But aside from any such considerations as these, there are certain general principles having to do with the customs of literary composition of the time, and particularly of the group in which Greene moved, that make it quite improbable that Greene should have waited until 1590 before beginning to write plays. Nothing is clearer than that the movements of these pre-Shakespearean groups were not movements of the individual but of the mass. There is in the work of this era the utmost possible play and interplay of influence. Marlowe was the only strikingly originative writer of the times, yet the facets of his contact with the literary life of England and the Continent have by no means as yet been numbered. Any new style of composition immediately assumed the dignity of a school. Lyly's style became so popular that Euphuism became a convention. So the appearance of the Arcadia, of Tamburlaine, of a romance by Greene, was followed by a flood of imitative works. Greene's Tully's Love is used in Every Woman in Her Humour, a comedy of humours after the model of Jonson; the author of Sir John Oldcastle borrows from The Pinner of Wakefield the swallowing of the seals; Harvey accuses Nash of being "the ape of Greene," and Greene of being the "ape of Euphues"; Tamburlaine is imitated again and again, sometimes in whole, as in Alphonsus of Arragon, Selimus, and The Battle of Alcazar, but more often through the unconscious influence of its affected language and dramatic types. As much can be said of the imitation of Kyd's Spanish Tragedy. Traces of the same source-book appear in Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and Marlowe's Dr Faustus, and identical lines appear in Greene's Orlando Furioso and Peele's Old Wives' Tale. The same comedy appears in A Looking-Glass for London and England, Locrine and Selimus, and The Taming of a Shrew contains lines from Tamburlaine and Dr Faustus. Shakespeare borrows from Greene, Oberon for A Midsummer Night's Dream; features of the story of Euphues, his Censure to Philautus for Troilus and Cressida; features of Farewell to Folly for Much Ado About Nothing; characters from the Mourning Garment for Polonius and Laertes, and innumerable reminiscent lines. Sometimes the influence is more complicate still. Greene in Pandosto borrows from Lyly's Campaspe, and Shakespeare, borrowing from Greene for his Winter's Tale, approximates Lyly's form; and Greene, ridiculing Marlowe's Tamburlaine, makes some allusions that indicate that he as well as Marlowe must have been acquainted with Primaudaye. Cases of this kind are so frequent that they seem to have no individual bearing, but to refer to the general conditions of art composition of the day. In such a system of community of ideas Greene was entirely at home. Of this we have abundant evidence in his often displayed ability to feel the popular pulse, and to make himself a part of every growing movement. His first works were written under the influence of the Italian school. In these early works there is a strong strain of Euphuism, which is made explicit in his Euphues, his Censure to Philautus (1587). Two years later a new style had arisen through the composition of Sidney's Arcadia (published in 1590), and Greene aligns himself with the new pastoral movement in his Menaphon. Not content with the tacit desertion of the conceits of Lyly he gives his new work the sub-title Camilla's Alarum to Slumbering Euphues, and attacks his old models for artificiality. So also Greene is quick to utilise contemporary events to add to the popular appeal of his writings. From the publication of the Spanish Masquerado (1589), celebrating the victory over the Spanish Armada, there is every reason to believe Greene received his warmest recognition at court; and sincere as were his conny-catching pamphlets we may be sure that their value was not lessened in Greene's eyes by their popular appeal. Greene was neither more nor less of an imitator than his fellows; his ideals and methods of composition were, no doubt, those of his time, and if we cannot claim for him that he consistently broke ground in new domains of expression, we may at any rate be certain that he did not fall far behind in the progressive motion of the art of his era.
