genius was in his grave, Harvey gloated and leered with hellish glee,
and wrote of Greene’s “most woeful and rascal estate, how the wretched
fellow or, shall I say, the prince of beggars, laid all to gage fore
some few shillings and was attended by lice.” This is one of Harvey’s
malignant, vitriolic, discharges in his attempt to spatter the memory
and deface the monument of the dead. “Achilles tortured the dead
body of Hector, and, as Antonious and his wife, Fulva, tormented the
lifeless corpse of Cicero, so Gabriel Harvey hath showed the same
inhumanities to Greene that lies low in his grave.” The testimony of
Gabriel Harvey, whose malignant attacks on the memory of Greene by
monstrously exaggerated statement, is vitiated by his own statement
that “he was cheated out of an action for libel against Greene by his
death.”
Harvey was vulgarly ostentatious, courting notoriety by the
gorgeousness of his apparel; currying favor with the great, and aping
Venetian gentility after his return from Italy. He was a dabbler
in astrology, a prognosticator of earthquakes, and constructor of
prophetic almanacs. The failure of his predictions subjected him to
much bitter ridicule. His inordinate vanity is best shown by his
publication of everything spoken or written in commendation of himself,
by his obsequious friends and flatterers, who snickered with the public
generally, as he was an object of ridicule, the butt on which to crack
their jokes.
In one of those fanciful studies in Elizabethan literature, which
we now hold in our hand, we may read, in a work called “A Snip for
an Upstart Courtier or A Quaint Dispute Between Velvet-breeches and
Cloth-breeches,” that Greene has very vulgarly libeled Harvey’s
ancestry; but, when we turn to Greene’s book we learn that the
vulgarity consists in calling Gabriel Harvey’s father a ropemaker.
Only a snob would regard any honest employment as a degradation, and
furthermore, the passage does not point contumeliously and spitefully
at Gabriel Harvey’s father, for the reference is very slight. “How is
he (Gabriel’s father) abused?” writes Nash, “Instead of his name he is
called by the craft he gets his living with.” Still the lines which so
mortally offended Gabriel were suppressed by Greene. Notwithstanding
this, those biographers and critics whose sole object is to blacken
the poet’s memory, conceal from the reader the fact of the detachment
of all reference to a rope-maker. Harvey was extremely anxious to
push himself among the aristocracy in order to conceal his humble
antecedents.
With all his faults, there was nothing of this weakness or snobbishness
in Robert Greene, who had himself sprung from the common people,
though born to good condition. Robert Burton, a contemporary, writing
in “The Spacious Time of the Great Elizabeth” says that idleness was
the mark of the nobility, and to earn money in any kind of trade was
despicable. Gabriel Harvey flung in Greene’s face the fact that he made
a living by his pen. Had young Greene lived a longer life, with all its
wealth of bud and bloom, we should now have in fruition a luxuriance of
imagination and versatility of diction possessed by few. With longer
life he would doubtless “have gained mastery of himself, when he
would have gone forward on the path of moral regeneration;” for there
was in the poet’s strivings, during the last few years of his life,
the promise and prophecy of a glorious future. His soul enlarged, he
battled for the commonweal; his heart was with the lowly and his voice
was for the right when freedom’s friends were few.
In his play “The Pinner of Wakefield,” first printed in 1599, Robert
Greene makes a hero, and a very strenuous one, of a mere pound-keeper
who proudly refuses knighthood at the hands of the king. In the sketch
given by Professor J. M. Brown we read, “In the first scene of the play
when Sir Nicolas Mannering appears in Wakefield with his commission
from the rebel, Earl of Kendal, and demands victuals for the rebel
army, the stalwart pound-keeper steps forward, makes the knight eat
his words and then his seal! ‘What! are you in choler? I will give you
pills to cool your stomach. Seest thou these seals? Now by my father’s
soul, which was a yeoman’s when he was alive, eat them or eat my
dagger’s point, proud squire!’ The Earl of Kendal and other noblemen
next appear in disguise and send their horses into the Pinner’s corn to
brave him. The pound-keeper approaches and after altercation strikes
the Earl. Lord Bondfield says, ‘Villain, what hast thou done? Thou
hast struck an Earl.’ Pinner answers, ‘Why, what care I? A poor man
that is true is better than an earl if he be false’.” A yeoman boxing
or cuffing the ear of an earl! This has all the breezy freshness of
American democracy.
