The Earl of Leicester died on 4th September 1588. Previously to this date the company of players acting under his patronage had played in London, probably at the Cross-Keys in Bishopsgate Street, and more frequently had travelled in the country. At the death of Dudley, they had of course to seek for a new patron, and no doubt found one in Ferdinando, Lord Strange, whose company (containing as we shall see some of the actors already known as Leicester's men) are first traceable in 1589. An earlier company bearing the title of Lord Strange's men, c. 1582, seem to have been merely acrobats or posture-mongers. But before entering on the history of this company under its new name, of which we know Shakespeare to have been a member, we must note some particulars regarding other dramatists, especially Marlowe, Greene, and Nash, which indirectly concern Shakespeare, and have hitherto been wrongly interpreted.
In 1587, when the Admiral's men re-opened after the plague, they produced, in what succession we need not here determine, Greene's Orlando and Alphonsus of Arragon, Peele's Battle of Alcazar, and Marlowe's Tamberlaine. Those plays are enumerated in Peele's Farewell, 1589, as—
"Mahomet's pow, and mighty Tamberlaine,
King Charlemagne, Tom Stukeley, and the rest."
"Mahomet's pow" is the head of Mahomet in Alphonsus; King Charlemagne was probably a character in the complete play of Orlando, of which only a mutilated copy has come down to us; Tom Stukeley is the hero of The Battle of Alcazar; and "the rest" most likely indicate Lodge's Marius and Sylla and Marlowe's Faustus. Greene and Peele wrote no more for this company, but in 1587 removed to the Queen's men, who had been travelling in the country. On 29th March 1588 Greene's Perimedes the Blacksmith was entered on the Stationers' Registers. In the introduction Greene attacks Marlowe and Lodge, who had remained with the Admiral's men, in a passage worth quoting: "I keep my old course still to palter up something in prose, using mine old posy still, omne tulit punctum; although lately two gentlemen poets made two madmen 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 fa-burden of Bow-bell, daring God out of heaven with that atheist Tamberlaine or blaspheming with the mad priest of the sun. But let me rather openly pocket up the ass at Diogenes' hand than wantonly set out such impious instances of intolerable poetry. 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." For the fuller understanding of this satire it may be noted that no "priest of the sun" is known in an early play except in The Looking-glass for London and England by Lodge and Greene, which is certainly of later date than Perimedes, yet may indicate Lodge's liking for that character; that Diogenes is the name assumed by Lodge in his Catharos, 1591, and that Marlowe's name was written Merlin as often as Marlowe. There can be no doubt as to the persons aimed at, nor of the effect of the satire, for both of them left off writing for the Admiral's men; and Marlowe during the next two years produced The Jew of Malta, which can be traced to the Queen's company, and together with Greene, Lodge, and Peele produced the plays of The Troublesome Reign of King John, and The First Part of York and Lancaster on which 2 Henry VI. is founded. The internal evidence for the authorship of these last-mentioned plays is very strong: they were, however, published anonymously.
1589.
Before the entry of Greene's Menaphon on the Stationers' Registers on 23d August 1589, Hamlet and The Taming of a Shrew must have been represented by Pembroke's men, and Marlowe must have left the Queen's company. As Menaphon is accessible in Professor Arber's reprint to the general reader, it will be sufficient to refer to it here without quoting passages in full. That Greene refers so satirically to Marlowe as to prevent our supposing that at this date they could be writing jointly for the same theatre, is clear from a hitherto unnoticed passage in p. 54: "Whosoever descanted of that love told you a Canterbury tale; some prophetical fullmouth, that, as he were a Cobler's eldest son, would by the last tell where another's shoe wrings." Marlowe or Merlin was a shoemaker's son of Canterbury. That Doron in the story is meant for the author of The Taming of a Shrew was shown by Mr. R. Simpson by comparing Doron's speech in p. 74: "White as the hairs that grow on Father Boreas' chin," and the passage in Nash's introduction, p. 5, about mechanical mates, servile imitators of vain-glorious tragedians, who think themselves "more than initiated in poet's immortality if they but once get Boreas by the beard," with the words of the play itself: "whiter than icy hair that grows on Boreas' chin." Mr. Simpson was, however, entirely wrong in identifying Doron with Shakespeare, and did not notice that Doron's entire speech parodies one of Menaphon's in p. 31, just as The Taming of a Shrew parodies Marlowe's plays, or "the mechanical mates" alluded to by Nash imitate the "idiot art-masters" in the "swelling bombast of a bragging blank verse," or the "spacious volubility of a drumming decasyllabon." The name Menaphon is taken from Marlowe's Tamberlaine. In these passages Greene and Nash satirise Kyd, then writing for Pembroke's company. In another paragraph, p. 9, Nash speaks of "a sort of shifting companions" that "leave the trade of Noverint whereto they were born," who get their aphorisms from translations of Seneca and can "afford you whole Hamlets of tragical speeches." This passage is familiar to all students of Shakespeare; and yet no one has, I think, pointed out that Nash identifies these "famished followers" of Seneca with the "Kidde in Æsop, who, enamoured with the Fox's newfangles, forsook all hopes of life to leap into a new occupation." This pun in a tractate containing similar allusions to the names Greene, Lyly, and Merlin is equivalent to a direct attribution of the authorship of Hamlet as produced in 1589 to Kyd, and is also a refutation of those who have seen in the whole passage an allusion to Shakespeare.
Very shortly after Greene's Menaphon Nash issued his Anatomy of Absurdities, which had been entered on the Stationers' Registers 19th September 1588, and which contains much of the same satirical matter as his address in Menaphon.