The significance of these things in the study of the chronology of Greene's plays should be manifest. There were during Greene's literary life three extraordinary dramatic successes on the London stage—Tamburlaine, Dr Faustus and The Spanish Tragedy. It is reasonable to suppose that the man who, in prose composition, always struck when the iron was hot, would, as a playwright, use the same expedition to take advantage of a popular wave of enthusiasm. That Greene's Alphonsus of Arragon was written under the inspiration of Marlowe's Tamburlaine, and that Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay was written as a reflex from Dr Faustus is so certain as to require no demonstration. And it is only less certain that we have in Orlando Furioso a reminiscence of Tamburlaine and of The Spanish Tragedy, and that James IV. was inspired as a pseudo-historical play by the growing popularity of the chronicle type. According to the best authority obtainable Tamburlaine appeared in 1587, The Spanish Tragedy before 1587, and Dr Faustus in 1588. With these conditions before us, and in the light of Greene's known character and the habits of the times, it is scarcely possible to think that Greene should have waited until Dr Faustus had somewhat dimmed the lustre of Tamburlaine before imitating the latter; or that he should have ignored the undoubted vigour of the magician motive to imitate a form that had enjoyed prior popularity, only to take up for treatment a drama in the occult spirit, when this type in its turn had been laid on the shelf in favour of the newer form of chronicle play. Ignoring then for the present A Looking-Glass for London and England, which is not entirely Greene's own composition, and George-a-Greene, concerning which doubts must exist, we are provided with the order of succession of the four remaining plays in the order of publication of their prototypes: Alphonsus of Arragon, Orlando Furioso, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, James IV. Further investigation provides more explicit chronological data.
Alphonsus of Arragon is the earliest of Greene's extant plays. Its date has been set at 1587 or 1588 by Gayley, who has carefully worked over the conclusions of Fleay, Storojenko and others. That Greene had been interested in Alphonsus as early as 1584 is clear from his mention of the name in the dedication to The Card of Fancy. The play was not written before Tamburlaine, for that hero is mentioned in it; on the other hand there are several considerations that seem to show that it was written soon after Tamburlaine in an effort to share some of that play's popularity. Greene's words in the prologue:
"Will now begin to treat of bloody Mars,
Of doughty deeds and valiant victories."
seem to announce a purpose to begin a new warlike vein. The play resembles Tamburlaine in bombast, in rant, in comparing a victorious warrior with the gods, in the motive of Asiatic and Mohammedan conquest, and in its double original design. Unlike Tamburlaine only one of the parts was completed. There is a possibility that the two plays are mentioned in conjunction by Peele in his well-known "Farewell" verses to Sir John Norris and his companions (1589):
"Bid theatres and proud tragedians,
Bid Mahomet's Poo and mighty Tamburlaine,
King Charlemayne, Tom Stukeley and the rest,
Adieu."
By the ingenuity of Mr Fleay we are able to conjecture that "Mahomet's Poo" probably refers to the brazen head, or poll, through which the Prophet speaks in the fourth act of the play.
That Alphonsus was not successful on the stage seems likely when one compares the play with the successful productions of the day. Its failure is indicated by the fact that, though a second part was promised in the epilogue, no such part is known to have been written. More interesting still, for the light it throws on the fortunes of this play, and on Greene's relationship with his contemporaries, is the study of the antagonism that suddenly appears in all of Greene's allusions to Marlowe. This feeling apparently dates from the beginning of 1588, or about the time of the probable first performance of Alphonsus of Arragon. It is first marked in the very satirical allusion to Tamburlaine contained in the address to the gentleman readers prefixed to Perimedes (1588). In this the author expresses a purpose to "keep my old course to palter up something in prose using mine old poesie still Omne tulit punctum, although lately two Gentlemen Poets made two madmen of Rome beat it out of their paper bucklers, and had it in derision for that I could not make my verses jet upon the stage in tragical buskins, every word filling the mouth like the faburden of Bo-Bell, daring God out of heaven with that Atheist Tamburlaine or blaspheming with the mad priest of the sun." He ends this passage as follows: "If I speak darkly, gentlemen, and offend with this digression, I crave pardon, in that I but answer in print what they have offered on the stage." Just who the two poets and