The Elizabethan Stage, Vol. 3

by E. K. Chambers

WILLIAM GOLDINGHAM (c. 1567).

Author of the academic Herodes (cf. App. K).

HENRY GOLDWELL (c. 1581).

Describer of The Fortress of Perfect Beauty (cf. ch. xxiv, C).

STEPHEN GOSSON (1554–1624).

Gosson was born in Kent during 1554, was at Corpus Christi, Oxford, 1572 to 1576, then came to London, where he obtained some reputation as playwright and poet. Meres in Palladis Tamia (1598) commends his pastorals, which are lost. Lodge speaks of him also as a ‘player’.[658] In 1579 he forsook the stage, became a tutor in the country and published The School of Abuse (App. C, No. xxii). This he dedicated to Sidney, but ‘was for his labour scorned’. He was answered the same year in a lost pamphlet called Strange News out of Afric and also by Lodge (q.v.), and rejoined with A Short Apology of the School of Abuse (App. C, No. xxiv). The players revived his plays to spite him and on 23 Feb. 1582 produced The Play of Plays and Pastimes to confute him. In the same year he produced his final contribution to the controversy in Plays Confuted in Five Actions (App. C, No. xxx). In 1591 Gosson became Rector of Great Wigborough, Essex, and in 1595 published the anonymous pamphlet Pleasant Quips for Upstart Newfangled Gentlewomen. In 1600 he became Rector of St. Botolph’s, Bishopsgate. In 1616 and 1617 he wrote to Alleyn (q.v.) as his ‘very loving and ancient friend’.[659] He died 13 Feb. 1624.

Gosson claims to have written both tragedies and comedies,[660] but no play of his is extant. He names three of them. Of Catiline’s Conspiracies he says that it was ‘usually brought into the Theater and that ‘because it is known to be a pig of mine own sow, I will speak the less of it; only giving you to understand, that the whole mark which I shot at in that work was to show the reward of traitors in Catiline, and the necessary government of learned men in the person of Cicero, which foresees every danger that is likely to happen and forestalls it continually ere it take effect’.[661] Lodge disparages the originality of this play and compares it unfavourably with Wilson’s Short and Sweet[662] (q.v.). Of two other plays Gosson says: ‘Since my publishing the School of Abuse two plays of my making were brought to the stage; the one was a cast of Italian devices, called, The Comedy of Captain Mario; the other a Moral, Praise at Parting. These they very impudently affirm to be written by me since I had set out my invective against them. I can not deny they were both mine, but they were both penned two years at the least before I forsook them, as by their own friends I am able to prove.’[663] It is conceivable that Gosson may be the translator of Fedele and Fortunio (cf. ch. xxiv).

ROBERT GREENE (1558–92).

Robert Greene was baptized at Norwich on 11 July 1558. He entered St. John’s College, Cambridge, as a sizar in 1575 and took his B.A. in 1578 and his M.A. by 1583, when he was residing in Clare Hall. The addition of an Oxford degree in July 1588 enabled him to describe himself as Academiae Utriusque Magister in Artibus. He has been identified with a Robert Greene who was Vicar of Tollesbury, Essex, in 1584–5, but there is no real evidence that he took orders. The earlier part of his career may be gathered from his autobiographic pamphlet, The Repentance of Robert Greene (1592), eked out by the portraits, also evidently in a measure autobiographic, of Francesco in Never Too Late (1590) and of Roberto in Green’s Groats-worth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance (1592). It seems that he travelled in youth and learnt much wickedness; then married and lived for a while with his wife and had a child by her. During this period he began his series of euphuistic love-romances. About 1586, however, he deserted his wife, and lived a dissolute life in London with the sister of Cutting Ball, a thief who ended his days at Tyburn, as his mistress. By her he had a base-born son, Fortunatus. He does not seem to have been long in London before he ‘had wholly betaken me to the penning of plays which was my continual exercise’.[664] His adoption of his profession seems to be described in The Groats-worth of Wit. Roberto meets a player, goes with him, and soon becomes ‘famozed for an arch-plaimaking poet’.[665] Similarly, in Never Too Late, Francesco ‘fell in amongst a company of players, who persuaded him to try his wit in writing of comedies, tragedies, or pastorals, and if he could perform anything worthy of the stage, then they would largely reward him for his pains’. Hereupon Francesco ‘writ a comedy, which so generally pleased the audience that happy were those actors in short time, that could get any of his works, he grew so exquisite in that faculty’.[666] Greene’s early dramatic efforts seem to have brought him into rivalry with Marlowe (q.v.). In the preface to Perimedes the Blacksmith (S. R. 29 March 1588) he writes: ‘I keep my old course to palter up something in prose, using mine old poesie still, Omne tulit punctum, although lately two Gentlemen Poets made two mad men of Rome beat it out of their paper bucklers: and had it in derision for that I could not make my verses jet upon the stage in tragical buskins, every word filling the mouth like the faburden of Bo-Bell, daring God out of heaven with that Atheist Tamburlan, or blaspheming with the mad priest of the Sun.... Such mad and scoffing poets that have poetical spirits, as bred of Merlin’s race, if there be any in England that set the end of scholarism in an English blank-verse, I think either it is the humour of a novice that tickles them with self-love, or too much frequenting the hot-house (to use the German proverb) hath sweat out all the greatest part of their wits.... I but answer in print what they have offered on the stage.’[667] The references here to Marlowe are unmistakable. His fellow ‘gentleman poet’ is unknown; but the ‘mad priest of the Sun’ suggests the play of ‘the lyfe and deathe of Heliogabilus’, entered on S. R. to John Danter on 19 June 1594, but now lost.[668] In 1589 Greene published his Menaphon (S. R. 23 Aug.), in which he further alluded to Marlowe as the teller of ‘a Canterbury tale; some prophetical full-mouth that as he were a Cobler’s eldest son, would by the last tell where anothers shoe wrings’.[669] Doron, in the same story, appears to parody a passage in the anonymous play of The Taming of A Shrew, which is further alluded to in a prefatory epistle To the Gentlemen Students of Both Universities contributed to Greene’s book by Thomas Nashe. Herein Nashe, while praising Peele and his Arraignment of Paris, satirizes Marlowe, Kyd, and particularly the players (cf. App. C, No. xlii). To Menaphon are also prefixed lines by Thomas Brabine which tells the ‘wits’ that ‘strive to thunder from a stage-man’s throat’ how the novel is beyond them. ‘Players, avaunt!’[670] In the following year, 1590, Greene continued the attack on the players in the autobiographic romance, already referred to, of Never Too Late (cf. App. C, No. xliii). In 1590 Greene, whose publications had hitherto been mainly toys of love and romance, began a series of moral pamphlets, full of professions of repentance and denunciations of villainy. To these belong, as well as Never Too Late, Greene’s Mourning Garment (1590) and Greene’s Farewell to Folly (1591). A preface to the latter contains some satirical references to the anonymous play of Fair Em (cf. ch. xxiv.) One R. W. retorted upon Greene in a pamphlet called Martine Mar-Sextus (S. R. 8 Nov. 1591), in which he abuses lascivious authors who finally ‘put on a mourning garment and cry Farewell’.[671] Similarly, Greene’s exposures of ‘cony-catching’ or ‘sharping’ provoked the following passage in the Defence of Cony-catching (S. R. 21 April 1592) by one Cuthbert Conycatcher: ‘What if I should prove you a cony-catcher, Master R. G., would it not make you blush at the matter?... Ask the Queen’s 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 Admiral’s men for as many more.... I hear, when this was objected, that 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.’[672] It is probable that the change in the tone of Greene’s writings did not correspond to any very thorough-going reformation of life. There is nothing to show that Greene had any share in the Martinist controversy. But he became involved in one of the personal animosities to which it led. Richard Harvey, the brother of Gabriel, in his Lamb of God (S. R. 23 Oct. 1589), while attacking Lyly as Paphatchet, had ‘mistermed all our other poets and writers about London, piperly make-plaies and make-bates. Hence Greene, beeing chiefe agent for the companie [i.e. the London poets] (for hee writ more than foure other, how well I will not say: but sat citò, si sat benè) tooke occasion to canuaze him a little.’[673] Apparently he called the Harveys, in his A Quip for an Upstart Courtier (S. R. 21 July 1592, cf. App. C, No. xlvii), the sons of a ropemaker, which is what they were.[674] In August Greene partook freely of Rhenish wine and pickled herrings at a supper with Nashe and one Will Monox, and fell into a surfeit. On 3 September he died in a squalid lodging, after writing a touching letter to his deserted wife, and begging his landlady, Mrs. Isam, to lay a wreath of bays upon him. These details are recorded by Gabriel Harvey, who visited the place and wrote an account of his enemy’s end in a letter to a friend, which he published in his Four Letters and Certain Sonnets: especially Touching Robert Greene, and Other Parties by him Abused (S. R. 4 Dec. 1592).[675] This brought Nashe upon him in the Strange News of the Intercepting of Certain Letters[676] (S. R. 12 Jan. 1593) and began a controversy between the two which lasted for several years. In Pierce’s Supererogation (27 Apr. 1593) Harvey spoke of ‘Nash, the ape of Greene, Greene the ape of Euphues, Euphues the ape of Envy’, and declared that Nashe ‘shamefully and odiously misuseth every friend or acquaintance as he hath served ... Greene, Marlowe, Chettle, and whom not?’[677] In Have With You to Saffron Walden (1596), Nashe defends himself against these accusations. ‘I never abusd Marloe, Greene, Chettle in my life.... He girds me with imitating of Greene.... I scorne it ... hee subscribing to me in anything but plotting Plaies, wherein he was his crafts master.’[678] The alleged abuse of Marlowe, Greene, and Chettle belongs to the history of another pamphlet. This is Green’s Groats-worth of Wit, Bought with a Million of Repentance (S. R. 20 Sept. 1592, ‘upon the peril of Henry Chettle’[679]). According to the title-page, it was ‘written before his death and published at his dying request’. To this is appended the famous address To those Gentlemen, his Quondam Acquaintance, that spend their wits in making Plays.[680] The reference here to Shakespeare is undeniable. Of the three playwrights warned, the first and third are almost certainly Marlowe and Peele; the third may be Lodge, but on the whole is far more likely to be Nashe (q.v.). It appears, however, that Nashe himself was supposed to have had a hand in the authorship. Chettle did his best to take the responsibility off Nashe’s shoulders in the preface to his Kind-Hart’s Dream (S. R. 8 Dec. 1592; cf. App. C, No. xlix). In the epistle prefixed to the second edition of Pierce Penniless his Supplication to the Devil (Works, i. 154), written early in 1593, Nashe denies the charge for himself and calls The Groats-worth ‘a scald trivial lying pamphlet’; and it is perhaps to this that Harvey refers as abuse of Greene, Marlowe, and Chettle, although it is not clear how Marlowe comes in. There is an echo of Greene’s hit at the ‘upstart crow, beautified with our feathers’ in the lines of R. B., Greene’s Funerals (1594, ed. McKerrow, 1911, p. 81):

Greene, gaue the ground, to all that wrote upon him.