OF the group of gifted college-bred men who had some part in the
fashioning of Shakespearian drama and drew into their mortal lungs a
breath of the element whose "air was fame," Greene has long been marked
with unenviable distinction. He had the misfortune to try to darken
with an early and single shaft the rising sun of Shakespeare; and he
has stood out like a shadow against that dawning genius ever since. The
mean circumstances of his Bohemian career, and the terribly brutal,
Zolaesque scene of his death-chamber--the most repulsively gruesome
in English literary annals--have sustained with a lurid light the
unfavourable impression; and, were this really all, no one would have
grudged oblivion the man's memory. The edition of his collected works,
however, which Grosart gave to scholars, has enlarged general knowledge
of Greene, and has permitted the formation of a more various image of
his personality, a juster estimate of his literary temperament, and a
clearer judgment concerning his position in the Elizabethan movement
of dramatic imagination; and some few, even before this, had lifted up
protestation against that ready damnation which seemed provided for him
by his irreverence toward the undiscovered god of our idolatry who,
then fleeting his golden days, seemed to this jaundiced eye "an upstart
crow beautified with our feathers, ... the only Shake-scene in a
country." Never were more unfortunate words for the "blind mouth" that
uttered them. But there is more to know of Greene than this one speech;
and though the occasion is not apt here for so complete a valuation of
his character and temperament, his deeds and works, as is to be desired
for truth's sake, yet it is needful to take some notice of his total
personality as evinced in his novels, plays, poems, and pamphlets, in
order to determine his relative station in the somewhat limited sphere
of English comedy.
Marlowe is commonly regarded as the forerunner of the heroic strain
in Shakespeare, with moulding influence on the imaginative habit of
his younger fellow-workman in respect to that phase of his art; and
Greene, who though he will never shine as a "morning-star" of the
drama was at least a twin luminary with Marlowe, has been credited
with occupying a similar position as the forerunner of Shakespeare
with respect to the portrayal of vulgar life. It is hardly to be
expected that an antithesis so convenient for the critics should be
really matter-of-fact. The narrower distinct claim that the Clown in
his successive reincarnations passed through the world of Greene's
stage on his way from his old fleshly prison in the Vice of the
primitive English play may require less argument; and in several other
particulars it may appear that fore-gleams of the Shakespearian drama
are discernible in Greene's works without drawing the consequence that
Shakespeare was necessarily a pupil in every school that was open to
him. Not to treat the matter too precisely, where precision is apt to
be illusory even if attainable in appearance, was there not a plain
growth of Greene as a man of letters closely attached to his time which
will illustrate the general development of the age and its art, and
naturally bring out those analogies between his work and Shakespeare's
that have been thought of as formative elements in him by which his
successor on the stage profited? The line of descent does not matter,
on the personal side, if the general direction of progress be made out.
Greene was distinctively a man of letters. He was born with the native
gift, and he put it to use in many ways. He tried all kinds of writing,
from prose to verse, from song to sermon, and apparently with equal
interest. He was college-bred and must have been of a scholarly and
receptive temperament; he was variously read in different languages
and subjects; and he began by being what he charged Shakespeare with
being,--an adapter. His tales, like others of the time, must be
regarded as in large measure appropriations from the fields of foreign
fiction. Even as he went on and gained a freer hand for expression,
he remained imitative of others, with occasional flashes of his own
talent; and, dying young, he cannot be thought to have given his
genius its real trial of thorough originality. In the main his work is
derivative and secondary and represents or reflects literary tradition
and example; he was still in the process of disencumbering himself of
this external reliance when he was exhausted, and perished; and it is
in those later parts of his work which show originality that he is
attached to the Shakespearian drama. Slight examination will justify
this general statement in detail. It is agreed that he drew his earlier
novels from the stock-fiction, with its peculiar type of woman and
its moral lesson; and he shows in these sensibility of imagination
and grace of style. He was, more than has been thought, a stylist, a
born writer; and this of itself would interest him in the euphuistic
fashion, then coming to its height in Lyly; and besides he always kept
his finger on the pulse of the time and was ambitious to succeed by
pleasing the popular taste: he adopted euphuism temporarily, employing
it in his own way. In the drama his play, _Orlando Furioso_, harks
back to Ariosto, and it was when the stage rang with _Tamburlaine_
that he brought out _Alphonsus, King of Aragon_, and when _Doctor
Faustus_ was on the boards that he followed with _Friar Bacon and Friar
Bungay_; on Sidney's _Arcadia_ succeeded his own _Menaphon_; and if
_James IV._ with its Oberon preceded _A Midsummer Night's Dream_--which
is undetermined--it was a unique inversion of the order which made
Greene always the second and not the first. In view of this literary
chronology it seems clear that in the start and well on into his career
Greene was the sensitive and ambitious writer following where Italian
tradition, contemporary genius, and popular acclaim blazed the way; and
in so doing his individual excellence lay not in originality on the
great scale, but in treatment, in his modification of the _genre_, in
his individual style and manner and purport--in the virtues, that is to
say, of an able, clever, variously equipped man of letters whose talent
had not yet discovered the core of genius in itself.
It is observable, too, in the earlier period of his work, that in his
treatment of his material so derived, he displays the qualities of the
weaker, the less robust literary habit; he uses refinement, he is
checked by his good taste, he strives for effects less violent, less
sensational, less difficult in the sense that it requires less of the
giant's strength to carry them off well. There is little, too, in this
portion of his work which lets personality burn through the literary
mould; that belongs to his late and stronger time. It is true that
his novels have a moral in them for edification; but, although he had
the preacher's voice, it is not here in the earlier tales that it is
heard; it was the immemorial privilege of the Renaissance tale, however
scandalous, to wear cowl and cassock. In the cardinal point of his
delineation of female character, for which he is highly praised because
of the purity and grace of the womanhood he presented, he follows the
Renaissance convention, as it seems to me, but with refining and often
true English touches--that ideal of Italian origin which is, on the
whole, one of outline, of pale graciousness, of immobile or expressive
beauty, pictorial; these women seem like lovely portraits which have
stepped down out of a frame, and have only so much of life as an
environment of light and air and silence can give them. Are they not,
for example, as truly like Spenser's women--except where Spenser's
are differentiated by doing "manly" parts--as they are prophetic of
Shakespeare's simpler types? Greene, no doubt, incorporated in this
ideal something of his own experience of noble and patient womanhood,
possibly as he had known it in his wife, as Shakespeare embodied
eternal reality in his creations; but it would not occur to me to
believe that Shakespeare found a model for Ophelia or Imogen in the
Lady Ida and Dorothea, any more than in Una and her sisters. All these
before Shakespeare are of one family--they are the conventionalized
Renaissance ideal variously modified and filled with richer artistic
life; but in Shakespeare they pass into that clear luminous air where
art and humanity are one thing. Greene should have our admiration for
his sensibility to the type, for the appreciation with which he drew
it, for the charm he thereby clothed his pages with; but as to there
being a line of descent, that is altogether another thing; and in
respect to Greene himself, his special female characterization imports
the element of refinement in him, the trait of the less robust literary
habit just spoken of. Similarly, he was of too sound taste to be long
content to speak in the cut phrase of euphuism, and he soon laid the
fashion off; and, in his afterplay on the _Tamburlaine_ motive, it
is a matter of debate whether he was parodying or rivalling Marlowe's
large-languaged rhetoric, and, whichever he was doing, he was hampered
by a better taste than his model, either laughing at it, or else
without the giant's strength to succeed in the worser way, and to
_Doctor Faustus_ and _Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_, so far as they are
compared, like remarks apply. Greene has his own virtues in all these
instances, but they are not those of originating power, of creative
overflow, of genius of the Elizabethan stripe; they live within the
narrower circle of improvement through refined taste, or else of
satirical protest or comparative failure due to the same trait.
The thought of refinement in connection with Greene, the stress laid
upon it here, has not been commonly prominent in writings upon him,
and is out of harmony with our traditional impression of him--the
envious and dying profligate in his misery. Yet it is to be found
not only in his early portraits of womanhood of the pure type (he
afterward presented a baser one), nor in the fact often noted of the
marked purity of his works; but more pervasively in his continuing
taste, in those habits and choices in the literary field, those
revolts and reforms, which show the steady rightness of the man in
his self-criticism and his criticism of current successes. I seem to
feel this innate refinement in the limpidity of single lines; but it
is plain to every one in the lovely lyrics which have sung themselves
into the hearts of all lovers of our poetry, those songs, found in
all anthologies of English verse, which bear Greene's name. He was a
gross man, living grossly, as all know; but it sometimes happens that
in such fleshly natures--as, every one will at once think, in Ben
Jonson--there is found this flower of delicacy, the very fragrance of
the soul; and so it was with Greene, and the lyrics are the mortal sign
of this inward grace. It belongs with this, as has been observed by
several writers, that of all the men who preceded Shakespeare, Greene
most lets the breath of the English country blow through his pages,
and likes to lay his scene in some rural spot. He loved the country;
and yet, here too, protest may well be made when it is said that in
this he led the way for Shakespeare; surely all country paths were open
to the Warwickshire lad in his own right; nor need the difference be
allowed that the forest of Arden is a conventionalized nature, as one
critic maintains, while Greene's is of the soil--that is to mistake art
for convention; but to say even this one word in passing in behalf of
Shakespeare's nature-reality is superfluous, except that it suggests
the different road by which Shakespeare here, as well as in his dealing
with madness, witchcraft, and fairyland (in all of which Greene is
said to have taught him), went his own ways, irrespective of comrades
of the time. In this love of the country which Greene had lies the key
to the better man in him and to his own native distinctions. Beneath
his literary temperament, which seems an educational and professional
veneer that should finally drop away, is his genuine nature--the man
he was; and, life going on to imminent wreck, it became clear in his
later works that he was more and more engaged in contemporary life,
