The considerations outlined are sufficient to incline one favourably toward the theory of Greene's authorship of Locrine. Yet the difficulties are such as for the present to deny the play a place among Greene's works. The date is in great doubt. The first edition of 1595 "newly set forth, overseen and corrected by W. S.," is evidently a revamped version. We cannot agree with Brooke that the play appeared before Tamburlaine, for, among many strains of the dramas of The Misfortunes of Arthur type there are mingled undoubted influences from the revenge plays and Tamburlaine. It is difficult to adjust the play to any scheme of activities that has been worked out for Greene. Certainly it did not ante-date Alphonsus of Arragon, for there is every reason to take the prologue of that play at its word. Upon the hypothesis that it is Greene's work we should place it just before Orlando Furioso, the play which it resembles above all others, and about the same time as A Looking-Glass for London and England, which in respect of comedy it greatly resembles.
It is impossible to view with any favour the theory of Greene's authorship of Selimus. In every respect the play is divergent from Greene's characteristic tone and method. Grosart's theory that this play may be supposed to take the place of the promised second part of Alphonsus of Arragon has no weight. Like the latter play Selimus is the first part of a work that had been planned in series, and in no respect does it supplement Greene's first play. Like Alphonsus of Arragon the play is constructed with such slavish fidelity to the Tamburlaine principles that it is difficult to think Greene could have written Selimus after the failure of Alphonsus. Constructively the play is unlike Greene's work. The declamation is more sustained and the action is less crowded than in Greene's other plays. The many parallel passages quoted by Grosart prove nothing more than that borrowing was the order of the age. Nor is anything proved by the fact that the same clown comedy is introduced into Locrine, Selimus and A Looking-Glass for London and England. If Locrine is Greene's work it was probably written about the time that he was collaborating with Lodge, and he may have introduced the same comedy into both plays. It is no more of an assumption that the author of Selimus borrowed his comedy from Locrine than that Greene would use the same tricks three times within two years. The blank verse of Selimus, built largely on a system of rhymed stanzas, is very far from that of Locrine and of Greene's undoubted plays. To illustrate this no better passages could be chosen than those produced by Collins to evidence the similarity of the verse of the two plays. The vexed problem of the part taken by Greene in the Henry VI. plays can be treated now only as a subject for interesting but comparatively fruitless speculation. So also must be considered the ingenious and almost convincing circumstantial argument that A Knack to Know a Knave is the comedy "lastly writ" by Greene and "Young Juvenal," and mentioned in A Groatsworth of Wit.[25]
We said in beginning that Greene is clearly typical of his time. And indeed his plays are complexes of the dominant dramatic types of the years just before Shakespeare. In his work are focused the strains leading from the three most clearly marked dramatic movements of the age. The English morality combines with rustic low life to produce the interlude, which continues its course of didacticism and horse-play until the end of the century. The Senecan drama scatters ghosts and horrors through English plays until it is etherealised in the poetry of Tamburlaine, and laughed to death in the parodies of The Spanish Tragedy. The English chronicle play gives life to the dry bones of history, and celebrates the solidarity of an England united over the face of the globe, and through all the eras of her splendid history. Of all these elements the one that remains in Greene's work from beginning to end is the didactic strain. A Looking-Glass for London and England is the last full flowering of English religious drama. Yet didactic elements appear in Friar Bacon's strangely unmotivated repentance, and in the interpolated scene of a lawyer, a merchant and a divine in James IV. In Greene's dramas many of the types and figures from a bygone stage are mingled with the newer creations of his invention. The vices of the interludes spring up incongruously in the midst of the characters of a later drama. In Friar Bacon the Vice is again carried off to hell on the back of the Devil, just as had been done years before in simpler plays; and in the same play, by the use of the expedient of perspective glasses, two actions are represented as taking place in widely separate localities, after the manner of the early masques. And aside from these persisting formulas from an older drama there are influences and obligations in relation with Lyly and Marlowe and Kyd that are literally too numerous for enumeration. As significant as any service Greene performed for English drama is the assimilation to a single dramatic end of the adverse expedients of a heterogeneous dramaturgy.
