Comparing this with lines in the fragment of Peele's The Hunting of Cupid, preserved in a manuscript volume of extracts by Drummond of Hawthornden, the conclusion is reached that it is Peele, the writer of pastoral, to whom Greene refers as "shepherd," and that Greene's lines are a direct transcription from Peele. Referring to the Stationers' Registers we learn that Peele's The Hunting of Cupid was listed for 26th July 1591, certainly later than we should be willing to place the beginning of composition on Greene's James IV. The formal proviso, "That if it be hurtful to any other copy before licensed ... this to be void," may or may not indicate the existence of an earlier copy. That the general motive was in the air and had caught the ear of Greene is clear from the snatches and fragments of it we find in his late work. In the Mourning Garment, registered 1590, are lines moving upon the same rhyme and answering the same interrogation as Peele's verses:
"Ah, what is love? It is a pretty thing.
As sweet unto a shepherd as a king."[16]
One who gets this haunting strain in mind cannot fail to notice how frequently Greene uses the rhyme of thing, bring, king, and sting in James IV. Once it is:
"Although a bee be but a little thing,
You know, fair queen, it hath a bitter sting."
And in the first scene of the second act Greene plays upon the repetition of this rhyme. Peele himself again uses the refrain in Decensus Astræ, licensed October 1591. The argument from the fact that "weel I wot" in Ida's line seems to reflect the same clause in The Hunting of Cupid would be stronger were it not that "weel I wot" occurs only in the Drummond manuscript and is not found in the fragment quoted by Dyce[17] from the Rawlinson manuscript. Here instead of "weel I wot" is found "for sure." As Greene himself has used the refrain in a song sung by a shepherd's wife it leaves room to doubt that either the swains of The Hunting or Peele himself was the shepherd. It is clear that the first general use of the motive had occurred in Greene's Mourning Garment. The positive objections to placing James IV. subsequent to July 1591 lead one to one of three conclusions: (1) Peele's lyric had long been written before it was entered in the Stationers' Registers, and in manuscript form inspired the strains in the Mourning Garment and James IV.; (2) Greene himself provides the prototype of Peele's lyric in his Mourning Garment verse and its cognate form in James IV.; (3) or, as seems most probable, fragmentary strains that have been found are reminiscences of a popular song that has not yet been traced.
We have, a little arbitrarily perhaps, grouped the four indubitable plays of Greene's unassisted composition in order to formulate the developing characteristics of his dramatic genius. Yet there are other plays that raise problems no less interesting than those we have considered, and that might, were we able unquestioningly to assign them to Greene, go far to clarify the obscure places in his biography and his art. That Greene had a part in A Looking-Glass for London and England there is, of course, no doubt, but we are not yet able to say how much of the play is his composition, and the question of its date provides some difficulties. We incline to the view that it was an early play. Lodge was absent from England in 1588 on a voyage with Captain Clark to the Islands of Terceras and the Canaries. In August 1591 he sailed from Plymouth with Cavendish and did not return until 1593, after Greene's death. A Looking-Glass was then either written before 1588 or between 1589 and 1591. Collins, arguing from passages in the play remotely paralleled by biblical allusions in Greene's Vision and the Mourning Garment, decides that it was produced in 1590. This conclusion cannot be accepted because, as Collins himself admits, references to Nineveh and Jonas are frequent in the literature of the time. Of the three reasons given by Collins for supposing that the play was not written before 1588 one is based on the slender hypothesis that as it is not proved that Greene wrote plays before 1590 this one could not have been earlier; and another is based on a gratuitous assumption that this play is that comedy "lastly writ" with "Young Juvenal" and mentioned in A Groatsworth of Wit.[18] The argument that the realistic passage beginning "The fair Triones with their glimmering light" could only have been written after Lodge's first maritime experience carries more weight, but cannot stand long as against counter evidence of any force whatever. Nor do we see any strength in the theory that this play is a product of Greene's era of repentance. As has been shown, Greene uses repentance as a didactic motive from the first. Considering this as a moralising play one may with better force place it in the earlier years of less complex dramatic inspiration. It is difficult to conceive that in 1589, when Greene was almost certainly engaged in writing Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, he should have been willing to go back to the motive of the interludes. As the spirit of the play is earlier than Greene's mature work, so its associations are with the earlier rather than with the later work of Lodge. An Alarum against Usurers, the influence of which is often apparent, was published in 1584. In the years from 1589 to 1591 inclusive Lodge was engaged on another type of work, represented by Scillæ's Metamorphosis, Rosalynde, The History of Robert, second Duke of Normandy, and Catharos, certainly as far removed as possible from the moralising vein of A Looking-Glass. Two published expressions by Lodge lean rather to the earlier than the later date. In Scillæ's Metamorphosis (1589) Lodge vows,
"To write no more of that whence shame doth grow,
[Nor] tie my pen to penny-knaves delight."
