Greene's Groats-Worth of Wit

• 1. Introduction

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  Greene's Groats-Worth of Wit arrived in London bookshops on the 20th of September 1592, registered at the Stationers' Hall just two and a half weeks after its supposed author was already dead. Robert Greene had died on the 3rd of September, and the city was still buzzing with talk of his famously dissolute life. Into that charged atmosphere came a small pamphlet - part morality tale, part deathbed confession, part literary grenade - that would set off what contemporaries called "a literary scandal."

  The pamphlet claimed to be Greene's own dying words. It contained coded attacks on fellow playwrights, a passage that most scholars now read as the earliest surviving criticism of William Shakespeare, and a chain of disputed authorship that scholars are still arguing about today. Who actually wrote it? What did Greene - or whoever wrote in his name - really mean? And why does a cheap pamphlet from Elizabethan London still matter more than four centuries later?

• 2. Roberto and Lucanio

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  The pamphlet opens with two brothers, Roberto and Lucanio Gorinius, sons of a wealthy usurer. Roberto is the scholar; Lucanio is being groomed to inherit the family business. When their father dies, the difference between them becomes stark: Lucanio gets the wealth, and Roberto gets only a single groat - enough, the title suggests, to buy a "groat's worth of wit."

  Roberto uses that groat's worth of cunning to arrange a visit to a dazzling courtesan named Lamilia, hoping to use her to fleece his newly rich brother. The plan collapses badly. Lamilia tells Lucanio exactly what his brother proposed, and Roberto is thrown out. He falls in with an actor who tells him that a man of letters can earn a living writing plays.

  Two years pass in the narrative, and both brothers have come undone by their own flaws. Lucanio has spent every coin of his inheritance on Lamilia, who has discarded him; he spends the rest of his life as a pimp. Roberto becomes a successful playwright but squanders everything he earns. At the end of the story, he finds himself dying with exactly one groat left - the same amount his father left him. The narrator then steps forward and admits that Roberto's life mirrors his own, before turning to address his readers directly with ten precepts for living more honourably.

• 3. The Upstart Crow

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  Near the end of the pamphlet, the narrator addresses three unnamed playwrights as "Gentlemen his Quondam acquaintance, that spend their wits in making Plaies." He warns them about actors and newcomers to the trade, and then he fires one of the most debated sentences in the history of English literature. He rails against "an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he 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 conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey."

  The phrase "Shake-scene" appears nowhere in print before this passage, and most scholars take it as a pun on the name Shakespeare. The line "Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde" is a near-direct parody of a line from Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 3, written around 1591: "O tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide" (Act I, scene iv, line 137). That allusion suggests the target was someone known for that very play.

  If the reading is correct, this passage is the first documented reference to Shakespeare since 1585, apart from a passing mention of his father in a 1588 lawsuit. In 1592 Shakespeare would have been an actor newly contributing to plays including all three parts of Henry VI and Richard III - a figure the university-educated London playwrights might well have resented.

  Scholars debate what the complaint really was. The text accuses the "upstart Crow" of thinking he can write as well as university men, and some read it as a charge of plagiarism or excessive pride. Hanspeter Born argued that the attack was prompted because Shakespeare may have rewritten parts of Greene's play A Knack to Know a Knave. Katherine Duncan-Jones, believing Thomas Nashe is "by far the stronger suspect" for having written the passage, pointed to Nashe's own possible grievances.

  A minority of anti-Stratfordians have argued the passage points instead to the actor Edward Alleyn, the famous Elizabethan stage star. The debate has not settled. What is clear is that whoever wrote the lines, they were strong enough to provoke complaints from at least two of the writers mentioned, within weeks of publication.

• 4. The University Wits

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  The three playwrights the narrator admonishes were not random targets. They belonged to a coterie of university-educated writers known as the University Wits, linked by their association with Greene. The text gestures at each of them through coded description, and scholars have spent centuries decoding the signals.

  The "famous gracer of Tragedians" who has denied the existence of God is widely taken to mean Christopher Marlowe, who had studied at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and who faced charges of atheism during his short life. The pamphlet's narrator notes that this writer admires Machiavelli, a figure who appears repeatedly in Marlowe's plays.

