Short answers, pulled from the story.
Robert Greene (1558-1592) was a popular Elizabethan writer and pamphleteer, widely regarded as one of the first professional authors in England. He published more than twenty-five prose works between 1583 and 1592, writing in genres including romance, autobiography, and drama. His plays, none published in his lifetime, include Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, his greatest popular success.
In the posthumous pamphlet Groatsworth of Wit, Greene or a writer working in his name attacked a rising playwright as an 'upstart Crow' and a 'Shake-scene', twisting a line from Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 3 into a taunt against an actor who thought himself a poet. The Oxford English Dictionary records 'Shake-scene' as a term of uncertain meaning used only in this passage. Some scholars attribute the attack to Greene's resentment over Shakespeare's involvement with A Knack to Know a Knave.
Greene is believed to have been born in Norwich, with L. H. Newcomb identifying him as probably the Robert Greene baptized on the 11th of July 1558 at St George's, Tombland. He enrolled at St John's College, Cambridge, as a sizar on the 26th of November 1575, received a BA in 1580, and later received an MA, apparently from Clare College, in 1583. Oxford University granted him a further MA in 1588, almost certainly as a courtesy degree.
Greene died on the 3rd of September 1592, aged 34. Gabriel Harvey attributed his death to 'a surfeit of pickle herring and Rhenish wine' and reported he was buried in the New Churchyard near Bedlam on the 4th of September. No burial record has been found to confirm Harvey's account.
Greene's best-known play is Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, composed around 1590. Among his prose works, the romances Pandosto (1588) and Menaphon (1589) are considered the height of his stylized writing, and the song 'Weep not my wanton, smile upon my knee' from Menaphon achieved wide popularity. His coney-catching pamphlets of 1591-92 and the posthumous Groatsworth of Wit are also central to his reputation.
Yes. Greene's plays earned him a place among the University Wits, the group of classically educated Elizabethan playwrights that included John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Christopher Marlowe. The designation reflects both his Cambridge and Oxford degrees and his role in shaping the literary drama of the late sixteenth century.