“How different from this is Shakespeare’s conception of the place of
the working-man in society. In King Lear, a good servant protests
against the cruelty of Regan and Cornwall toward Gloucester, and is
killed for his courage.” “Give me my sword,” cries Regan, “a peasant
stand up thus!” The voice of the yeoman is often heard in Greene’s
drama, not as buffoon and lackey, as in Shakespeare, but as freeman
whose voice is echoed at Naseby and Marston’s gory fields of glory,
where the sturdy yeomanry of England strove to do and to dare for the
eternal right—soldiers who never cowered from “sheen of spear,” nor
blanched at flashing steel. With Greene rank is never the measure of
merit as with Shakespeare. To peer and yeoman alike, he gave equal
hospitality; for Robin Greene, as his friends called him, was as
friendly to the poor man’s rags as to the purple Robe of King. Greene
in his popular sympathies is thoroughly with the working classes,
the common people, of whom Lincoln says, “God loves most, otherwise
he would not have made so many of them.” His heroes and heroines are
taken, many of them, from humble life. In his Pinner of Wakefield there
is a very clear discernment of democratic principle in the struggle
against prerogative. Half of those plays of Greene’s which we still
possess, are devoted to the representation of the life of the common
people which gave lineage to Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin and
John Bunyan. If these are any guide to his character, his is one
distinguished both by his amicable and by his amiable qualities.
We have in the “Coney-catching series” Greene’s exposure of the
practice of sharpers and knaves, who were fleecing the country people
who came to London. The author of these tracts shows great courage
in his effort to abate fool-catching. Greene’s life was threatened,
and it required the utmost exertion of his friends to prevent his
assassination. The Coney-catching knaves, who felt the halter being
drawn about their necks, threatened to cut off his hand if he would not
desist. Greene, notwithstanding these threats, would not be swerved
from his noble aim, but met them like a true Roman, single-handed and
alone, while his literary enemies took advantage of this opportunity to
blacken his good name. “Greene made these revelations for the good of
the commonwealth, and displayed great courage in facing all risks in so
doing. No books are more out-and-out sincere.”
Greene’s account of the repentance and reformation of a fallen woman,
told in a way that discloses the poet’s kindness of heart and fullness
of humanitarian spirit, reveals his better self. “He assured his
readers, in the words of the woman herself, that her first false step
gradually led her on to complete ruin, so heavy-burdened with grief and
shame that death seemed to her a benefaction, and the grave the only
place for perfect rest.” Not a few there may have been, who, on reading
Greene’s account of the reformation and redemption of this unfortunate
woman, were started on the path of regeneration, while the dim-eyed
critic can see nothing but the blurred reputation of the poet. But who
shall estimate Robert Greene’s influence on individual happiness? Who
shall say how many thousands have been made wiser, happier, and better
by a writer who held out a kind and friendly hand, and had a heart
as true behind it? His statue would crown Trafalgar’s towering shaft
more worthily than the statue of England’s greatest naval hero does;
for there is more true honor and merit in the man who wrote purely to
bring back from evil courses to a state of moral rectitude, than in a
monument for the victory over many enemies.
Greene’s non-dramatic works are the largest contribution left by
any Elizabethan writer to the novel literature of the day. “He was
at once the most versatile and the most laborious of literary men.”
Famous, witty, and brilliant, he was one of the founders of English
fiction, and is conceded to be the author of half a dozen plays for the
theatre. In them we have the mere “flotsam and jetsam” of his prolific
pen. What would we not give for all the plays of Robert Greene from
whom his contemporaries and successors purloyned plumes! According
to Ben Jonson, it was as safe to pillage from Greene in his day, as
it is to persecute his reputation in ours. He was a graduate of both
universities, was a man of genius, but did not live to do his talents
full justice. A born story teller, like Sir Walter Scott, he could do
good work easily and quickly.
We glean the following from the pages of “The English Novel in the
Time of Shakespeare,” by J. J. Jusserand, “Greene’s prose tale,
‘Pandosto, the Triumph of Time,’ had an extraordinary success, while
Shakspere’s drama ‘Winter’s Tale’ founded on Greene’s Pandosto was not
printed, either in authentic or pirated shape, before the appearance
of the 1623 folio, while Greene’s prose story was published in 1588
and was renamed half a century later, ‘The History of Dorostus and
Fawnia.’ So popular was it that it was printed again and again. We
know of at least seventeen editions, and in all likelihood there were
more throughout the seventeenth century, and even under one shape or
another throughout the eighteenth. It was printed as a chap-book during
this last period and in this costume began a new life. It was turned
into verse in 1672, but the highest and most extraordinary compliment
of Greene’s performance was its translation into French, not only once
but twice. The first time was at a moment when the English language
and literature were practically unknown and as good as non-existent to
French readers. In fact every thing from Greene’s pen sold. All of his
writings enjoyed great popularity in their day, and, after the lapse of
three centuries, have been deemed worthy of publication, insuring the
rehabilitation of Greene’s splendid genius.”
We are content to believe that almost all of the so-called posthumous
writings of Robert Greene are spurious, and that but few genuine chips
were found in the literary work-shop of the poet after his death.
We accept the very striking and impressive address to his brother
play-wrights, the after-words to a “Groats Worth of Wit.” We also may
shyly accept the sweet wife letter as the authentic product of the
poet’s mind, heart and hand. Of this letter, there are two versions,
neither of which are very trustworthy, as both are from posthumed
pamphlets. One, which we believe to be a forgery, is found in “The
Repentance.” The other is found in a pamphlet written by his malignant
enemy, Harvey, which contains an account of the poet’s last illness and
death. Nash writes about Harvey, “From the lousy circumstance of his
poverty before his death and sending that miserable writt to his wife,
it cannot be but thou lyest, learned Gabriel.” We would not set down as
auto-biographical the posthumous pamphlets, even though of unquestioned
authenticity, for in the repentance Greene is made to say, “I need not
make long discourse of my parents who for their gravitie and honest
life are well known and esteemed among their neighbors, namely in the
citie of Norwich where I was bred and borne;” and then he is made to
contradict all this in “Groats Worth of Wit,” where the father is
called Gorinius, a despicable miser. “Greene is not known to have had a
brother to be the victim of his cozenage.”
As “there is a soul of truth in things erroneous,” there may be a soul
of truth in the following letter contained in “The Repentance”:
“Sweet wife, if ever there was any good will or friendship between
thee and me, see this bearer (my host) satisfied of his debt. I owe
him tenne pounds and but for him I had perished in the streetes.
Forget and forgive my wrongs done unto thee and Almighty God have
mercie on my soule. Farewell till we meet in heaven for on earth thou
shalt never see me more.
“This 2nd day of Sept., 1592.
“Written by thy dying husband,
“ROBERT GREENE.”
The reader will notice the statement in the posthumed letter that the
poet had contracted a debt to the sum of ten pounds, equal to $400
present money, but there is nothing whatever about leaving many papers
in sundry bookseller’s hands which Chettle averred in the address “To
the Gentlemen Readers Kind Hearts Dreame.” If this were a fact, the
bookseller doubtless would have been called upon; “see this bearer (my
host) satisfied of his debt,” and sweet wife would not have bourne the
burden while booksellers felt themselves blest to pay dear for the very
dregs of her husband’s wit.
Those writers who express no doubt of the authenticity of the posthumed
pamphlets, leave their readers to set down as auto-biographical
whatever portions of those pieces he may think proper. At the same
time the trend of impulse is given the reader by the critics that he
may not fail to read the story of the poet’s life out of characters
devoid of all faith in honesty and in virtue, while the author (Greene)
is anxious evidently to point a moral by them and reprove vice. These
forged pamphlets and so-called auto-biographical pamphlets make Greene
accuse himself of crimes which he surely did not commit, such as the
crime of theft and murder. He says, “I exceeded all others in these
kinds of sinnes,” and he is represented as the most atrocious villain
that ever walked the earth. There is not an atom of evidence adduced
to show Francisco in “Never Too Late” was intended by the author for
a picture of himself, and we do not believe that Greene wrote the
pamphlet in which Roberto, in “Groats Worth of Wit” is one of the
despicable characters.
