FOOTNOTES:
[1018] A mistake for Frolic.
[1019] Alamort, mortally sick; and then, dispirited.
[1020] "A gay, reckless fellow."
[1021] Below 'Neptune,' Sig. A iii.
[1022] B. refers to Ebbsworth, Roxburghe Ballads, IV. 365, 468. See also Nash, Four Letters Confuted (Grosart, II. 190), who says of Harvey's "barefoote rimes" that "they would have trowld off bravely to the tune of O man in desperation, and, like Marenzos Madrigals, the mourneful note naturally have affected the miserable Dittie."
[1023] Chappell gives the song in Popular Music of the Olden Time, p. 216. Three Merry Men is quoted in Westward Hoe, and in Barry's Ram Alley (sung by Smallshanks: see note, Hazlitt-Dodsley, X. 298), as well as in Twelfth Night; and it is parodied by the musical cook in The Bloody Brother. Chappell is somewhat daring when he takes these words from the Old Wives' Tale as the original; lines 3 and 4 look like a parody.
[1024] Dy. points out the pun in 'wooden' (= mad).
[1025] Long wide breeches or trousers; Dy. See Looking-Glass for London and England, near end: "This right slop is my pantry, behold a manchet [Draws it out]" ...
[1026] A bit of nonsense like the talk of Macbeth's porter. The speech is a sort of parody on the appeal of wandering knights or travellers in romances, and Clunch, with his 'territories,' may take the place of enchanter, giant, or the like.
[1027] This use of the third person is common in dramas of the time. See Ward, Old English Drama, Select Plays, etc., Introd., p. xi., notes. So in Greene: "Which Brandamart (i.e. I)" ...; "For Sacripant must have Angelica." It served to identify the actor.
[1028] They are now supposed to be at the cottage.
[1029] For fear of ...
[1030] A crab-apple. The pulp was mixed with ale, 'lamb's wool.'
[1031] Collier gave Dyce the following quotation from Martin's Month's Minde: "leaving the ancient game of England (Trumpe), where every coate and sute are sorted in their degree, are running to Ruffe, where the greatest sorte of the sute carrieth away the game."
[1032] The familiar motif of the contented peasant as entertainer of royalty or what not.
[1033] According to the Jests (Bullen, II. 314), George Peele had no skill in music, and must have been a conspicuous exception; witness the well-known statement of Chappell, Popular Music, p. 98. The barber kept "lute or cittern" in his shop for the amusement of waiting customers; and England had been a land of song from Cædmon's time down. The "man in the street" was expected to know how to join in a part song. The rural song, such as they sing here, was a great favorite with the dramatists.
[1034] Chopcherry: "a game in which one tries to catch a suspended cherry with the teeth; bob-cherry." ... New Engl. Dict.
[1035] A version of Childe Rowland?
[1036] Peele was probably of a Devonshire family.
[1037] A Dogberrian touch, evidently beloved by the pit, and a fine makeweight to those pompous experiments with word and phrase which delighted the serious playgoer.
[1038] Below 'extempore,' Sig. B.
[1039] See [Critical Essay] for the folk-tales in question.
[1040] handsome.
[1041] 'he' keeps (frequents, lives), i.e. the young man. Omission of subject is common in the ballads.
[1042] The conjurer.
[1043] See the [Critical Essay] for this "play within the play."
[1044] The princes, of course, talk in metre when the "high style" is needed, but in familiar prose with Erestus (= "Senex"). The repetitions in this blank-verse are characteristic.
[1045] B. omits. Dy. proposes to omit 'faire.' Neither omission is necessary.
[1046] Reminds one of nursery tales with bits of rhyme,—the cante-fable of folk-lore.
[1047] So Milton's famous "grey hooded Even, Like a sad votarist in palmer's weed" ...
[1048] Below 'gold,' Sig. B ii.
[1049] Dy. assumes that "something ... has dropt out"; but this is not necessary. Erestus, who says below that he 'speaks in riddles,' knows the errand of the brothers, and asks the question abruptly. He plays the part of Merlin in Childe Rowland.
[1050] The spell is important, solemn, and is therefore repeated. No particular tale of The White Bear of England's Wood is known, but similar cases of transformation are plentiful.
[1051] Dy. prints ''chanting'; needlessly.
[1052] Below 'mend,' Sig. B iii.
