Robert Greene (dramatist)
Robert Greene died on the 3rd of September 1592, reportedly after a surfeit of pickle herring and Rhenish wine. He was 34 years old, buried in the New Churchyard near Bedlam, and within days his name had spread across London not because of his death but because of a pamphlet attributed to him. That pamphlet, Greene's Groats-Worth of Wit, contained a few venomous lines about a rising actor the writer called an 'upstart Crow' and a 'Shake-scene'. The target, most scholars agree, was William Shakespeare. It is one of the earliest references to Shakespeare by name in the historical record, and it came from a man who had barely been alive long enough to see what Shakespeare would become. Greene spent roughly a decade as what one writer called 'England's first celebrity author', publishing more than twenty-five prose works in a stretch of nine years. He wrote plays that would outlast him, fashioned a public persona around repentance and rascality, and left behind a biography so tangled that later scholars could not even confirm where he was buried or whether he had a son. The questions Greene raises are not just about a single Elizabethan writer. They reach toward what it meant, for the first time in England, to live by the pen.
On the 11th of July 1558, a child named Robert Greene was baptized at St George's, Tombland, in Norwich. Whether that child and the future writer are the same person is a question scholars have not fully resolved. Robert was one of the most popular given names of the era, and Greene was a common surname. The historian L. H. Newcomb puts the identification as probable but not certain.
Two men in Norwich parish records share the name of the writer's probable father. One was a saddler who lived modestly in his parish until 1599. The other was a cordwainer who kept an inn from the late 1570s until his death in 1591. Neither man's will, one proved in 1591 and the other in 1596, mentions a son named Robert. Greene himself, in his later writings, implied that his father had disinherited him. Scholars drawn to the humble saddler see in that background an explanation for the writer's later sympathy for low-life characters. Those who favor the innkeeper note the social ambitions visible in Greene's early works.
Whatever his origins, Greene enrolled at St John's College, Cambridge, as a sizar on the 26th of November 1575. His academic record there was middling. On the 22nd of January 1580 he took his BA, graduating 38th out of 41 students in his college and 115th out of a university class of 205. He apparently transferred to Clare College for his MA, where he placed 5th out of 12 in his college and 29th of 129 in the university. No record of that transfer has been found, and his name does not appear in the Clare Hall Buttery Book for 1580-84. The only evidence for his time at Clare comes from a dedicatory epistle he signed 'Robert Greene. From my Studie in Clarehall the vii. Of Julie', published after his death in 1593. In 1588, Oxford University granted him an MA as well, almost certainly a courtesy degree; thereafter some of his title pages bore the phrase Utruisq. Academiae in Artibus Magister, 'Master of Arts in both Universities'.
Greene's literary career opened on the 3rd of October 1580, when a long romance called Mamillia was entered in the Stationers' Register. It was the start of an output that would be remarkable by the standards of any era. From 1583 to 1592, he published more than twenty-five prose works, moving between romances, pamphlets, plays, and autobiographical writing. Newcomb described his works as showing 'an inexhaustible linguistic facility, grounded in wide (if not painstaking) reading in the classics, and extra-curricular reading in the modern continental languages'. By producing so much across so many genres, Greene became one of the first writers in England to sustain himself financially through his pen alone.
His romances represent one distinct register of that output. Works like Pandosto in 1588 and Menaphon in 1589 were written in a highly stylized prose that reached for ornament and psychological complexity. A song from Menaphon, 'Weep not my wanton, smile upon my knee', a mother's lullaby to her baby son, achieved wide circulation and is probably his best-known lyric today. His early romances also carried conservative moral arguments. The critic Brenda Richardson found that those early prose works repeatedly illustrate 'the disastrous disruptions caused in life by passion' and praise a life of restraint.
His later pamphlets took a sharply different turn. The 'coney-catching' series, published in 1591 and 1592, told colorful inside stories of swindlers and tricksters preying on ordinary Londoners. Greene narrated these from the perspective of a repentant former rascal. Scholars have long debated how much of that persona reflected his actual experience, and Newcomb cautions that Greene 'built his persona around a myth of prodigal decline that cannot be taken at face value'. One of the last and most consequential of these works, Groatsworth of Wit, was entered in the Stationers' Register before Greene's death but published posthumously, its authorship later questioned by some who pointed to the writer Henry Chettle as a possible contributor or ghost.
None of Greene's plays were published during his lifetime. They circulated in performance and manuscript, and only came into print after his death. Among them, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay stands as his most celebrated dramatic work, thought to have been composed around 1590. His other plays from the same period include The History of Orlando Furioso, drawn from Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso; The Scottish History of James IV; and A Looking Glass for London and England, written together with Thomas Lodge.
His theatrical standing placed him among the group later called the University Wits, a loose circle of educated writers who brought classical learning and literary ambition to the Elizabethan stage. John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Christopher Marlowe were among those counted in that company. Greene's plays earned him a place there, even as his prose work occupied a different and sometimes competing literary space.
Scholars have since proposed Greene as the author of plays beyond his acknowledged canon. The authorship specialist Darren Freebury-Jones examined those attributions in detail, concluding that Greene is the most likely author of Locrine and that he co-authored Selimus. Plays also credited to him with varying degrees of certainty include John of Bordeaux, George a Greene, Fair Em, A Knack to Know a Knave, and Edward III. Some attributionists have even proposed his involvement in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and the Henry VI plays. The extent of Greene's dramatic output, in other words, remains genuinely unsettled, and the canons assembled under his name may yet expand or contract as attribution methods improve.
The passage that most securely keeps Greene in literary memory appears in Groatsworth of Wit. It runs: 'there is 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 Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.' The line 'tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide' appears in Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 3, dated by scholars to roughly 1591-92. Greene twisted it into 'Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde' to lampoon someone he evidently regarded as a presumptuous actor turned playwright. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that 'Shake-scene' is a term of uncertain meaning used by Greene in that attack, and records no other use of the word before or after.
What drove the attack is disputed. The scholar Hanspeter Born argues that Greene wrote the whole of Groatsworth himself, and that the trigger was Shakespeare's interference with a play attributed to Greene, A Knack to Know a Knave. Others have suggested the pamphlet or at least the offending passage was composed after Greene's death by Henry Chettle or another writer hoping to exploit a sensational deathbed narrative.
The pamphlet's afterlife has been long. Stephen Greenblatt and others have speculated that Greene's colorful and dissolute reputation may have supplied Shakespeare with a partial model for Falstaff. The line 'upstart Crow' gave its name to Ben Elton's 2016 sitcom about Shakespeare's early life, in which Greene appears as a character played by Mark Heap. The story the sitcom chose to begin with was 1592: the year the quarrel, real or imagined, was set down in print.
Gabriel Harvey announced Greene's death in a letter to Christopher Bird of Saffron Walden dated the 5th of September 1592. The letter appeared first as a short pamphlet around the 8th of September, then was expanded into Four Letters and Certain Sonnets, entered in the Stationers' Register on the 4th of December 1592. Harvey blamed Greene's end on 'a surfeit of pickle herring and Rhenish wine' and reported that he had been buried in the New Churchyard near Bedlam on the 4th of September. No burial record has been found to confirm any of this.
Harvey's account also described Greene's personal life in unflattering terms. He claimed Greene kept a mistress named Em, the sister of a criminal known as 'Cutting Ball' who had been hanged at Tyburn. Harvey described her as 'a sorry ragged quean of whom Greene had his base son Infortunatus Greene'. Newcomb notes that a Fortunatus Greene was buried at Shoreditch on the 12th of August 1593, a name whose folk-tale resonance may lie behind Harvey's sardonic invention of 'Infortunatus'.
Greene's own writings further complicate the picture. In The Repentance of Robert Greene, he claimed to have married a gentleman's daughter, fathered a child by her, spent her dowry, and abandoned her for London while she went to Lincolnshire. Harvey printed a letter allegedly from Greene to that wife, addressing her as 'Doll'. Yet extensive searches of London and Norwich records have failed to locate any marriage record. The Repentance itself has been subjected to computer analysis of vocabulary by the scholar Norbert Bolz, who concluded that the text was not written by Greene at all. Almost nothing about his private life, and very little about his death, can be confirmed through independent documentation. The fame that followed him into his final weeks rested, appropriately enough, on words whose origins remain in question.
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Common questions
Who was Robert Greene the Elizabethan dramatist?
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.
What did Robert Greene write about Shakespeare?
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.
Where was Robert Greene born and educated?
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.
How did Robert Greene die?
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.
What were Robert Greene's most famous works?
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.
Was Robert Greene one of the University Wits?
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.
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8 references cited across the entry
- 1journalDetermining Robert Greene's Dramatic CanonDarren Freebury-Jones — 2020
- 2newsPoetic justice as Shakespeare rival Robert Greene takes play creditDalya Alberge — 28 November 2020
- 3bookREADING ROBERT GREENE : recovering shakespeare's rival.DARREN FREEBURY-JONES — ROUTLEDGE — 2022
- 5bookWill in the world : how Shakespeare became ShakespeareStephen Greenblatt — W. W. Norton & Company — 2004
- 7journalLocrine and Robert Greene's Dramatic CanonMacDonald P. Jackson — 2023