two madmen of Rome may have been it is now impossible to say. What stands out clear is that Greene has been attacked on the stage for failing to make his "verses jet upon the stage in tragical buskins," after the manner of Marlowe's Tamburlaine; and as Marlowe was the atheist, and not Tamburlaine, it is also clear that Greene has a feeling of resentment against his brother poet. The explanation that seems most sensible is that Greene has attempted to write a play in Marlowe's vein, has failed, and being publicly taunted for his failure, either by Marlowe himself or by his partisans, expresses his determination to continue writing in prose, the form of composition that has already brought him fame. Greene's animosity toward Marlowe continued for several years. In Nash's address prefixed to Greene's Menaphon (1589)[8] the same feeling is manifested, possibly at the instigation of Greene. Here Nash, perhaps to throw contempt on Marlowe as a writer of plays, vaunts Greene as a writer of romance. Menaphon, he holds, excels the achievements of men who, unable to write romance, "think to outbrave better pens with the swelling bombast of a bragging blank verse." The same attack is persistently pushed in the poem, also prefixed to Menaphon, by Thomas Barnaby (signing himself by anagram Brabine), in the words "the pomp of speech that strives to thunder from a stage man's throat." Again and again Greene and his friends return to the attack on Marlowe, now in Francesco's Fortunes, in a slighting reference to the trade of Marlowe's father,[9] now in Greene's Vision, and finally in A Groatsworth of Wit, in which, though in more friendly guise, Greene reproves Marlowe for his atheism.[10] There can be little doubt that thus was displayed the rancour of the unsuccessful as against the successful dramatist. The play of Alphonsus of Arragon is in fact quite unworthy to be placed beside Marlowe's Tamburlaine in any comparison for literary excellence. Whether Greene recognised this or not he was undoubtedly influenced in his later play composition by the failure of his first effort. Without immediately striking out in any new vein he now proceeds to burlesque and to parody where first he had imitated.
About 1585 there was produced Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, a tragedy of blood, of madness, and revenge, with many ingredients of the Senecan plays. This play and Marlowe's Tamburlaine were the chief sensations of the English stage of the sixteenth century. No single play of Shakespeare's can be said to have had the instantaneous popular success and the immediate and widespread imitation given to both of these plays. In the next play that Greene wrote unaided after the failure of his Alphonsus of Arragon there is discernible an entire change in the author's attitude. He is no more originative than he was before, but he does not again attempt to treat an imitative drama in the spirit of its original. Certain of the scenes of Alphonsus of Arragon were ridiculous enough, but they were undertaken in no apparent spirit of burlesque. In Orlando Furioso Greene proceeds to parody the two most popular types holding the boards in his day. The real hero of Orlando Furioso is not the mad French knight, Orlando, but Sacripant. And Sacripant is a foiled Tamburlaine, a high aspiring king whose ambition comes to nothingness. In the spirit of Macbeth, who himself had something of Tamburlaine's lust of conquest, are the words of Sacripant: "I hold these salutations as ominous; for saluting me by that which I am not, he presageth what I shall be." And in the musings of Sacripant there operates the spirit of Tamburlaine. "Sweet are the thoughts that smother from conceit," he reflects; his chair presents "a throne of majesty"; his thoughts "dream on a diadem"; he becomes "co-equal with the gods." The lines beginning "Fair queen of love," spoken by Orlando ([p. 187] of this edition) remind us of the lofty yearning love of Tamburlaine for Zenocrate. As a play Orlando Furioso is Tamburlaine by perversions, and purposely so. Its chief martial spirit strives for high ends by ignoble means. He fails to win his mistress, and he fails to win his throne; done out of both by a madman. If this play is a perversion of the Tamburlaine motive, it is also a burlesque on the tragedy of blood. There are indications that Greene would have been quite willing to ridicule Kyd. Nash, in the same preface to Menaphon in which he had ridiculed Marlowe, satirises Kyd in the famous lines, "blood is a beggar," and "whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragical speeches." Kyd, as a non-university man, represented that rising coterie, of which Shakespeare was the master, against whom the jealous shafts of the university wits were directed. The signs of the influence of the tragedy of blood type are many. In the balanced and parallel lines of Senecan character, and found little elsewhere in Greene:
"Only by me was lov'd Angelica,
Only for me must live Angelica."