Very little is known with any degree of certainty concerning the
personal life of Robert Greene, and very little, if anything, in
regard to his family or ancestry, although much prominence is given by
imaginary writers to the history of his person in the manuals of our
literature. These writers attach an auto-biographical reality to their
dreams of fancy. They take advantage of Greene’s unbounded sincerity
and his own too candid confession in the address to the play-writers,
and of his irrepressible desire to sermonize, whether in plays or
pamphlets, with all the fervor of a devout Methodist having a license
to exhort. The closest analogy to Greene’s position, in fact, is that
of the revival preacher—as Prof. Storojenko puts it—“who, to make the
picture of the present as telling as possible, sees and paints his
past in its very blackest colors. This self-flagellation is strongly
connected with a really attractive feature of Greene’s character; we
mean his sincerity, a boundless sincerity which never allowed him to
spare himself. Robert Greene was incapable of posing and pretending to
be what he was not. This is why we may fearlessly believe him when he
speaks of the anguish of his soul and the sincerity of his repentance.
A man whose deflection from the path of virtue cost him so much moral
suffering cannot, of course, be measured by the same standard as the
man who acts basely, remains at peace with himself and defends his
faults by all kinds of sophistry. Speaking further of his literary
labors, he never dealt in personalities in exposing some of the crying
nuisances of London and is perfectly silent as to the moral change in
his own character, which was the fruit of his dealing with them. In a
word, he conceals all that might, in his opinion, modify the sentence
that he pronounces on his own life for the edification of others.”
IV
There is a commendative piece of writing which should be read in
connection with Greene’s letter to “divers play-makers.” We refer
to the preface to “Kind Hearts Dreams,” written by Henry Chettle,
which was registered December 8, 1592. Chettle says, “About three
months since died M. Robert Greene, leaving many papers in sundry
book-seller’s hands, among others, his ‘Groats Worth of Wit’ in which
a letter written to diverse play-makers is offensively by one or
two of them taken.” Chettle’s statement about many papers in sundry
book-sellers hands may be discredited because of the poet’s urgent
necessities, and the strong desire on the part of book-sellers to
publish Greene’s writings. Of this we may be sure, that the letter was
not placed in book-sellers hands by Greene or for him. He would not
have called his friends to repentance in that way, for it would have
given publicity to the defects in the lives of his friends as well as
his own.
The letter evidences the fact of its having been written as a private
letter to three of the poet’s friends (Marlowe, Nash and Peele).
If sent, it did not reach them, but was surreptitiously procured,
doubtless, by some hack-writer, (inferentially, Henry Chettle, who
transcribed it.) Gabriel Harvey may have been accessory to its
procurement, as his ghoulish instinct led him to visit the poor
shoemaker’s house where Greene died, on the day following the poet’s
funeral in search of matter foul and defamatory, and with ink of
slander to blacken the poet’s memory. This snobbish ape of gentility,
Gabriel Harvey, hated Greene because he called his father by “the craft
he gets his living with.” However, when Greene learned that Harvey
was ashamed of his father’s humble employment, that of ropemaker,
he straightway canceled the offensive allusion, but Harvey still
continued to manifest the same hateful malignity and venomous spite.
The letter is a fine character study of the three poets addressed.
Greene drew out the true feature of every distinguishing mark or trait,
both mental and moral, of these, his fellow-craftsmen, who, though he
did not name them, are asserted to be Marlowe, Nash and Peele. Greene
characterized them individually, and twice he collectively admonished
them thus, “Base minded men all three of you, if by my miseries ye be
not warned,” and, in the concluding part of the letter, “But now return
I again to you three, knowing my miseries is to you no news and let me
heartily entreat you to be warned by my harmes.”
