the Muses' darling for thy verse,
Fit to write passions for the souls below.
"The Old Wives' Tale" is thought to have suggested a poem very unlike it, Milton's "Comus". The date of Peele's "David and Bathsheba," "a remain of the fashion of Scripture plays," is uncertain (published in 1599). This is the best of Peele's extant work, and the blank verse is not unworthy of Marlowe. David says of the dead Absalom—
touch no hair of him,
Not that fair hair with which the wanton winds
Delight to play, and love to make it curl,
Wherein the nightingales would build their nests,
And make sweet bowers in every golden tress,
To sing their lover every night to sleep.
With Peele and Marlowe we are coming close to the perfection of the verse of Shakespeare. Peele died in 1597(?); two years earlier he was poor and in sickness. Probably some of his plays are lost; the "Battle of Alcazar" is but doubtfully assigned to him. Peele cannot have taught Shakespeare much: though he greatly improved blank verse, he only proves that spectators were not intolerant of real poetry in plays.
Greene.
Robert Greene was a Norwich man (born about 1560), the son of parents of substance; at St. John's College, Cambridge, he graduated in 1578. Norwich was a puritan town, but the indulgence of Greene's mother, as he tells us, enabled him to make the Italian tour, probably between 1578 and 1580,
An Englishman that is Italianate
Doth quickly prove a devil incarnate,
said the proverb, and Greene, a man greatly given to fits of repentance, describes his dissipations much as St. Augustine describes his own. At all events he learned Italian and could borrow from novels in that language. He lived among "wags as loose as myself," both in Italy and London. Neither the effects of a rousing sermon nor an early marriage (1585, 1586) to a wife with whom he soon parted company could withdraw Greene from the bottle and his wild comrades. He was the conventional "gentleman of the press," living by a very rapid pen, "yarking up a pamphlet" with unprecedented speed, says Nash, and his wares, we learn, were well paid. He had also many noble patrons, at least he dedicated his "love pamphlets," romances in the manner of Lyly, to many ladies. They are pure in tone, and his favourite female character is a chaste and long-suffering Patient Grizel, like Enid in the Welsh "Mabinogion," and Enid in the "Idylls of the King". Between 1583 and 1589 he wrote at least eight of those love stories and pamphlets, including "Euphues, his Censure to Philautus," and, as five were dedicated to ladies of rank, they were probably of the sort which women enjoyed. Later he was either remorseful, or affected remorse, for his way of living, and turned his experience of the town to use, in tracts on "Cosenage" and "Cony-catching," exposures of the devices of courtesans, usurers, and other harpies.
His "Repentance," and his "Groatsworth of Wit" (1592), with the notorious allusion to "Shake-scene" were among his last efforts. The "Groatsworth of Wit" describes the jealousies between the playwrights and the actors, who, then as always, gained most of the popularity, and then gained most of the money yielded by the stage. It is almost impossible for unbiased readers to avoid detecting in Greene's "Johannes Factotum," "the only Shake-scene in the country," an allusion to Shakespeare. Whether he partook too freely of pickled herrings and Rhine wine, as gossip averred, or not, he fell into a fatal illness, and died in debt to his landlord and landlady, in September, 1592.
Harvey attacked and Nash defended his memory, but, even according to Nash he was a "ruffler". "Penning of plays," Greene says, was his "continual exercise," but at what date he began it is uncertain. He appears to have been stung by some comment in a play by two other authors on the unfashionable character of his own dramas, "for that I could not make my verses jet upon the stage in tragical buskins"; that is, apparently, he did not try to write the sonorous blank verse of Marlowe; or tried and failed to produce in Nash's words "the swelling bombast of a bragging blank verse".