[8] Menaphon was probably written a year or so earlier, but Nash's address was probably dated from the year of publication.
[9] If we are to believe that Edward III. is Marlowe's play the reference of this passage to Marlowe is made certain, for Greene ridicules the words 'Ave Cæsar' that occur in the play. The only other play in which the words are known to occur is Orlando Furioso by Greene himself. It would be too much to say that their use there is in ridicule of Marlowe, though even that is possible.
[10] It may be, though it is not certain, that Greene was attacking Marlowe in the epistle prefixed to his Farewell to Folly (1591), in which he tells the gentleman students that his Mourning Garment had been so popular that the pedlar found the books "too dear for his pack, that he was fain to bargain for the life of Tomliuclin to wrap up his sweet powders in those unsavoury papers." If "Tomliuclin" is a misprint for Tamburlaine this is Greene's most direct and spiteful attack on Marlowe.
[11] Gayley, Representative English Comedies, p. 410.
[12] Orlando Furioso, ii. 76-79; Old Wives' Tale, ii. 808-811.
[13] See Storojenko, Huth Library, vol. I., p. 235, and Gayley, Representative English Comedies, p. 412.
[14] Greene's satirical use in Never too Late of the words "Ave Cæsar," which occur in Edward III., Act i. Sc. I, and his connecting of them with a cobbler, seem to constitute Fleay's case. The matter has already been mentioned in connection with Greene's jealousy of Marlowe. The latest editor of Edward III., C. F. Tucker Brooke, in The Shakespeare Apocrypha, ignores the supposition that the play may be by Marlowe and dismisses the theory that it was by two hands. He puts forward the claims of Peele, not, however, with great weight.
[15] And for another expression of the same idea see Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, [p. 264].
[16] The refrain, "O, what is love! it is some mighty power," occurs with almost a lyric note in George-a-Greene.
[17] The Old Dramatists—Greene and Peele, p. 603.