Technically Greene's contribution to the stage was most significant. Nash called him master above all others in "plotting of plays." Part of this mastery comes from his recognition of the technical requirement of continuous action on the stage. Better than any of his contemporaries, not excluding Kyd, he knew that action is of equal importance with speech in the exposition of a dramatic story. Wherever possible he visualises before his audience the successive stages in the progress of his plot, not by the use of ghosts and chorus, who serve merely a narrative purpose, but by bringing before his readers palpable expedients illustrative of the theme of the action. The use of the Brazen Head in Alphonsus of Arragon; the incantations of Melissa in Orlando Furioso; the raising of the arbor, and the death of Remilia under the incantations of the Magi in A Looking-Glass for London and England; the use of a visible magic to transport Burden and Helen, to raise Hercules and the tree, and to present the downfall of the Brazen Head in Friar Bacon, all reveal an ability to adapt the properties and expedients of the stage of the time to the purposes of the plot. This is further exemplified in the facility with which from the beginning Greene utilises such spectacular expedients as the letting down of the throne of Venus from above in Alphonsus of Arragon, and the descent of the throne of Oseas the prophet in A Looking-Glass. Not only does he use the palpable tricks of stagecraft, but he adapts these to the purposes of his dramatic exposition. The perspective glass in Friar Bacon which serves to present two scenes at the same time serves also to connect two strains of the plot and to further the action by arousing Prince Edward's suspicion of the fidelity of Lacy. So magic, which in Dr Faustus serves only to raise a spectacle, in this play is used as a plot expedient to delay the marriage of Margaret and Lacy. The stage directions are more full and circumstantial in Greene's plays than in those of either Marlowe or Peele, and reveal the same tendency to heighten the effect of plot by action and display.
Greene's dramas present a steady development in effectiveness of plot involution. The first plays are marked by a large amount of action and a great number of narrative fragments very crudely and inorganically clustered around the central character. Alphonsus of Arragon is Greene's poorest work in this as in every other respect. Its first act is marked by hesitation and indirection; accident, coincidence and inconsistency are the rule throughout. The play is practically divided into two parts, in the first of which Alphonsus is the central figure, while Amurack serves as protagonist in the second. Orlando Furioso is structurally an improvement on its predecessor, and in A Looking-Glass for London and England an excellent unity of action has been attained. It is in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay that Greene effected the most substantial advance in play technique made before Shakespeare. This is nothing less than the weaving of two distinct plots into the unity of a single dramatic narrative. On account of the crowding of the action and the sensations, the play is unbalanced and unorganised. Friar Bacon's activities are divided into two distinct parts, his victory over Vandermast and his loss of the Brazen Head, and they are scattered through a half-dozen episodes. For perfect balance Prince Edward surrenders Margaret too early in the play and thus makes necessary the introduction of further retarding action based upon an unexplainable whim of Lacy. Yet granting the inchoate character of the play we must admit that in effecting the combination of the story of Friar Bacon with the story of Prince Edward, Lacy and the Fair Maid of Fressingfield, Greene accomplished an unusually significant innovation. In James IV. Greene's technique is at its best. Even in the faulty version that comes down to us we see traces of Greene's experimenting temper. In dumb shows he is reinstating a popular feature of older plays. His induction serves as a model for Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew; and one of its characters, Oberon, is a rough draft for the fairy of that name in A Midsummer Night's Dream, as Bohan is a prototype of Jaques in As You Like It. But Greene's induction is better integrated with his play than is Shakespeare's induction of Sly, the Lords and the Servants, for the two characters, Slipper and Nano, who appear first in the induction, are sent out into the play to serve as connecting links for all of its action. James IV. is the only one of Greene's plays that has unity of action. The plot is introduced with a masterly directness and economy. The fatal situation breaks on the reader at the beginning, and throughout the play the crux of the action remains the love of the King of Scots for another than his queen. Ateukin springs up at the psychological moment and at the dramatic crisis. The first act of the play, dramatically quite the best first act written outside of Shakespeare up to his time, provides the king's marriage to Dorothea, the revelation of his love for Ida, the enlistment of Ateukin in the cause of the king's love, and a lover for Ida to make her inaccessible. Aside from the development of the tragedy of this situation there enters into the play only one minor episode, the love of Lady Anderson for the young knight (in reality Queen Dorothea) whom she is succouring in her castle. That Greene chose to end the play after the manner of comedy, and not, as the situation would seem to require, and the taste of the age must have demanded, with the death of the erring king, is an effective indication of his later freedom from restraint and of his personal philosophy of art.