All of Shakspere’s biographers and commentators aver that Shakspere was
not one of the three persons addressed. How then could Chettle’s words
bear witness to his (Shakspere’s) civil demeanor or factitious grace
in writing. Mr. Fleay stated many years ago (1886) that there was an
entire misconception of Chettle’s language that Shakspere was not one
of those who took offense. They are expressly stated to have been two
of the three authors addressed by Greene. The recent Shakespearean
writers have evidently mistaken Chettle’s placation of Nash or Peele,
or either of the three play-makers addressed by Greene, it does not
matter which, for an apology to Shakspere, who was not the object of
Greene’s satire or Chettle’s placation for were not Nash, Marlowe and
Peele each “excellent in the quality he professes?” Had they not lived
in an age of compliment they would have merited these complimental
phrases of Henry Chettle? For their names were in the trump of fame.
Christopher Marlowe, the first great English poet, was the father of
English tragedy and the creator of English blank verse. He is, by
general consent, identified with the first person addressed by Greene,
“With thee will I first begin, thou famous gracer of tragedians, who
hath said in his heart there is no God. Why should thy excellent wit,
His gift, be so blinded that thou should give no glory to the giver?”
The second person referred to is identifiable with Thomas Nash, “With
thee I join, young juvenall, that byting satyrist,” though not with
equal accord, as the first with Marlowe, as some few persons prefer to
name Thomas Lodge. This predilection for Lodge is based on their having
been co-authors in the making of a play (“That lastlie with me together
writ a comedie”). This fact, however, signifies very little, for it
is generally conceded that Marlowe, Nash, Peele, Lodge and Greene
mobilized their literary activities in the production of not a few of
the earlier plays called Shakspere’s.
We are convinced that Lodge was not the person addressed by Greene as
young juvenall. He was absent from England at the date of Greene’s
letter, having left in 1591 and did not return till 1593. Moreover,
he had declared his intention long before to write no more for the
theatre. In 1589 he vowed “to write no more of that whence shame doth
grow.” At Christmas time in 1592 he was in the Straits of Magellan.
Born in 1550, Lodge led a virtuous and quiet life. He was seventeen
years older than Nash, and four years older than Greene, who would
not, in addressing one four years his senior, have used these words,
“Sweet boy might I advise thee.” The youthfulness of Nash fits well.
He was boyish in appearance. Born in Nov., 1567, he was seven years
younger than Greene, and was the youngest member of their fellowship.
The mild reproof “for his too much liberty of speech” contained in the
letter, justifies the belief that Thomas Nash was referred to as “young
juvenall, that byting satyrist, who had vexed scholars with bitter
lines.”
The equal unanimity and general consent which identifies the first with
Marlowe, identifies the third and last person, who had been co-worker
in drama making of the same fellowship, with George Peele, “and thou
no less deserving than the other two, in some things rarer, in nothing
inferior” driven (as myself) to “extreame shifts, a little have I to
say to thee.” Chettle could, however, have bourne witness to Peele
“his civil demeanor and factitious grace in writing.” Peele held the
situation of city poet and conductor of pageants for the court. His
first pageant bears the date of 1585, his earliest known play, “The
Arraignment of Paris” was acted before 1584. “Peele was the object of
patronage of noblemen for addressing literary tributes for payment. The
Earl of Northumberland seems to have presented him with a fee of three
pounds. In May, 1591, when Queen Elizabeth visited Lord Burleigh’s
seat of Theabald, Peele was employed to compose certain speeches
addressed to the queen, which deftly excused the absence of the master
of the house, by describing in blank verse in his ‘Polyphymnic,’
the honorable triumph at tilt. Her majesty was received by the
Right Honorable the Earl of Cumberland.” In January, 1595, George
Peele, Master of Arts, presented his “Tale of Troy” to the great Lord
Treasurer through a simple messenger, his eldest daughter, “necessities
servant.” Peele was a practised rhetorician, who embellished his
writings with elegantly adorned sentences and choice fancies. He was
a man of polished intellect and social gifts, and possessed of a very
winsome personality. “His soft, caressing woman voice” low, sweet and
soothing, may have had a considerable effect upon Chettle, and could
not have been unduly honored by Chettle’s apology in witnessing “his
civil demeanor and factitious grace in writing.”