in what he saw and knew, and that he took his material from these; he
had written autobiographical sketches and accounts of low life and its
characters, and he had displayed certain tendencies toward preaching
and sympathies with the unredeemed masses of humanity, all somewhat
miscellaneously, and without any other art than a strong prose style;
but, at the end, is it not manifest that he had grown into realism as
his material, and into an attitude of moral denunciation and popular
sympathy in dealing with it, and is not this the significance of his
collaboration with Lodge in _A Looking-Glasse for London and England_,
and of his own unique _George-a-Greene_? All the earlier work seems to
end, and new beginnings appear both in his renderings of contemporary
realism, and in his most imaginative and various play, _James IV._
The gradual substitution, then, as Greene came to his time of
strength, of frank English realism for cultured Italian tradition and
contemporary vital literary example, seems to be the true line of
his growth. It shows distinctly in his choice of the English subject
of Roger Bacon in place of Doctor Faustus, in his satire of certain
aspects of court life, when he translated an Italian plot of Cinthio
into apocryphal history as _James IV._, in his presentation of the
state of London in collaboration with Lodge, and in the half-rebellious
play of _George-a-Greene_. This is the imaginative and artistic
side of what is practical in his pamphlets of personal repentance
and cony-catching. Personally I seem to detect Puritanism morally in
the one half, and Puritanism politically in the other half, of this
late dramatic work; but it cannot be maintained that the case is
certain. Apart from that, Greene was--what so few ever are, even in
an Elizabethan environment--a humourist; and he used the old English
comedy tradition as an element in his purely English work. The matter
is so plain and comparatively so slight as to require the fewest
words. In comedy specifically he gave examples, which he may be said
to have first given in the sense that he gave them in an original or
a developed form, of the court fool in Ralph, of the country bumpkin
or crass fool in Miles, of the highly developed and wholly humanized
_Vice_ in Adam, of a special humouristic type (aptly characterized
as the ancestor of Andrew Fairservice) in Andrew, otherwise not born
till Sir Walter Scott's day, and of the true Shakespearian clown, the
unmistakable one, in Slipper. Such was his definite service to comedy
in respect to type; and criticism can only point it out, because the
substance can be given only by reading the characters attentively. In
regard to humour at large, it appears to me that in his hands, apart
from linguistic felicity and wit, he presents a humour of situation
tending toward pure farce, and a humour of intention tending toward
pure satire of the social variety, and a humour of manners tending
toward pure pleasantry as in the "Vail Staff" episode. The single
link binding him with Shakespeare, in comedy is through the character
of Slipper; and yet here, as in the other instances of female
type, love of country scenes, and also in madness, witchcraft, and
fairyland, I cannot believe that Shakespeare may not have arrived at
his end--in this case, Launce--without necessarily being obliged to
Greene for assistance. The bent toward contemporary realism, toward a
well-languaged and winning clown, toward Englishry, which is another
name for nature in human life and its setting, is plain in Greene;
this was the running of the stream; but no larger inference follows
from it in my mind than that Greene had worked out his growth, as
Shakespeare in his apprenticeship also did, in similar directions,
but that Greene had done it on national lines, whereas Shakespeare
did it on universal lines, that Greene had done it in a practical,
whereas Shakespeare did it in an ideal way, and that Greene had done
it largely under personal conditions, being at war with his fate as a
mere man, whereas Shakespeare did it as a human spirit above the reach
of material vicissitude. What one owed to the other is an insignificant
detail at best; what is important is to observe in Greene the advancing
movement of the drama in moral intention, in higher characterization,
in original phases of humanity, in humour of more body and intellect,
in comedy and fantasy approaching the goal of the Elizabethan spirit.
Greene, it must be acknowledged, opened some veins that no one followed
up; some of his characters and much of his sympathies were his own in
an unshared way; but his work of all kinds ended with him, and, so far
as he was an explorer of the way, he was most like one who, in our
own time, may be an experimenter in some new force--his name is not
associated with scientific history, with new invention, with discovery,
but such success as he had was because his eye was on the element which
men of his craft were working out more thoroughly than he himself.
It is pleasant to close this brief note on one of the most unfortunate
of men whom our literature remembers, with a kindlier appreciation
of him than has hitherto obtained. The mere volume of his writings
indicates great industry; the criticism of them witnesses our respect
for his endowments, his taste, his fundamental manhood; the analysis of
them shows improvement in himself, and the power of mastery over the
material given him in the direction of the true progress of art in his
day; the very violence of his fate or of his repentances suggests that
the nature so ruined may have been of finer and better metal than those
who died and made no such sign of conscious self-obstruction: there
remain the ideal women, the clear-cut comedians, the lovely lyrics, to
plead for him as an accomplisher of art; and, in view of this, may we
not forget the unhappy incident that has made him like the flitting
bat in the slow dawn of our golden poet, and remember the much that
he, dying so young, at thirty-two, accomplished before the day of his
disappointment, the night of his deserted solitude, and the tragic
ignominy of his death?