[1053] B. notes that "St. Luke's Day (18th October) was the day of Horn Fair; and St. Luke was jocularly regarded as the patron saint of cuckolds. St. Andrew was supposed to bring good luck to lovers." ...
[1054] The reference is to the tale preserved in several versions, and known as "The Three Heads of the Well," Jacobs, English Fairy Tales, p. 222. "The Well of the World's End," p. 215, however, has the incident of filling a sieve.
[1055] So "God ye good night, and twenty, sir!" In Middleton's Trick to Catch the Old One—"A thousand farewells." Compare the well-known forms of greeting, as "Grüss' mir mein Liebchen zehntausend mal!" or the elaborate message at the opening of the ballad Childe Maurice.
[1056] See Appendix [B] on this Song.
[1058] The 'Booby' is later called 'Corebus' or 'Chorebus.' See Harvey, The Trimming of Thomas Nashe, Grosart, III. 29: "Thou mayest be cald the very Chorœbus of our time, of whom the proverbe was sayde, more foole than Chorœbus: who was a seely ideot, but yet had the name of a wise man." ...
[1059] Mr. Fleay thinks this is a pun upon that eternal theme of satire for Harvey's enemies, the rope-maker's trade of his father. "The name," Mr. Fleay says, "for the stock of Huanebango are adapted from Plautus, Polymachæroplacidus (from Pseudulus), Pyrgopolinices (from Miles Gloriosus), in shapes which inevitably suggest English puns indicating Harvey's rope-making extraction, Polly-make-a-rope-lass, and Perg-up-a-line-O...." Mr. Fleay is bold.
[1060] A difficult passage. Dy. thinks the stock is a sword,—Corebus "has run away from the Parish, and become a sort of knight-errant." Dr. Nicholson: "He has started and they may catch" (if they can) and as a vagabond put him in the stocks. B. makes the clown plume himself on his finery. He points with pride to his feather; and he is equally proud of his fashionable "long stock" (i.e. the stocking fastened high above the knee). This gives better sense than the second explanation; Corebus asserts a sort of equality with Huanebango.
[1061] The successful guessing of riddles wins a bride, fortune, liberty, what not, in many a folk-tale.
[1062] Below 'the,' Sig. C.
[1063] Enter Erestus.
[1064] care for.
[1065] plenty. Corebus quotes the stilted talk of Huanebango.
[1066] This gift of the cake reminds one of a similar motif in the tale of The Red Ettin, Jacobs, p. 135.
[1067] though times are hard.
[1068] sings.
[1069] Below 'up,' Sig. C ii.
[1070] These tricks of magic are the staple of tales and chapbooks about conjurers, and make a braver showing in plays like Doctor Faustus and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. See the latter play in this volume, and Mr. Ward's introduction to his edition of the two dramas.
[1071] Later editions omit. The formula is less uncanny than usual; but the two cocks have grim associations. The dark-red cock of Scandinavian myth belonged to the underworld. See The Wife of Usher's Well, and R. Köhler in the Germania, XI. 85 ff.
[1072] The local hits are to be noted: praise for roast beef of England, wine of France, and girding at Spain, at brewers,—one thinks of Falstaff's complaint about the lime in his sack,—friars, and usurers.
[1073] Below 'begon,' Sig. C iii.
[1074] B. prints: 'heaven [n]or hell shall rescue her from me.'
[1075] Did this Echo suggest the song in Comus?
[1076] The "Life-Index," so called, of popular tales, connected with the equally popular motif of the "Thankful Dead."
[1077] Erestus.
[1078] Misprint for 'Corebus.'
[1079] Dogberry's distortion of words is about as old as English comedy.
[1080] Q. assure.
[1081] As above:—a gay, reckless fellow.
[1082] According to Sir Walter Scott "the very latest allusion to the institution of brotherhood in arms" is in the ballad of Bewick and Grahame, "sworn brethren" as they are, each "faith and troth" to the other.
[1083] That's settled once for all.—Bullen.
[1084] Recent editions make the Sexton's speech end here, and put the rest in the stage directions.
[1085] Below 'the,' Sig. D.
[1086] Open the argument from my side (with the aid of the pike-staff).—Bullen.
[1087] Recent eds. [Gives money].
[1088] on.
[1089] harvesters.
[1091] Below 'men,' Sig. D ii.
[1092] B. points out that Corebus enters a moment later.
