Robert Greene: [Six Plays]

by Robert Greene

and

"'Angelica doth none but Medor love,'
Angelica doth none but Medor love!";

in the allusions to Orestes, "Orestes was never so mad in his life as you were"; in the symbols of a classic Hades, Pluto and Averne; in the interspersed quotations from Latin and Italian; in the vague continental setting; in the use of a chorus; in the unheroic revenge motive; in the burlesque death, and the tearing of limb from limb; in "Orlando's sudden insanity and the ridiculously inadequate occasion of it, the headlong dénouement, the farcical technique, the mock heroic atmosphere, the paradoxical absence of pathos, the absurdly felicitous conclusion,—all seemingly unwitting,"[11] we have either imitated or burlesqued the characteristics of the popular revenge and blood play.

That Orlando Furioso was not written after 1591 is clear from a passage in A Defence of Conny-catching (1592) in which Greene is charged with selling the play twice, once to the Queen's players for twenty nobles, and, when these had gone to the provinces, to the Admiral's men for as many more. As the Queen's players left the court 26th December 1591, the play must have existed before that date. A reference to the Spanish Armada provides 30th July 1588 as a posterior limit. No valid conclusions can be drawn from certain resemblances between lines in this play and lines in Peele's Old Wives' Tale,[12] on account of uncertainty as to the date of the latter play. There seems no reason to doubt that Gayley is right in pointing out 26th December 1588 as the date of the first performance of the play before the Queen at court.

About the time that Greene's Orlando Furioso appeared there was presented, perhaps at the same play-house, the Theatre, Marlowe's play, Dr Faustus. In this play Marlowe treated with characteristic intensity the tragical story of a magician who aspired for wisdom as Tamburlaine had aspired for power. Magic and witchcraft were popular in English literature. The story of Dr Faustus was issued in German in 1587, and an English translation was probably made about the same time. The prose narrative of The Famous History of Friar Bacon must also have been well known. Magic and incantation had already been used by Greene in the Brazen Head of Alphonsus of Arragon, in Melissa of Orlando Furioso, and in the priests of Rasni in A Looking-Glass for London and England. But that Marlowe was the first to see a large dramatic motive in the conventional magic is certain. Here again we must accept it that Marlowe was the leader and Greene the adapter. We must agree with Collins that "the presumption in favour of Faustus having preceded Greene's play is so overwhelmingly strong that we cannot suppose that Marlowe borrowed from Greene." But Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay is by no means an imitation of Dr Faustus, nor is it a mere parody. Through his new mastery of technique Greene was deriving a method of his own that was to make him an effective and independent story-teller. Also there was developing in his art a refinement and sanity that revolted from the broadly-drawn conceits and exaggerated passion of Marlowe's early style. There is something suggestively ironical in the opposition of the titles of the two plays, the honourable history of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, as compared with the tragical history of Dr Faustus. So also there must be some delicate satire in the comic summoning of Burden and the Hostess as opposed to the impressive evocation of Alexander and Helen. And one of the chief episodes in the play may have a jocose oblique reference to Dr Faustus. "It is hardly too great an assumption," says Ward, "to regard Bacon's victory over Vandermast as a cheery outdoing by genuine English magic of the pretentious German article," represented in the play of Dr Faustus. In Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay we have the first extant expression of Greene's independent genius working along characteristic lines. Though Marlowe provides him his starting-point, the treatment is Greene's alone. While lacking in originativeness this play reveals that clearly-marked individual attitude toward art and the people of his brain that was to give Greene's plays a pronounced influence in the development of domestic comedy. And, according to Henslowe's records, the play was as great a success as Dr Faustus had been.

