Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/176

Rh , after I had a child by her, I cast her off, having spent up the marriage-money which I obtained by her. Then left I her at six or seven, who went into Lincolnshire, and I to London," where his reputation as a playwright and writer of pamphlets "of love and vaine fantasyes" continued to increase, and where his life was a feverish alternation of labour and debauchery. He tells us how in the end he was friendless "except it were in a fewe alehouses," where he was respected on account of the score he had run up. When the end came he was a dependant on the charity of the poor and the pitying love of the unfortunate. Henri Murger has drawn no picture more sickening and more pitiful than the story of Greene's death, as told by his Puritan adversary, Gabriel Harvey—a veracious though not an unprejudiced narrator. (Greene had stung his vanity by an allusion to his paternal origin in the prose-tract of A Quip for an Upstart Courtier.) After a banquet where the chief guest had been the dramatist Nash,—an old associate and perhaps a college friend of Greene's, any great intimacy with whom, however, he seems to have been anxious to disclaim,—Greene had fallen sick "of a surfeit of pickle herringe and Rennish wine." At the house of a poor shoemaker near Dowgate, deserted by all except his compassionate hosts and two women,—one of them the mother of his illegitimate son, Fortunatus Greene,—he died, September 2, 1592. Shortly before his death, he wrote under a bond for ten pounds which he had given to the good shoemaker, the following words addressed to his long-forsaken wife:—"Doll, I charge thee, by the loue of our youth and by my soules rest, that thou wilte see this man paide; for if hee and his wife had not succoured me, I had died in the streetes.—."

Shortly after Greene's death the dramatist Henry Chettle published a pamphlet from the hand of the unhappy man, entitled Greene's Groat's-worth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance. This ill-starred production may almost be said to have done more to excite the resentment of posterity against Greene's name than all the errors for which he so unctuously professed his (doubtless sincere) repentance. For in it he chose to point the fact of his own conversion by exhorting three of his quondam acquaintance to go and do likewise. Of these three Marlowe was one—to whom and to whose creation of "that Atheist Tamberlaine" (perhaps to both author and hero under the name of the latter) he had repeatedly alluded or referred in previous pamphlets. The second was Peele, the third probably Nash. But the passage addressed to Peele contained a transparent allusion to a fourth dramatist, who was an actor likewise, and of whom Greene accordingly thought himself entitled to speak with insolent arrogance as of "an vpstart crow beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygres heart wrapt in a player's hyde supposes hee is as well able to bombast out a blanke-verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Iohannes-fac-totum, is in his owne conceyt the onely shake-scene in a countrey." The phrase italicized parodies a passage occurring in The True Tragedie of Richard, Duke of Yorke, &c., and retained in Part III. of Henry VI. If Greene (as many eminent critics have thought) had a hand in The True Tragedie, he must here have intended a charge of plagiarism against Shakespeare. But it seems more probable that, while (as Mr R. Simpson suggested) the upstart crow beautified with the feathers of the three dramatists is a sneering description of the actor who declaimed their verse, the animus of the whole attack (as Dr Ingleby explains it) is revealed in its concluding phrases. This "shake-scene," i.e., this actor, had ventured to intrude upon the domain of the regular staff of play-wrights—their monopoly was in danger!

Altogether not less than thirty-fivo prose-tracts are ascribed to Greene's prolific pen. To these, which are by no means all of a personal or even controversial character, he owed in his lifetime a great part of his celebrity. Nearly all of them are interspersed with verses; in their themes they range from the "misticall" wonders of the heavens to the familiar but "pernitious sleights" of the sharpers of London. But the most widely attractive of his prose publications were no doubt those to which he more especially refers under the designation of "love-pamphlets," and which, as he tells us, brought upon him the outcry of Puritan censors. In these popular productions he appears very distinctly as a follower of the fashionable euphuistic style, indeed two of them are by their titles announced as a kind of sequel to the mother romance. But though Greene's style shows the same balanced oscillation to and fro, and his diction the same elaborate ornateness, as those of Lyly, he contrives to interest by the matter as well as to attract attention by the manner of his narratives. It is known that on his Pandosto, the Triumph of Time (1588) Shakespeare founded his A Winter's Tale; in fact, the novel contains the entire plot of the comedy, though some of the subordinate characters in the latter (including the immortal Autolycus) were added by Shakespeare.

In Greene's Never too late, announced in its author's unctuous variety of the euphuistic manner as a "Powder of Experience: sent to all youthfull gentlemen" for their benefit, the hero of the Palmer's story is in all probability intended for Greene himself; and this episodical narrative has a vivacity and truthfulness of manner which savour of an 18th century novel rather than of an Elizabethan tale concerning the days of "Palmerin, King of Great Britaine." The experiences of the Roberto of Greene's Groat's-worth of Wit are even more palpably the experiences of the author himself, though they are possibly overdrawn—for a born rhetorician exaggerates everything, even his own sins. Much that might be enlarged upon in Greene's manner as a writer of prose fiction shows how already in the Elizabethan age there was a possibility of the English novel anticipating what proved the slow course of its actual development.

For us, however, Greene's name lives chiefly if not solely as that of a dramatist. Only four plays remain to us of which he was indisputably the sole author. The earliest of these seems to be The History of Orlando Furioso, one of the Twelve Peeres of France—which has (on unsatisfactory evidence) been dated as before 1586, and is known to have been acted on February 21, 1592. It is a free dramatic adaptation of Ariosto (who in one passage is textually quoted), and contains a large variety of characters and a superabundance of action. Fairly lucid in arrangement and fluent in style, it lacks in the treatment of its main situation—the madness of Orlando the tragic power to which in truth its author was a stranger. Greene's Orlando has been described as "a stepping stone to Lear and Hamlet," but its priority to Kyd's Spanish Tragedy (to which the author of this observation likewise refers) is not proved. Very few dramatists between Sophocles and Shakespeare have succeeded in subordinating the grotesque effect of madness to the tragic; and Greene (the close of whose play is tameness itself) is not among the number.

Of the Comical History of Alphonsus, King of Arragon, Henslowe's Diary contains no trace. But it can hardly have been first acted long after the production of Marlowe's Tamburlaine, which had been brought on the stage at least three years before. For this play—which is oddly enough called "comical," though it contains not a single comic character, and is surely unintentionally humorous in the effect of some of its passages—was manifestly written in emulation of Marlowe's tragedy. While Greene cannot have thought himself capable of surpassing Marlowe as a 