[1093] "The 'fee-fi-fo-fum' formula is common to all English stories of giants and ogres; it also occurs in Peele's play and in King Lear.... Messrs. Jones and Krorf have some remarks on it in their 'Magyar Tales,' pp. 340-341; so has Mr. Lang in his 'Perrault,' p. lxiii, where he traces it to the furies in Æschylus' Eumenides."—Jacobs, Eng. Fairy Tales, p. 243.
[1094] Recent eds.—Enter Sacrapant the Conjurer and Two Furies.
[1095] Recent eds.—Huanebango is carried out by the Two Furies.
[1096] Recent eds.—Strikes Corebus blind.
[1097] goad.
[1098] In this and like cases the editors restore a tolerable metre by different printing. Thus 'Here hard' may be taken as part of the preceding line.
[1099] Dr. Nicholson would read 'name' to no advantage. Sacrapant says she has forgotten her name, but has not forgotten as much as she ought to forget. The phrase is awkward, but is perhaps more "intelligible" than Mr. Bullen allows.
[1100] Below 'to,' Sig. D iii.
[1101] Dy. prints 'Well done!'
[1102] To the popular tale, here plainly drawn upon, Peele has added an amusing feature which seems to be his own invention. He provides the deaf Huanebango with a scolding wife, while the blind Corebus takes her ugly sister.
[1103] As much as "uncomely," "ugly," as shown by the countless passages in Elizabethan literature, and the connotation of the opposite, "fair." Dyce quotes the same phrase,—"though I am blacke, I am not the Divell ..." from Greene's, Quip for an Upstart Courtier.
[1104] In The Three Heads of the Well, "a golden head came up singing:—
"'Wash me and comb me,
And lay me down softly.
And lay me on a bank to dry,
That I may look pretty
When somebody passes by.'"
[1105] Sc. beard.
[1106] The upshot of much investigation seems to be that the phrase to have cockell-bread means to get a lover or a husband.
[1107] So in Hartmann's Iwein, a knight pours water from a certain well upon a stone near by; a terrible thunderstorm is the immediate result. A similar act may bring the milder rain for one's crops (Grimm, Mythologie, p. 494).
[1108] Harvey had an indifferent ear for verse, and here, perhaps,—since the hexameters follow so hard upon,—is a neat way of stating the fact.
[1109] Both Stanyhurst and Harvey were favorites for this sort of ridicule. The hexameters of the former are described admirably by Nash, and, of course, are parodied here. Huff, Ruff, and Snuff were characters in the play of King Cambyses. Cf. too Harvey in "Green's Memoriall or certain funerall sonnets" (Son. vi):—
"I wott not what these cutting Huffe-snuffes meane,
Of alehouse daggers I have little skill...."
[1110] Dy. points out that this is an actual line in Harvey's Encomium Lauri.
[1111] Below 'rattle,' Sig. E.
[1112] Used by Chaucer to describe the "hunting of the letter," in his day still a normal rule of verse, particularly in the north of England (Prologue to the "Persone's Tale"):—
"But trusteth wel, I am a suthern man,
I can not geste rum, ram, ruf, by letter...."
Professor Skeat (Notes to C.T., p. 446) thinks Peele has Chaucer in mind, and shows that the latter probably borrowed the words "from some French source."
[1113] 'Ka'=quoth he.—'Wilshaw'? [Qy.: Will ich ha(ve)? Cf. l. 648. Gen. Ed.]
[1114] Lob's pound, is B. notes, was a phrase of the day for "the thraldom of the hen-pecked married man."
[1115] It is hardly necessary to correct this into 'thy.'
[1116] As a ghost, of course.
[1117] Below 'runne,' Sig. E ii.
[1118] The "foot-page" of the ballads.
[1119] These rhyming scraps remind one constantly of the cante-fable, of the formula-jingles in popular tales.
[1120] Probably a misprint for 'come.'
[1121] Below 'pursse,' Sig. E iii.
[1122] Celanto.
[1123] He is blind.
[1124] In the tale there are three heads.
[1125] Dyce's copy read 'tost.' Mr. P. A. Daniel: "Qy.: 'Toast'?"
[1126] Milton, Comus, 817: "backward mutters of dissevering power."
[1127] Mr. P. A. Daniel would read 'iced.'
[1128] Dy., 'Acts.'
[1129] Below 'maide,' Sig. F.
[1130] Dy. notes that this and the three following lines are taken almost verbatim from Greene's Orlando Furioso.
[1131] It is not necessary to adopt Mr. Daniel's emendation.
[1132] Below 'Venelia,' Sig. F ii.
[1133] Calypha.
[1134] That is, all the actors of the play within the play. Below 'Omnes,' Sig. F iii.
[1135] Q., shuts.
[1136] Part.
APPENDIX
A. Characters: their Sources.—T. Warton, in 1785 (Milton's Poems on Several Occasions), pointed out that "the names of some of the characters as Sacrapant, Chorebus, and others, are taken from the Orlando Furioso." Peele quotes Ariosto freely near the end of Edward I. Storojenko (Grosart's Greene, I, 180) thinks the Sacrapant in Greene's Orlando Furioso "a very transparent parody of Tamburlaine." Mr. Fleay, with some daring, asserts that Huanebango is travestied from Huon o'Bordeaux, and is "palpably Harvey." Erestus, says the same authority, is from Kyd's Soliman and Perseda; "the play is evidently full of personal allusions, which time only can elucidate." Mr. Ward remarks that Jack is "namesake and rival of the immortal giant-killer." The classics, of course, are represented. Warton remarked that the story of Meroe could be found in Adlington's translation of Apuleius, 1566; but it is hardly necessary to go to such a source for the "White Bear of England's Wood."
B. The Song of the Harvesters—When the harvest-men enter again, and sing the song "doubled,"—as here,—it is evidently the same thing, a companion piece, only with reaping in place of sowing, and words to match:—
"Lo, here we come a-reaping, a-reaping,
To reap our harvest-fruit.
And thus we pass the year so long,
And never be we mute."
Is it too much, then, to assume that the present song is to be restored somewhat as follows?—
Lo here we come a-sowing, a-sowing,
And sow sweet fruits of love.
All that lovers be pray you for me,—
In your sweethearts well may it prove.
They would naturally enter with motions of sowing or of reaping, and the opening words would fit the action. Moreover, "In your sweethearts well may it prove" must refer to requital not for the act of sowing, but for the prayers invoked. These craft-songs were common enough. In Summer's Last Will and Testament the harvest-men sing an old folk-song of this kind, if one may judge by the Hooky, hooky of the refrain, said by one of the Dodsley editors (ed. 1825, IX, 41) to be heard still "in some parts of the kingdom." The curious in these matters may find valuable information about songs of labour in general, with imitative action and suitable refrains, in Bücher's Arbeit und Rhythmus, Abhandlungen d. phil.-hist. Classe d. königl. Sächsischen Gesell. d. Wissenschaften, Bd. XVII.
Additional Note—P. [368], l. 491, for 'church stile,' P. A. Daniel queries 'church ale'?—but see Overbury' Characters (Works, p. 145), "A Sexton": 'for at every church stile commonly ther's an ale-house.'
Robert Greene
HIS PLACE IN COMEDY
A Monograph by G. E. Woodberry,
Professor in Columbia University,
New York.
GREENE'S PLACE IN COMEDY
Of the group of gifted college-bred men who had some part in the fashioning of Shakespearian drama and drew into their mortal lungs a breath of the element whose "air was fame," Greene has long been marked with unenviable distinction. He had the misfortune to try to darken with an early and single shaft the rising sun of Shakespeare; and he has stood out like a shadow against that dawning genius ever since. The mean circumstances of his Bohemian career, and the terribly brutal, Zolaesque scene of his death-chamber—the most repulsively gruesome in English literary annals—have sustained with a lurid light the unfavourable impression; and, were this really all, no one would have grudged oblivion the man's memory. The edition of his collected works, however, which Grosart gave to scholars, has enlarged general knowledge of Greene, and has permitted the formation of a more various image of his personality, a juster estimate of his literary temperament, and a clearer judgment concerning his position in the Elizabethan movement of dramatic imagination; and some few, even before this, had lifted up protestation against that ready damnation which seemed provided for him by his irreverence toward the undiscovered god of our idolatry who, then fleeting his golden days, seemed to this jaundiced eye "an upstart crow beautified with our feathers, ... the only Shake-scene in a country." Never were more unfortunate words for the "blind mouth" that uttered them. But there is more to know of Greene than this one speech; and though the occasion is not apt here for so complete a valuation of his character and temperament, his deeds and works, as is to be desired for truth's sake, yet it is needful to take some notice of his total personality as evinced in his novels, plays, poems, and pamphlets, in order to determine his relative station in the somewhat limited sphere of English comedy.