It seems likely that Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay appeared the year following the production of Dr Faustus in 1588. The year 1589 is also indicated by other evidence. In theme the play resembles Greene's Tully's Love of that year. In verse it is not unlike Orlando Furioso, which had appeared in 1588. A striking piece of collateral evidence is adduced by Fleay, who, noting Edward's remark in Act I., "Lacy, thou know'st next Friday is Saint James'," is able to show that 1589 is the only year between 1578 and 1595 in which St James's day falls on Friday. Further confirmation of this date arises from a satirical thrust by Greene at the now unknown author of Fair Em, the Miller's Daughter of Manchester, in his letter prefixed to Farewell to Folly. Fair Em bears about the same relationship to Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay that this play bears to Dr Faustus. In other words, while it is not exactly an imitation, it is in many respects a reflection and a parody of the earlier play. The chief points in which Fair Em parodies Greene's play are in the title, in which the author, "somewhat affecting the letter," plays upon Greene's "Fair Maid of Fressingfield"; in the relationship of a king with his courtier in the courtship of a mistress, in Lubeck's fidelity to William the Conqueror in the matter of his love for Mariana contrasted with Lacy's treachery to Edward in courting Margaret; in Em's scornful refusal to return to Mandeville after he has discarded her contrasted with Margaret's hasty forgiveness of Lacy after his unkind desertion; and in the fact that, while in Friar Bacon Lacy is put into disguise to pursue his love suits, in Fair Em it is the king who masquerades to gain a mistress. Greene no more relished the imitation of his work in 1591 than he did the following year, when he wrote A Groatsworth of Wit. His allusion to this play in his Farewell to Folly epistle is identified by his quoting two lines that occur toward the end of the play, "A man's conscience is a thousand witnesses," and "Love covereth the multitude of sins." Upon such sentiments in the drama Greene throws ridicule in the following words: "O, 'tis a jolly matter when a man hath a familiar style and can indite a whole year and never be beholding to art! But to bring Scripture to prove anything he says, and kill it dead with the text in a trifling subject of love, I tell you is no small piece of cunning." The most important point in these lines is the indication that a year had been spent in the composition of the play Greene was ridiculing. If we are to accept it that Fair Em is in any respect an imitation of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay we must count at least a year before the production of Fair Em to find the date of Greene's play. Accepting early 1591 as the point after which Fair Em could not have been written,[13] Friar Bacon must have been produced at least a year before that time, in 1589, or early in 1590. Supposing, on account of the beautiful eulogy to Elizabeth at the close of the play, that it must have been intended for presentation at court, Gayley suggests St Stephen's day, 26th December 1589, as the probable date of the play's production.

There is an element in the play of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay which, viewed in the light of the dramatic influences of the times, reveals again Greene's quickness of apprehension of a significant new strain in the drama. It is the introduction of Prince Edward, the King of England, and the Emperor of Germany, into the fabric of his plot. This play must precede Marlowe's Edward II. by several months, and at this point we are able finally to dissociate Greene's genius from the direct influence of his great contemporary. In order to develop this point it may be well to glance hastily at the history of the chronicle type of play in England to the time of Greene's James IV. Plays on subjects drawn from English history had been more or less common since the production of Gorboduc in 1562. Three Latin plays, Byrsa Basilica and the two college plays by Thomas Legge, Richardus Tertius, had come somewhat near to the true chronicle type. But it was not until the latter years of the ninth decade of the century that dramatists began on any large scale to utilise the history and mythology of England's kings and wars for the celebrating of her contemporary glories. Even before the Spanish Armada England had become conscious of her own power and eager for the display of her prowess. It was under the stimulus of this growing consciousness of might that the first true chronicle play, The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, was written. In this play a dramatist for the first time displays an adequate sense of the objective value of the materials derived from history, combined with that insight into human nature and largeness of imaginative power that are necessary to make of the dry records of Holinshed and Stow a moving dramatic story. The Life and Death of Jack Straw, which also probably preceded the Armada in its first production, is, while not so good as The Famous Victories, a play of vigorous characterisation and native English colouring of historical events. But we are probably not far from the truth in supposing that it was the year 1588 that brought the complete development of the chronicle type. From this year dates the production of the two parts of The Troublesome Reign of King John of England, the date being indicated by the allusion to Tamburlaine in the prologue. The First Part of the Contention betwixt two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, etc., and The True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York, etc., upon which are based the second and third parts of Shakespeare's Henry VI. trilogy, must be dated little, if any, later. The Troublesome Reign is known to have been performed by the Queen's men after the other university men had left Greene alone as representative of this company. The theory that connects Greene's name with the composition is, however, so much a matter of conjecture that nothing can be gained from its consideration. Following these two works, almost certainly not preceding them, as some have thought, comes Marlowe's Edward II., the faultless masterpiece of his dramatic composition, produced probably in 1590. And within a few years, in quick succession, there came Edward III., Richard II., and Richard III., the Henry VI. trilogy, and the culminating trilogy of the two parts of Henry IV. and Henry V.

Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, which appeared in the midst of a movement toward the chronicle type of play, so far adopted its formulas as to introduce historic English characters into the fabric of a story based on prose romance. No feature whatever of the chronicle element as introduced into the play is found in the source-book, nor is there any historical warrant for any of the action presented under the names of the kings. Greene's later attitude toward the rapidly-growing chronicle type of play reveals the motives and characteristics of his art at its maturity. He is still willing to borrow from the dominant types of art holding the stage at the time such expedients as shall serve to adjust his work to the popular demand. But he no longer transcends his own powers in an attempt at imitation, or does violence to his own principles of beauty in a parody of the work of a rival. His note is now a clear and individual one, and to the day of his death it sounds upon a definite key. Greene's powers were no more equal to the blowing into pulsing life of the dead bones of the chronicles of Stow and Holinshed than they were efficient to answer in verse to the lure of "impossible things" after the manner of Marlowe. Greene may have expressed himself in a chronicle play as did Marlowe in Edward II., and as did others of his time, but the simple fact is that no chronicle play of unmixed type can with certainty be assigned to him, and until a light is thrown that modifies somewhat the view here outlined we must regard his part in the composition of The Troublesome Reign and The True Tragedy as distinctly a subordinate one. These considerations are of some importance in considering James IV. and George-a-Greene. Assuming that George-a-Greene is Greene's work, it is clear that here he but modified the chronicle play type to his own purposes, and that he based his story, not on historical narrative, but on the legends of the people as retained in ballad and prose romance. Nor is James IV. based on historical records. Going back to the source from which he drew his early stories, he rests his plot on the first novel of the third decade of Giraldi Cinthio's Hecatommithi. The play's sole claim to be counted in the chronicle group is based on the fact that certain of the imaginary characters of Cinthio's fiction are provided with the names of members of the English ruling family. The events of the story have no connection with history, and Greene's title, The Scottish History of James the Fourth, slain at Flodden, is but an ingenious device to reach with a romantic and misleading title the interest of an audience now newly turned toward historical topics.

No evidence whatever can be adduced to show that Greene was in any respect indebted to Marlowe's Edward II. for his pseudo-chronicle on James IV. Present information makes it seem probable that the plays were performed about the same time, Marlowe's play being, perhaps, a few months the earlier. The plays are quite different. Each dramatist had attained to the maturity of his powers through the purification of his artistic ideals, but whereas Marlowe's last play is held to the outlines of a rigorous art with an almost poignant reticence, Greene's James IV. manifests the sweetening and mellowing touch of a dignified and manly philosophy. Nor can we see any indebtedness in Greene's play to Peele's Edward I., though the cruel abuse of the memory of Queen Elinor contained in that play can get its only justification on the theory that the play was written immediately after the Spanish Armada, and therefore two years before James IV. But there is one chronicle play that Greene may have seen and that may have influenced him slightly. It is not possible here to go into the question of the authorship of Edward III. So excellent is the play in its choicest passages that one would not be loath to assign portions of it to Marlowe, or to Shakespeare, or to impute the entire play to the collaboration of these poets. One would even welcome evidence that the hand of Greene is to be seen in the play. Fleay assigns the play to Marlowe and sets its date of production at 1590 or earlier, basing these suppositions upon a citation from this play in a presumably satirical allusion to Marlowe in Greene's Never too Late; perhaps a strained double hypothesis, but one that has the possibility of truth.[14] One would tend to the theory that the play was written by Marlowe, on account of the total absence of comedy and a dulcet sweetness in the blank verse. If so it was an early study and must be placed before Edward II. Edward III. is like James IV. in the fact that it is not a pure chronicle play, but is based for its most effective scenes upon a romantic episode from Painter's Palace of Pleasure. As James IV. goes back to a novella of Cinthio, the ultimate source of the romantic by-plot of Edward III. is a novel by Bandello. The historical portions of the play are based on Holinshed. These romantic scenes, which comprise scene 2 of the first act and the entirety of the second act, are strikingly similar to the large theme of James IV. The love of King Edward for the beautiful Countess of Salisbury, whose castle he has rescued, is similar in its passion and its ill-success to the love of James for Ida. Both stories deal with Scottish wars, though in Edward III. the romantic element arises as a result of the English king's protection of his subject, the Countess of Salisbury, against the Scots, whereas in James IV. the wars result from the unfortunate love of the Scottish king for his subject, Ida, and his consequent attempt to kill his English wife, Dorothea. Like James, Edward is willing to kill his queen in order to gain his love. The Countess of Salisbury's lines,

"As easy may my intellectual soul
Be lent away, and yet my body live,
As lend my body, palace to my soul,
Away from her, and yet retain my soul,"