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 In August Greene partook freely of Rhenish wine and pickled herrings at a supper with Nashe and one Will Monox, and fell into a surfeit. On 3 September he died in a squalid lodging, after writing a touching letter to his deserted wife, and begging his landlady, Mrs. Isam, to lay a wreath of bays upon him. These details are recorded by Gabriel Harvey, who visited the place and wrote an account of his enemy's end in a letter to a friend, which he published in his ''Four Letters and Certain Sonnets: especially Touching Robert Greene, and Other Parties by him Abused'' (S. R. 4 Dec. 1592). This brought Nashe upon him in the Strange News of the Intercepting of Certain Letters (S. R. 12 Jan. 1593) and began a controversy between the two which lasted for several years. In Pierce's Supererogation (27 Apr. 1593) Harvey spoke of 'Nash, the ape of Greene, Greene the ape of Euphues, Euphues the ape of Envy', and declared that Nashe 'shamefully and odiously misuseth every friend or acquaintance as he hath served Greene, Marlowe, Chettle, and whom not?' In ''Have With You to Saffron Walden'' (1596), Nashe defends himself against these accusations. 'I never abusd Marloe, Greene, Chettle in my life He girds me with imitating of Greene I scorne it hee subscribing to me in anything but plotting Plaies, wherein he was his crafts master.' The alleged abuse of Marlowe, Greene, and Chettle belongs to the history of another pamphlet. This is ''Green's Groats-worth of Wit, Bought with a Million of Repentance'' (S. R. 20 Sept. 1592, 'upon the peril of Henry Chettle' ). According to the title-page, it was 'written before his death and published at his dying request'. To this is appended the famous address ''To those Gentlemen, his Quondam Acquaintance, that spend their wits in making Plays''. The reference here to Shakespeare is undeniable. Of the three playwrights warned, the first and third are almost certainly Marlowe and Peele; the third may be Lodge, but on the whole is far more likely to be Nashe (q.v.). It appears, however, that Nashe himself was supposed to have had a hand in the authorship. Chettle did his best to take the responsibility off Nashe's shoulders in the preface to his Kind-Hart's Dream (S. R. 8 Dec. 1592; cf. App. C, No. xlix). In the epistle prefixed to the second edition of Pierce Penniless his Supplication to the Devil (Works, i. 154), written early in 1593, Nashe denies the charge for himself and calls The Groatsworth 'a scald trivial lying pamphlet'; and it is perhaps to this that Harvey refers as abuse of Greene, Marlowe, and Chettle, although it is not clear how Marlowe comes in. There is an echo of Greene's hit at the 'upstart crow, beautified with our feathers' in the lines of R. B., Greene's Funerals (1594, ed. McKerrow, 1911, p. 81):

Greene, gaue the ground, to all that wrote upon him. Nay more the men, that so eclipst his fame: Purloynde his plumes, can they deny the same?