Marlowe is commonly regarded as the forerunner of the heroic strain in Shakespeare, with moulding influence on the imaginative habit of his younger fellow-workman in respect to that phase of his art; and Greene, who though he will never shine as a "morning-star" of the drama was at least a twin luminary with Marlowe, has been credited with occupying a similar position as the forerunner of Shakespeare with respect to the portrayal of vulgar life. It is hardly to be expected that an antithesis so convenient for the critics should be really matter-of-fact. The narrower distinct claim that the Clown in his successive reincarnations passed through the world of Greene's stage on his way from his old fleshly prison in the Vice of the primitive English play may require less argument; and in several other particulars it may appear that fore-gleams of the Shakespearian drama are discernible in Greene's works without drawing the consequence that Shakespeare was necessarily a pupil in every school that was open to him. Not to treat the matter too precisely, where precision is apt to be illusory even if attainable in appearance, was there not a plain growth of Greene as a man of letters closely attached to his time which will illustrate the general development of the age and its art, and naturally bring out those analogies between his work and Shakespeare's that have been thought of as formative elements in him by which his successor on the stage profited? The line of descent does not matter, on the personal side, if the general direction of progress be made out.
Greene was distinctively a man of letters. He was born with the native gift, and he put it to use in many ways. He tried all kinds of writing, from prose to verse, from song to sermon, and apparently with equal interest. He was college-bred and must have been of a scholarly and receptive temperament; he was variously read in different languages and subjects; and he began by being what he charged Shakespeare with being,—an adapter. His tales, like others of the time, must be regarded as in large measure appropriations from the fields of foreign fiction. Even as he went on and gained a freer hand for expression, he remained imitative of others, with occasional flashes of his own talent; and, dying young, he cannot be thought to have given his genius its real trial of thorough originality. In the main his work is derivative and secondary and represents or reflects literary tradition and example; he was still in the process of disencumbering himself of this external reliance when he was exhausted, and perished; and it is in those later parts of his work which show originality that he is attached to the Shakespearian drama. Slight examination will justify this general statement in detail. It is agreed that he drew his earlier novels from the stock-fiction, with its peculiar type of woman and its moral lesson; and he shows in these sensibility of imagination and grace of style. He was, more than has been thought, a stylist, a born writer; and this of itself would interest him in the euphuistic fashion, then coming to its height in Lyly; and besides he always kept his finger on the pulse of the time and was ambitious to succeed by pleasing the popular taste: he adopted euphuism temporarily, employing it in his own way. In the drama his play, Orlando Furioso, harks back to Ariosto, and it was when the stage rang with Tamburlaine that he brought out Alphonsus, King of Aragon, and when Doctor Faustus was on the boards that he followed with Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay; on Sidney's Arcadia succeeded his own Menaphon; and if James IV. with its Oberon preceded A Midsummer Night's Dream—which is undetermined—it was a unique inversion of the order which made Greene always the second and not the first. In view of this literary chronology it seems clear that in the start and well on into his career Greene was the sensitive and ambitious writer following where Italian tradition, contemporary genius, and popular acclaim blazed the way; and in so doing his individual excellence lay not in originality on the great scale, but in treatment, in his modification of the genre, in his individual style and manner and purport—in the virtues, that is to say, of an able, clever, variously equipped man of letters whose talent had not yet discovered the core of genius in itself.
It is observable, too, in the earlier period of his work, that in his treatment of his material so derived, he displays the qualities of the weaker, the less robust literary habit; he uses refinement, he is checked by his good taste, he strives for effects less violent, less sensational, less difficult in the sense that it requires less of the giant's strength to carry them off well. There is little, too, in this portion of his work which lets personality burn through the literary mould; that belongs to his late and stronger time. It is true that his novels have a moral in them for edification; but, although he had the preacher's voice, it is not here in the earlier tales that it is heard; it was the immemorial privilege of the Renaissance tale, however scandalous, to wear cowl and cassock. In the cardinal point of his delineation of female character, for which he is highly praised because of the purity and grace of the womanhood he presented, he follows the Renaissance convention, as it seems to me, but with refining and often true English touches—that ideal of Italian origin which is, on the whole, one of outline, of pale graciousness, of immobile or expressive beauty, pictorial; these women seem like lovely portraits which have stepped down out of a frame, and have only so much of life as an environment of light and air and silence can give them. Are they not, for example, as truly like Spenser's women—except where Spenser's are differentiated by doing "manly" parts—as they are prophetic of Shakespeare's simpler types? Greene, no doubt, incorporated in this ideal something of his own experience of noble and patient womanhood, possibly as he had known it in his wife, as Shakespeare embodied eternal reality in his creations; but it would not occur to me to believe that Shakespeare found a model for Ophelia or Imogen in the Lady Ida and Dorothea, any more than in Una and her sisters. All these before Shakespeare are of one family—they are the conventionalized Renaissance ideal variously modified and filled with richer artistic life; but in Shakespeare they pass into that clear luminous air where art and humanity are one thing. Greene should have our admiration for his sensibility to the type, for the appreciation with which he drew it, for the charm he thereby clothed his pages with; but as to there being a line of descent, that is altogether another thing; and in respect to Greene himself, his special female characterization imports the element of refinement in him, the trait of the less robust literary habit just spoken of. Similarly, he was of too sound taste to be long content to speak in the cut phrase of euphuism, and he soon laid the fashion off; and, in his afterplay on the Tamburlaine motive, it is a matter of debate whether he was parodying or rivalling Marlowe's large-languaged rhetoric, and, whichever he was doing, he was hampered by a better taste than his model, either laughing at it, or else without the giant's strength to succeed in the worser way, and to Doctor Faustus and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, so far as they are compared, like remarks apply. Greene has his own virtues in all these instances, but they are not those of originating power, of creative overflow, of genius of the Elizabethan stripe; they live within the narrower circle of improvement through refined taste, or else of satirical protest or comparative failure due to the same trait.
The thought of refinement in connection with Greene, the stress laid upon it here, has not been commonly prominent in writings upon him, and is out of harmony with our traditional impression of him—the envious and dying profligate in his misery. Yet it is to be found not only in his early portraits of womanhood of the pure type (he afterward presented a baser one), nor in the fact often noted of the marked purity of his works; but more pervasively in his continuing taste, in those habits and choices in the literary field, those revolts and reforms, which show the steady rightness of the man in his self-criticism and his criticism of current successes. I seem to feel this innate refinement in the limpidity of single lines; but it is plain to every one in the lovely lyrics which have sung themselves into the hearts of all lovers of our poetry, those songs, found in all anthologies of English verse, which bear Greene's name. He was a gross man, living grossly, as all know; but it sometimes happens that in such fleshly natures—as, every one will at once think, in Ben Jonson—there is found this flower of delicacy, the very fragrance of the soul; and so it was with Greene, and the lyrics are the mortal sign of this inward grace. It belongs with this, as has been observed by several writers, that of all the men who preceded Shakespeare, Greene most lets the breath of the English country blow through his pages, and likes to lay his scene in some rural spot. He loved the country; and yet, here too, protest may well be made when it is said that in this he led the way for Shakespeare; surely all country paths were open to the Warwickshire lad in his own right; nor need the difference be allowed that the forest of Arden is a conventionalized nature, as one critic maintains, while Greene's is of the soil—that is to mistake art for convention; but to say even this one word in passing in behalf of Shakespeare's nature-reality is superfluous, except that it suggests the different road by which Shakespeare here, as well as in his dealing with madness, witchcraft, and fairyland (in all of which Greene is said to have taught him), went his own ways, irrespective of comrades of the time. In this love of the country which Greene had lies the key to the better man in him and to his own native distinctions. Beneath his literary temperament, which seems an educational and professional veneer that should finally drop away, is his genuine nature—the man he was; and, life going on to imminent wreck, it became clear in his later works that he was more and more engaged in contemporary life, in what he saw and knew, and that he took his material from these; he had written autobiographical sketches and accounts of low life and its characters, and he had displayed certain tendencies toward preaching and sympathies with the unredeemed masses of humanity, all somewhat miscellaneously, and without any other art than a strong prose style; but, at the end, is it not manifest that he had grown into realism as his material, and into an attitude of moral denunciation and popular sympathy in dealing with it, and is not this the significance of his collaboration with Lodge in A Looking-Glasse for London and England, and of his own unique George-a-Greene? All the earlier work seems to end, and new beginnings appear both in his renderings of contemporary realism, and in his most imaginative and various play, James IV.
The gradual substitution, then, as Greene came to his time of strength, of frank English realism for cultured Italian tradition and contemporary vital literary example, seems to be the true line of his growth. It shows distinctly in his choice of the English subject of Roger Bacon in place of Doctor Faustus, in his satire of certain aspects of court life, when he translated an Italian plot of Cinthio into apocryphal history as James IV., in his presentation of the state of London in collaboration with Lodge, and in the half-rebellious play of George-a-Greene. This is the imaginative and artistic side of what is practical in his pamphlets of personal repentance and cony-catching. Personally I seem to detect Puritanism morally in the one half, and Puritanism politically in the other half, of this late dramatic work; but it cannot be maintained that the case is certain. Apart from that, Greene was—what so few ever are, even in an Elizabethan environment—a humourist; and he used the old English comedy tradition as an element in his purely English work. The matter is so plain and comparatively so slight as to require the fewest words. In comedy specifically he gave examples, which he may be said to have first given in the sense that he gave them in an original or a developed form, of the court fool in Ralph, of the country bumpkin or crass fool in Miles, of the highly developed and wholly humanized Vice in Adam, of a special humouristic type (aptly characterized as the ancestor of Andrew Fairservice) in Andrew, otherwise not born till Sir Walter Scott's day, and of the true Shakespearian clown, the unmistakable one, in Slipper. Such was his definite service to comedy in respect to type; and criticism can only point it out, because the substance can be given only by reading the characters attentively. In regard to humour at large, it appears to me that in his hands, apart from linguistic felicity and wit, he presents a humour of situation tending toward pure farce, and a humour of intention tending toward pure satire of the social variety, and a humour of manners tending toward pure pleasantry as in the "Vail Staff" episode. The single link binding him with Shakespeare, in comedy is through the character of Slipper; and yet here, as in the other instances of female type, love of country scenes, and also in madness, witchcraft, and fairyland, I cannot believe that Shakespeare may not have arrived at his end—in this case, Launce—without necessarily being obliged to Greene for assistance. The bent toward contemporary realism, toward a well-languaged and winning clown, toward Englishry, which is another name for nature in human life and its setting, is plain in Greene; this was the running of the stream; but no larger inference follows from it in my mind than that Greene had worked out his growth, as Shakespeare in his apprenticeship also did, in similar directions, but that Greene had done it on national lines, whereas Shakespeare did it on universal lines, that Greene had done it in a practical, whereas Shakespeare did it in an ideal way, and that Greene had done it largely under personal conditions, being at war with his fate as a mere man, whereas Shakespeare did it as a human spirit above the reach of material vicissitude. What one owed to the other is an insignificant detail at best; what is important is to observe in Greene the advancing movement of the drama in moral intention, in higher characterization, in original phases of humanity, in humour of more body and intellect, in comedy and fantasy approaching the goal of the Elizabethan spirit. Greene, it must be acknowledged, opened some veins that no one followed up; some of his characters and much of his sympathies were his own in an unshared way; but his work of all kinds ended with him, and, so far as he was an explorer of the way, he was most like one who, in our own time, may be an experimenter in some new force—his name is not associated with scientific history, with new invention, with discovery, but such success as he had was because his eye was on the element which men of his craft were working out more thoroughly than he himself.
It is pleasant to close this brief note on one of the most unfortunate of men whom our literature remembers, with a kindlier appreciation of him than has hitherto obtained. The mere volume of his writings indicates great industry; the criticism of them witnesses our respect for his endowments, his taste, his fundamental manhood; the analysis of them shows improvement in himself, and the power of mastery over the material given him in the direction of the true progress of art in his day; the very violence of his fate or of his repentances suggests that the nature so ruined may have been of finer and better metal than those who died and made no such sign of conscious self-obstruction: there remain the ideal women, the clear-cut comedians, the lovely lyrics, to plead for him as an accomplisher of art; and, in view of this, may we not forget the unhappy incident that has made him like the flitting bat in the slow dawn of our golden poet, and remember the much that he, dying so young, at thirty-two, accomplished before the day of his disappointment, the night of his deserted solitude, and the tragic ignominy of his death?
G. E. Woodberry.
Robert Greene
THE HONORABLE HISTORIE OF
FRIER BACON
Edited with Critical Essay and Notes
by Charles Mills Gayley, LL.D.,
Professor in the University of
California.