ROBERT GREENE.
From John Dickenson's "Greene in Conceipt" (1598).
CONTENTS
[INTRODUCTION]
"Why should art answer for the infirmities of manners?" asks Thomas Nash in defending the memory of his dead comrade, Robert Greene, against the attacks of Gabriel Harvey. Some such consideration as this has been needed to rescue Greene's fame from the uncritical hostility of later times. It has been the misfortune of the man to be remembered by posterity chiefly through adverse personal documents. The assaults of a frustrate and dying man on a successful rival like curses soon turned home to roost. Gabriel Harvey, the Kenrick of his day, crowned the dead poet with bays more pathetic than the sordid wreath placed by Isam's hand. And to complete the tale of disfavour Greene himself tells his own story with a morbid self-consciousness only exceeding Bunyan's, and a thrifty purpose to turn even his sins to pence. Though during Greene's life and after his death circumstances were unmeet to dispassionate biography, it may promote the calmer mood of a later age to inquire into the conditions of his disordered career and the sources of his unique genius. "Debt and deadly sin, who is not subject to?" cries Nash. "With any notorious crime I never knew him tainted." Nash refers Greene back to human nature. With Nash, at the best but lukewarm, and with Symonds, no partisan of Greene's, one believes that circumstances as well as natural frailty made Greene what he came to be. And of truth he must be represented as no isolated figure, but as a man of his times, frail, no doubt, but frail with Marlowe and Peele, versatile with Sidney and Raleigh, reflective with Spenser, and lusty with Shakespeare.
Robert Greene represents the Elizabethan age at its best and its worst. What was best in it he helped to consummate. Of the worst he was the victim as well as the exemplar. Greene's life comprises and almost defines the greatest era of expansion known in English drama. Shakespeare's debt to his predecessors is great not only on account of direct literary influences. The best things his forerunners had done for him were to free the drama from the regulations of a didactic art, to provide the dramatist a cultivated audience at home in the great popular play-houses of the metropolis, and somewhat to relieve the stage from the awful stigma that had rested on the callings of the actor and the playwright. When Greene was at preparatory school and at Cambridge didactic purpose still dominated popular plays. In The Conflict of Conscience (1560), King Darius (1565), The Life and Repentance of Mary Magdalene (1566), and Jacob and Esau (1568) moral drama was late represented. Even in tragedy, and serious drama on secular subjects, the didactic element persisted in Preston's Cambises (1569), and in Edward's Damon and Pithias (1571). Only in Gascoigne did pure art speak for itself. He indeed "broke the ice" for the greater poets who followed him, but he was a translator, and not an original dramatist. The most promising writer before 1586 was Robert Wilson. Critics have seen in his The Three Ladies of London (1584) the mingling of the old morality and the new art, yet Wilson shows his subserviency to the demands of his time by making this "a perfect pattern for all estates to look into," and by presenting the allegory of three abstractions—Lucre, Love and Conscience. Six years later his continuation of this play was frankly called a "Moral." Greene himself shows the same motive in A Looking-Glass for London and England and in James IV.; and the late appearance of such plays as A Warning for Fair Women (1599), and A Larum for London (1602) testifies to the vitality of the didactic element in drama long after the exponents of a new art had arisen.