"Spitting the meat 'gainst supper for my guess,"
and the hay, and butter, and cheese displays of Harleston fair. "He was of singular pleasaunce, the very supporter, and, to no man's disgrace be this intended, the only comedian, of a vulgar writer, in this country," writes Chettle in A Kind Hart's Dream, summing up in striking phrase the true contemporary judgment of Greene's greatest distinction. But there is another aspect of his genius. He loved the active life of out-of-doors, and he indulged a vigorous spirit of participation in the life around him. But he saw behind things into the spirit, and his treatment of events is dignified with a rich philosophy drawn from his manifold contact with the most lavish era in England's history. To him a drama is more than an isolated and a meaningless show. In Francesco's Fortunes he outlines the kind of play that he himself wrote: "Therein they painted out in the persons the course of the world, how either it was graced with honour, or discredited with vices." He leaves the hollow-sounding verbiage of his early plays to comment with the lawyer on "the manners and the fashions of this age." His James IV. is a play of contemplation. Bohan is an early "malcontent," and Andrew, noting the downfall of his prince, exclaims, "Was never such a world, I think, before." With the heart of a democrat Greene understands alike the problems of kings and yeomen. The counsel of the King of England to Dorothea on the obligations and dangers of sovereignty is sage and rational, and Ida's comments on the "greatest good"—that it lies not "in delights, or pomp, or majesty"—are rich with the best philosophy. In A Quip for an Upstart Courtier Clothbreeches asks, "Doth true virtue consist in riches, or humanity in wealth? is ancient honour tied to outward bravery? or not rather true nobility, a mind excellently qualified with rare virtues?" So often is this note struck in Greene's plays that we might call it a personal one were it not that it is beginning to appear commonly in the literature of the time.
Summing up Greene's contribution to the drama of his age we should say that it lies in the essential comedy of his outlook on life, his inherent vis comica; in his loving insight into human nature in its familiar aspects; in his distrust of exaggeration and his tendency to turn this to burlesque; and in his beautiful philosophy of the eternal verities. Out of the drama of Greene there developed the new romantic comedy of Shakespeare and the realism of joy of domestic drama. After George-a-Greene there came the Huntingdon plays of Munday and Chettle, in which the woodland knight, Robin Hood, appears again. After Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay there came Fair Em, A Knack to Know a Knave, John-a-Kent and John-a-Cumber, and Dekker's Shoemaker's Holiday. Heywood and Samuel Rowley and Munday and Dekker and the author of The Merry Devil of Edmonton share with Shakespeare indisputable strains of his individual note.
Professor Herford calls attention to the conflict, in Greene's life, between "the fresh, unworn sense of beauty and poetry," and "the bitter, disillusioned cynicism of premature old age." That conflict was a necessary one. It was present also in the discrepancy between the lyric note of Marlowe's yearning fancy and the hard reserve laid upon his later pen by bitter suffering. Both of these were true Elizabethans. They were true to their times in the vastness of their conceptions and in the narrowness of their lives, in their poetic triumphs no less than in their personal defeats. The marvellous thing is that in the midst of riotous life they should have learned repose in art, that though writing in a tavern their muse should have remained chaste. Marlowe remained to the end the poet of "air and fire." From Greene we get in the drama the first clear note of the English woodland joy that had echoed fitfully in English non-dramatic verse from the days of Chaucer and the unknown author of Alysoun.
A Groatsworth of Wit has been so often cited as a record in the history of English drama that its value as a human document has been forgotten. Of Greene's attack therein on Shakespeare there is no need to say anything here. To those who have any concern with Greene himself it is interesting chiefly for its revelation of the awful melancholy of his last days and his pathetic sense of the wrongs suffered by the little school of dramatists of which he was a member. The sense of pity produced by reading this book is intensified by a study of Greene's last days as suggested in his own succeeding book, The Repentance of Robert Greene, and in the pamphlets of Harvey and Nash. Greene died on the 3rd of September 1592, of a malady following a surfeit of Rhenish wine and pickled herring. Before his death he received commendations from his wife, and his last written words were addressed to her in a request to pay the debt incurred by his sickness. We are told that after his death the keeper of his garret crowned his head with bays. Fourteen years later, when, with the exception of Lodge, the last of the university wits had passed away, and Shakespeare, whom they had all feared, had taken his abiding place, Dekker in his tract, A Knight's Coiffuring, shows Marlowe, Greene and Peele, together once more in Elysium, under the "shades of a large vine, laughing to see Nash, that was but newly come to their college, still haunted with the sharp and satirical spirit that had followed him here upon earth."
The text of this edition is based on Dyce's modernised text of 1861 compared with the later collations of Grosart and Collins, and editions of single plays by Ward, Manly and Gayley. The editor has been conservative in accepting modifications of Dyce's text. The act and scene divisions as found in Collins have been adopted, and the location of scenes has been indicated throughout.