As Marlowe moved from the sublime passion of his Tamburlaine theme to the cold reserve of his Edward II., Greene also, casting off the turgid eloquence of his early style, attained at the end to an art of contemplative repose and genial humanity. The critic likes to feel that in stripping away the excrescences from his art he was discovering his own soul. In treating Greene as a representative Elizabethan, one should not ignore the individuality of the man that stamps all his work with a new impress. Without being original in structure or style Greene was individual in outlook and temper. He had a keener eye for the little things than any dramatist of his time, and he had also a better sympathy for the quick flashing moods and manifestations of human character. His knowledge of the concrete realities of character is an attribute of the man himself. In depicting fairies he lacks, as did Lyly, the imagination to vitalise an unreal world in the spirit of a Shakespeare. He chooses his characters from the world around him and studies them in their native habitat. His clowns, though belonging to an ancient family, are racy of the soil of England, and are fellows with Shadow, and Launce, and Speed and Grumio. Warren and Ermsby are Englishmen of a sturdy type, and Sir Cuthbert Anderson and Lady Anderson are studied as if in their Scotch castle. But Greene did something more than present the exteriors of men as types. He studied their psychology, and knew the warring forces within the individual soul, the power of circumstance, and ambition, and love to direct the forces of character into untoward paths. He knew that logic of human nature that counts consistency untrue, and constructs motives out of the syllogisms of perversity. So he divides the part of the Capitano, in the original story upon which James IV. was based, into two parts, one the working intelligence, Ateukin, and the other the executioner, Jaques. So also the King of Scots is no puppet. He struggles as he falls, and his fall is reflected in his distraught mind. And in the depiction of women Greene lavishes the finest forces of his genius. Nash called him "the Homer of women," and that phrase is worth the entirety of Strange News in defending Greene's fame. Sometimes he goes to his own baser experience for his comment, and then there is, as in Orlando Furioso ([p. 191]), a touch of the awful invective delivered against prostitutes in his Never too Late. But Greene's later art was better than this. Scottish Ida, who wins the heart of the King of Scots from English Doll, is no courtesan. Something of the respect and love that breathes through Greene's allusions to Doll his wife is seen in his treatment of all womankind. Even Angelica in Orlando Furioso, unformed as are her outlines, represents that fidelity of a patient Grizzel so well exemplified in Margaret in Friar Bacon and Dorothea in James IV. Nothing in Marlowe's Queen Isabella of Edward II., Zenocrate of Tamburlaine, Abigail of The Jew of Malta, can equal the sweet and simple womanliness of Greene's gallery, comprising Isabel in Never too Late, Bellaria and Fawnia in Pandosto, Sephestia in Menaphon, Philomela and the shepherd's wife in the Mourning Garment, Margaret in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, and Ida and Dorothea in James IV.
Greene's skill in the treatment of character grew out of his knowledge of life, and is involved in his most significant and enduring contribution to the stage. This is the introduction of realism onto a stage that was essentially romantic, and it arises from the application of dramatic art to the experiences of everyday life. Greene's low life is not artificial pastoral, nor is it the boorish clownage of the interludes. It is the characteristic life of England that we see in Harrison's Description, refined and beautified by a mature and chastened art. Only in such art can come the homely ideal of "beauty tempered with ... huswifery." By the time of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay Greene's art has come home. Now in a series of domestic thumb sketches he shows us Margaret:
"And there amongst the cream bowls she did shine
As Pallas 'mongst her princely huswifery,"
and the hostess in the kitchen,