  The identity of the "young Juvenal" took longer to settle. Thomas Lodge was once a favoured candidate, having co-written a comedy with Greene called A Looking Glass for London. But Lodge was out of England at the time, and the narrator's language implies all three men knew Greene was ill. Modern commentators now lean toward Thomas Nashe, who had studied at St John's College, Cambridge, and was later called "gallant young Juvenal" by Francis Meres in his 1598 survey Palladis Tamia - an apparent echo of Greene's earlier epithet. Greene's phrase "bombast out a blank verse" also seems to draw on a remark Nashe made in the preface to Greene's own Menaphon in 1589. Nashe was considerably younger than Greene, which would explain the affectionate tag "sweet boy." The one stubborn problem is that no comedy co-written by Greene and Nashe is known to survive.

  The third playwright, usually identified as George Peele, had studied at Christ Church, Oxford, and was, like Greene, notorious for a chaotic personal life. Peele may already have collaborated with Shakespeare by this point; the early play Titus Andronicus is now generally thought to have been written by both of them. Both Peele and Nashe may also have contributed to Henry VI, Part 1, and according to Gary Taylor, the evidence for Nashe's dominant role in the first act of that play is considerable.

• 5. Who Really Wrote It

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  Henry Chettle was the man who brought Groatsworth to the printer. He had entered into partnership with the printer John Danter in 1591, and he arranged for the pamphlet to be printed by Danter and John Wolfe for the bookseller William Wright. The Stationers' Register entry names Chettle explicitly - registered "uppon the perill of Henrye Chettle" - which signals he bore legal responsibility for its contents.

  Chettle's explanation, given in the preface to his own Kind-Heart's Dream later in 1592, was that Greene's handwriting was illegible and he had simply transcribed the manuscript into his own hand so it could be licensed. He denied writing a word of it. But the fact that the surviving manuscript was entirely in Chettle's hand gave his contemporaries reason to doubt him, and some scholars have doubted him ever since.

  In 1969, Warren B. Austin undertook what was then a pioneering computer-aided analysis of the prose styles of Chettle and Greene. Austin concluded, on the basis of word-choice frequencies, that Chettle had written the whole thing. His analysis convinced many scholars for decades. Then in 2006, Richard Westley re-examined Austin's methods and reached the opposite conclusion, arguing that Austin had selected evidence to support a predetermined view. Westley found that the patterns Austin identified were better explained by Chettle's role as a transcriber, not as an author.

  Steve Mentz, writing in 2008, offered a third reading: that Groatsworth contains a substantial core of material Greene did write, but that the final pamphlet reflects significant editorial interference by Chettle, creating what Mentz called "an unusual sort of collaboration" between a dead man's papers and a living editor's hand.

  Chettle's own apology in Kind-Heart's Dream is itself a piece of evidence. He said he wished he had edited out some of the offensive material about one of the aggrieved writers, and expressed genuine regret - writing that he had "seen his demeanor no less civil than he excellent in the quality he professes." Most scholars read this as an apology to Shakespeare, based on reports from "divers of worship" who vouched for Shakespeare's honesty and his "facetious grace in writing."

  Thomas Nashe also denied writing Groatsworth. In the 1592 edition of his Pierce Penniless, he dismissed it as a "scald, trivial lying pamphlet" - a denial that itself became evidence in the argument about who had most reason to distance themselves from the text.

• 6. Echoes and Afterlives

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  Groatsworth was reprinted by Thomas Creede in 1596, four years after the scandal of its first appearance, which suggests it held public interest well beyond the initial controversy. It was one of several publications that followed Greene's death, each feeding on curiosity about his notoriously dissolute life. The Repentance of Robert Greene and Greene's Vision appeared around the same time, both written in the first person and purporting to be his dying statements.

  The pamphlet's long afterlife in scholarship has been shaped largely by the Shakespeare passage. Baldwin Maxwell and Stephen Greenblatt both speculated that Greene was the model for Shakespeare's Falstaff, a suggestion Jenny Sager dismissed as fanciful and "cringe-worthy." Greenblatt also proposed that a line in Hamlet may be a quiet dig at Groatsworth: Polonius, reading Hamlet's letter addressed to "the most beautified Ophelia," remarks that "beautified is a vile phrase" - a possible echo of Greene's charge that the upstart crow was "beautified with our feathers."

  The pamphlet also quietly preserves, in its closing pages, a letter to Greene's wife that was said to have been found after his death. In it Greene apologises for years of neglect and asks her to care for their son. That domestic detail - a dying man's letter home - sits at the end of a text that otherwise burns with professional jealousy and literary score-settling, a contrast that has kept readers coming back to the pamphlet for reasons that go well beyond the Shakespeare question.