V. Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, which appeared in the midst of a movement toward the chronicle type of play, so far adopted its formulas as to introduce historic English characters into the fabric of a story based on prose romance. No feature whatever of the chronicle element as introduced into the play is found in the source-book, nor is there any historical warrant for any of the action presented under the names of the kings. Greene's later attitude toward the rapidly-growing chronicle type of play reveals the motives and characteristics of his art at its maturity. He is still willing to borrow from the dominant types of art holding the stage at the time such expedients as shall serve to adjust his work to the popular demand. But he no longer transcends his own powers in an attempt at imitation, or does violence to his own principles of beauty in a parody of the work of a rival. His note is now a clear and individual one, and to the day of his death it sounds upon a definite key. Greene's powers were no more equal to the blowing into pulsing life of the dead bones of the chronicles of Stow and Holinshed than they were efficient to answer in verse to the lure of "impossible things" after the manner of Marlowe. Greene may have expressed himself in a chronicle play as did Marlowe in Edward II., and as did others of his time, but the simple fact is that no chronicle play of unmixed type can with certainty be assigned to him, and until a light is thrown that modifies somewhat the view here outlined we must regard his part in the composition of The Troublesome Reign and The True Tragedy as distinctly a subordinate one. These considerations are of some importance in considering James IV. and George-a-Greene. Assuming that George-a-Greene is Greene's work, it is clear that here he but modified the chronicle play type to his own purposes, and that he based his story, not on historical narrative, but on the legends of the people as retained in ballad and prose romance. Nor is James IV. based on historical records. Going back to the source from which he drew his early stories, he rests his plot on the first novel of the third decade of Giraldi Cinthio's Hecatommithi. The play's sole claim to be counted in the chronicle group is based on the fact that certain of the imaginary characters of Cinthio's fiction are provided with the names of members of the English ruling family. The events of the story have no connection with history, and Greene's title, The Scottish History of James the Fourth, slain at Flodden, is but an ingenious device to reach with a romantic and misleading title the interest of an audience now newly turned toward historical topics. No evidence whatever can be adduced to show that Greene was in any respect indebted to Marlowe's Edward II. for his pseudo-chronicle on James IV. Present information makes it seem probable that the plays were performed about the same time, Marlowe's play being, perhaps, a few months the earlier. The plays are quite different. Each dramatist had attained to the maturity of his powers through the purification of his artistic ideals, but whereas Marlowe's last play is held to the outlines of a rigorous art with an almost poignant reticence, Greene's James IV. manifests the sweetening and mellowing touch of a dignified and manly philosophy. Nor can we see any indebtedness in Greene's play to Peele's Edward I., though the cruel abuse of the memory of Queen Elinor contained in that play can get its only justification on the theory that the play was written immediately after the Spanish Armada, and therefore two years before James IV. But there is one chronicle play that Greene may have seen and that may have influenced him slightly. It is not possible here to go into the question of the authorship of Edward III. So excellent is the play in its choicest passages that one would not be loath to assign portions of it to Marlowe, or to Shakespeare, or to impute the entire play to the collaboration of these poets. One would even welcome evidence that the hand of Greene is to be seen in the play. Fleay assigns the play to Marlowe and sets its date of production at 1590 or earlier, basing these suppositions upon a citation from this play in a presumably satirical allusion to Marlowe in Greene's Never too Late; perhaps a strained double hypothesis, but one that has the possibility of truth.[14] One would tend to the theory that the play was written by Marlowe, on account of the total absence of comedy and a dulcet sweetness in the blank verse. If so it was an early study and must be placed before Edward II. Edward III. is like James IV. in the fact that it is not a pure chronicle play, but is based for its most effective scenes upon a romantic episode from Painter's Palace of Pleasure. As James IV. goes back to a novella of Cinthio, the ultimate source of the romantic by-plot of Edward III. is a novel by Bandello. The historical portions of the play are based on Holinshed. These romantic scenes, which comprise scene 2 of the first act and the entirety of the second act, are strikingly similar to the large theme of James IV. The love of King Edward for the beautiful Countess of Salisbury, whose castle he has rescued, is similar in its passion and its ill-success to the love of James for Ida. Both stories deal with Scottish wars, though in Edward III. the romantic element arises as a result of the English king's protection of his subject, the Countess of Salisbury, against the Scots, whereas in James IV. the wars result from the unfortunate love of the Scottish king for his subject, Ida, and his consequent attempt to kill his English wife, Dorothea. Like James, Edward is willing to kill his queen in order to gain his love. The Countess of Salisbury's lines, |
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