Certainly we cannot believe that Lodge was abjuring playwriting at the very moment that he was preparing A Looking-Glass. The other passage occurs in Lodge's Wits Misery (1596), in which Lodge says it is odious "in stage plays to make use of historical scripture." This passage should be viewed in connection with a passage in the epistle prefixed to Greene's Farewell to Folly (1591), taunting the author of Fair Em for "blasphemous rhetoric," and for borrowing from the scripture. Whatever may be the claims of consistency we must suppose that the argument from good policy would tend to the conclusion that the scriptural drama of Greene and Lodge was written as long as possible before these uncompromising words. Setting narrow limits, we should say that A Looking-Glass was produced between the date of the production of Tamburlaine and of the destruction of the Spanish Armada. In the deification of Rasni, "god on earth, and none but he," there are traces of an aspiring kingliness, and the lament of Rasni over Remilia, his queen, has the yearning note sounded in Tamburlaine's grief over the dying Zenocrate. That the play was not written during the intense excitement incident to the Armada would seem probable on general principles, for there is no hint either of imminent national danger or of the intoxication of success. The undoubted reflections of The Spanish Tragedy in this play can serve only to place it in near conjunction with Orlando Furioso as an early play. Whether it preceded or followed that play it is impossible now to decide.[19] As to Greene's share in the work it is impossible to speak with even the semblance of authority. The comic portions sound like Greene's work,[20] and if Greene wrote Act v. scene 4 of James IV. he was quite capable of writing the moralising part. In simplicity of construction the play is quite unlike Greene's other dramatic works, just as it is much better than Lodge's The Wounds of Civil War. Arguing from the position of their names on the title-page, one is tempted to believe that the play was planned and drafted by Lodge, and put forth by Greene somewhat after the manner used in his edition of his friend's Euphues Shadow (1592).
The anonymous authorship of George-a-Greene, Locrine and Selimus provides problems that must continue to vex critics for some time to come. None of them is assigned to Greene on absolute evidence of any weight, yet strong support has been given to the theory of Greene's authorship of each of them. In the case of the first so respectable has been the following that no editor would care definitely to exclude the play from his list. Yet the best evidence is questionable, and much of the evidence is quite adverse to the theory of Greene's authorship. The manuscript notes on a copy of the Quarto of 1599, assigning the play to a minister who had played the pinner's part himself, and in another hand to Robert Greene (quoted on [p. xxiii.]), cannot to-day be considered good evidence. Judged by the well-known tests of textual and structural criticism the play almost absolutely fails to connect itself either with Greene or his contemporary university writers. Few plays of the late eighties are so isolated from the clearly-marked characteristics of the drama of the time. Of Euphues, of Tamburlaine, of The Spanish Tragedy, of Seneca, of the religious play, there are few, if any, traces. The rhetorical structure shows none of the artificial balances and climaxes so common at the time; there is neither ghost, chorus, dumb show nor messenger; there is no high aspiring figure, no madness, no revenge; and the bloodshed is decent. The lyrics are English and not Italian. Indeed so far is it from the classical style that it seems difficult to believe that a university man wrote the play. The rich mythology of the university wits is entirely wanting. Such classical allusions as are to be found are the stock figures of a layman's vocabulary, Leda, Helena, Venus and Hercules, the rudimentary mythology of the age. The play lies nearer to the ground in an absolute realism of the soil than any known in this group. The milk cans of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay may be pure pastoral; the country setting of George-a-Greene is pure rustic, and is not helped at all by literature. So also the play lacks many of Greene's characteristic notes. It was performed at the Rose by Sussex' men, while so far as is known Greene remained faithful to the Queen's company throughout his life. It lacks that satirical under-current, that ironic veiled counter cuff at his rivals, that personal innuendo in the midst of a good story that is so characteristic of Greene.
But in spite of the facts that are brought to his judgment the beauties of the play are such as to compel every editor to soften judgment by inclination and include the play among Greene's dramas. Certainly Greene is the only university man of his day who, knowing the affectations of literature, at the same time knew real life in the concrete well enough to write George-a-Greene. If truth were told it was through plays of the type of George-a-Greene, rather than through the more ambitious university men's plays, that the current of pure English comedy was to flow. And it is because George-a-Greene integrates itself so perfectly with the development of Greene's dramatic genius, and represents so well that realism reached by a settling down of art from above, rather than arising from the vulgar fact, that we are willing to say that if Greene did not write this play he could have written one much like it. George-a-Greene seems to bring to consummation the developing principles of Greene's art. As in the case of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay there is in this play a quite unhistorical chronicle element concerning English kings. But unlike James IV., which is derived from an Italian original, this play tells an English story based on the native Robin Hood strain. Again, like Friar Bacon, the original story, which contains no romantic element, is augmented by a love story. If the play is Greene's it may represent the last and purest expression of his charming doctrine of beauty and his simple philosophy of content. To Greene beauty lay in fresh and joyous colours and in uncomplex forms. And his philosophy of repose is evolved out of the sublimation of the emotional riot of his early life. Again and again these notes are struck in George-a-Greene. Now it is the well-known strain: