“In prime of youth a rose, in age a weed,
That for a minute’s joy payes endless meed.”
His last letter to the poor Lincolnshire lady whom he married, ill-used, and cruelly abandoned, was dated from a squalid lodging in Dowgate, where he died of want and disease. It ran as follows:
“Doll, I charge thee by the love of our youth and by my soules rest that thou wilt see this man (the shoemaker) paide; for if hee and his wife had not succoured me I had died in the streetes.
“Robert Greene.”
Doll was the amiable and worthy woman to whom he had previously written:
“The remembrance of many wrongs offered thee and thy unreproved virtues add greater sorrow to my miserable state than I can utter or thou conceive, neither is it lessened by consideration of thy absence (though shame would hardly let me behold thy face) but exceedingly aggravated.”
Akin in character to Greene was John Skelton, a popular poet in the reign of the seventh Henry, and King Henry the Eighth’s poet laureate, who wrote of himself:
“A King to me mine habit gave
At Oxford the University,
Advanced I was to that degree:
By whole consent of their Senate,
I was made Poet Laureate.”
The title being then a university degree, and the habit a robe of white and green, embroidered in silk and gold. He took holy orders in 1498, and, as old Anthony Wood said, “having been guilty of many crimes, as most poets are,” Bishop Wykke suspended him from his benefice. In 1501 he was in prison for marrying and keeping a mistress, “a crime amongst the clergy of the Romish persuasion both in those days and these,” says Cibber, “more subjected to punishment than adultery.” He was a fierce and bitter assailant of the clergy, the Dominicans, and Cardinal Wolsey. Many of his productions were never printed, but were chanted at markets and fairs, in village ale-houses, and in the streets by itinerant ballad-singers, who learned them by heart and sent them abroad like floating seeds borne hither and thither by the vagrant winds. The author of the ‘Lives of the Laureates’ said of this poet: “The brief glance we have of him, the scholar and the buffoon, a priest with his married concubine and bastardized children, mocking, half in anger half in jest, or it might be in the wantonness of sorrow, at the falsehoods by which he was surrounded, may justly awaken our sympathy nor fail to suggest a moral.”
The misfortunes of poor Spenser I have referred to in dealing with the sad side of the subject, but another of the laureates who tasted the full bitterness of poverty was Ben Jonson, who began life as a bricklayer, became a soldier, and a brave one too, abandoned arms to tread the stage, and strolled about the country, trudging beside the waggon containing the players’ scenes, and “properties,” many a weary mile. From acting plays he took to writing plays, the two arts being then more intimately and nobly associated than they ever have been since, for the stage has fallen out of the hands of poets and players into those of showmen and buffoons. He was married and had a son, to whom some of the players stood sponsors. Shakespeare, it is traditionally said, was one of them, and what his necessities were may be readily guessed from the entry in Henslowe’s diary preserved at Dulwich College, in which small sums are entered as advanced to Ben Jonson for work he was then doing. A story is related of how he came, after many other vain efforts, to the Globe Theatre on the Bankside with his play of Every Man in His Humour, which after the manager had superficially glanced at he coldly returned as unsuitable. Shakespeare, it is said, stood by, and noting, we presume, the melancholy and despairing way in which his future dear friend and rival turned to leave the theatre, spoke to him, begging leave to read his play, with which he was so well pleased that he brought about its acceptance. Poverty haunted Ben with more or less closeness all through his career (often it must be confessed through the extravagance of his hospitality to brother poets) and was, it is said, sadly too intimate with him when he died. When sick in 1629, Charles I., who had been generous to him, being supplicated in his favour, sent him ten guineas, of which mean gift Smollett says, Jonson spoke as follows to the messenger of whom he received it: