Was penned by Roscio the tragedian;
and Scourge of Villainy (1598), xi. 40:
Say who acts best? Drusus or Roscio?
Similarly Fleay, ii. 279, has no real ground for supposing that the player in the Groatsworth of Wit is Wilson in particular. If, again, any individual is meant, it might just as well be James Burbage. Throughout Fleay is inclined to exaggerate the extent of the theatrical references in the pamphlets of Greene and Nashe. But R. Simpson is much worse in his hopelessly uncritical Introduction to Faire Em in The School of Shakspere, ii. 339, which is an attempt to trace a vendetta against the actors and especially Shakespeare as a main motive in Greene's writing from 1584 onwards. As far as I can see, Greene's attacks on the stage are limited to the three pamphlets named in the text, and Nashe's to the Menaphon preface. It is doubtful whether Greene was writing for the stage at all before about 1590; in any case it may be assumed that neither writer was normally engaged in tilting against his paymasters.
[1058] Cuthbert Conny-Catcher, The Defence of Conny-Catching (1592, Greene, Works, xi. 75), 'What if I should prove you a Conny-Catcher, Maister R. G. would it not make you blush at the matter?... Aske the Queens Players, if you sold them not Orlando Furioso for twenty Nobles, and when they were in the country sold the same Play to the Lord Admirals men for as much more. Was not this plaine Conny-Catching, Maister R. G.?... But I hear, when this was objected, you made this excuse; that there was no more faith to be held with players than with them that valued faith at the price of a feather; for as they were comedians to act, so the actions of their lives were Camelion-like; that they were uncertain, variable, time-pleasers, men that measured honesty by profit, and that regarded their authors not by desert, but by necessity of time.'
[1059] Dekker, Jests to Make you Merrie (1607, Works, ii. 303, 352), 'As proud as a player that feedes on the fruité of diuine poetry (as swine on acorns).... O you that are the Poets of these sinfull times, ouer whome the Players haue now got the vpper hand, by making fooles of the poore country people, in driuing them like flockes of geese to sit cackling in an old barne: and to swallow downe those playes for new which here euery punck and her squire (like the interpreter and his poppet) can rand out by heart they are so stale, and therefore so stincking; I know the Lady Pecunia and you come very hardly together, & therefore trouble not you'; cf. his references to 'strowlers' in note to p. 332. Another seventeenth-century critic is H[enry] P[arrot], Laquei Ridiculosi or Springes for Woodcocks (1613), Epig. 131, Theatrum Licentia:
Cotta's become a player most men know,
And will no longer take such toyling paines;
For here's the spring (saith he) whence pleasures flow
And brings them damnable excessive gaines: