CRITICAL ESSAY
Life.[1137]—Robert Greene was born in Norwich of estimable parents, and "in his non-age" sent there to school. He was entered November 15, 1575, at St. John's, Cambridge. According to his Short Discourse, he was even then "in his first yeares." We may, therefore, date his birth about 1560. At the university he "light amongst wags" as lewd as himself, and was by them drawn, probably after he had taken his B.A., 1578, "to travell into Italy and Spaine," where he "practizde such villainie as is abhominable to declare." After his return (probably before Part I. of his Mamillia was entered for printing, October 3, 1580,—certainly by March 20, 1581, when his ballad of Youthe[1138] was registered), he "ruffeled out in silks" posing as "malcontent"; but having in 1583,[1139] "by degrees proceeded M.A.," he betook himself to London, where as "Author of Playes and penner of Love Pamphlets" none soon was better known "than Robin Greene." Perhaps he was in Cambridge, September 6, 1583, when the Second Part of Mamillia was registered, for it is dated "from my Studie in Clare hall." Till about August 13, 1584, he was writing similar tales; and, despite a dissolute habit, he maintained favour with some of honourable calling. His Planetomachia appeared in 1585; an edition of his Morando[1140] is licensed during the next year. Between 1584 and 1586 he visited his former home, made a fleeting effort at reform, married a "proper young woman" of Lincolnshire,[1141] had a son by her, "cast her off," and returned to London. Here he gave himself "wholly to the penning of plaies," which with "other trifling pamphlets" were henceforth his "chiefest stay of living." Both kinds brought him popularity and envy.[1142] In July, 1588, he was incorporated M.A. at Oxford. In February, 1589, this "arch play-making poet" steps forth in the rôle of patriot with his Spanish Masquerado; soon after with his Mourning Garment (S. R. November 2, 1590) in that of moralist. The didactic note had been already struck in The Royal Exchange, early in 1590, and the penitential in the Farewell to Follie (S. R. 1587; pub. 1591); but both prevail in Never Too Late,[1143] 1590. The disposition to serve the Commonwealth is further displayed in his series for the exposure of "coosnage," 1591-92. Whatever else he had written he now counts for "apples of Sodom." In July, 1592, he[1144] "canvazed" the brothers Harvey in his Quip for an Upstart Courtier, but of this we have only the eviscerated remains. Soon afterward he indulged in that memorable surfeit of pickled herring and Rhenish wine. The ensuing sickness at the shoemaker's in Dowgate,—Greene's friendless lot, "lousie circumstance," mistresse,[1145] bastard, and corpse,—Gabriel Harvey[1146] has embalmed with the foul peculiar juices of his spite. Those last weeks Greene spent writing his Groatsworth of Wit which is partly, and his Repentance which is wholly, autobiographical, to dissuade men from a like "carelesse course of life." He sent back their son to his wife; and the night of his death received "commendations" from her "whereat he greatly rejoiced," and wrote a pathetic farewell. That was September 3, 1592. Mrs. Isam, his hostess, garlanded the dead poet with bays; and he was laid in the New Churchyard, near Bedlam.
Misapprehensions concerning Greene.—On the title-page of Planetomachia, 1585, Greene subscribes himself "Student in Phisicke"; and from this it has been inferred by most of his biographers that he was then studying medicine. But for Greene, as for Chaucer and Gower, whom he diligently perused, 'phisicke' sometimes meant natural philosophy,[1147] and always included a grounding in 'astronomie.'[1148] The word is here used with reference to the 'magic natural' of his subject,—the book being a narrative dispute of astrological influences.
According to popular assertion, substantiated by the arguments of Dyce, Fleay, Grosart, and others, Greene was at one period a parson. Careful investigation convinces me that this assertion is untrue. Our dramatist cannot have been the Robert Greene who, as unus Capellanorum nostrorum Capellæ nostræ Regiæ, was in 1576 presented by Elizabeth to the rectory of Walkington in Yorkshire; for at that time he was but a freshman at Cambridge. Nor can he[1149] have been the Robert Greene who from June 19, 1584, to February 17, 1586, was Vicar of Tollesbury in Essex; because according to his own story,[1150] that period was covered by other events: to wit, the conviction of sin in St. Andrew's at Norwich (while he was yet "newly come from Italy," end of 1584 or beginning of 1585), a "motion" which vastly amused his "copesmates," but lasted "no longer than the present time"; the relapse; the marriage "soon after to a gentleman's daughter" (sometime in 1585); the brief sequel of "wickedness" during which he "spent up" his wife's marriage-money; the "casting off" of the wife; and the return to play-writing in London. This last, six years before his death; therefore in 1586. Such manner of life is not that of the Vicar of Tollesbury; nor is the recital that of Greene if he ever was vicar of anything.
Mr. Fleay[1151] attempts to identify Greene, as Robert the parson, with one Robert Persj or Rupert Persten of Leicester's troupe acting between December, 1585, and July, 1587, on the Continent. There is, however, no proof that Greene was with these "instrumentalists and acrobats"; nor is the name Persj or Persten, as it appears in the Danish and Saxon records, either the English name Parson or a translation of the calling of parson into Danish or German. Actor King became Koning and Konigk, and actor Pope, Pape and Pabst,—but Persj, Percy, Persten, or Preston was untranslatable. Indeed, if the argument proves anything, it proves too much. For if Mr. Fleay's Persten (or as he coerces it, Priester) is Greene, Vicar of Tollesbury, this Vicar must have been acting abroad three months of the period during which he was preaching at home;—a dual activity terminated, moreover, not by the vestry of Tollesbury, which would appear to have enjoyed this unusual programme, or by the bishop, but by the Vicar himself, whose resignation is recorded as "free and spontaneous."[1152]
It is certainly safer to accept Greene's own story and the publishers' records, which, taken together, show that his marital estate was a debauch with rare intervals of business activity. During this period Arbasto and the enlarged Morando were registered and Planetomachia was printed.
A writer of Greene's self-exhibitive temper would not have hesitated, and one of his didactic tendency could not have failed, to present the world with an account of an episode which, if it existed, was the most sensational of his moral experiences. But in none of his writings, autobiographical, or quasi-autobiographical, does Greene give even remote intimation of taking orders. On the contrary he speaks as a layman, and a very wicked layman, too; as one who from infancy was bred in sin, and who held aloof from God's ministers. So far was he from the possibility of orders that when, in his youth, "once and yet but once" he "sorrowed for his wickedness of life," his comrades could conceive of no huger joke in the world than to wish that he "might have a pulpit." Roberto of the Groatsworth, "whose life in most part agreed" with his, was never a minister, nor was either of Greene's other understudies, Philador and Francesco. In Greene's Vision, which, whether authentic or not, is contemporaneous, the advice given to our dramatist "Be a devine, my sonne," is dismissed as out of the question, though that consummation were most devoutly to be desired. None of his associates of later years[1153] betrays acquaintance with his ministerial career, not Nashe or Burbye or Dekker or Heywood or Chettle. None of his panegyrists. And of his enemies not even Gabriel Harvey.
We may therefore conclude that the famous passage in Martine Marsixtus which (with a context partly relative to Greene) announces that "every red-nosed minister is an author" does not apply to Greene, but to any "unauthorized author who serves a drunken man's humor," or that the insinuation has reference to some sobriquet born of Greene's paroxysms of pentitence and mourning pamphlets. And, indeed, a nickname may have attached itself to this wayward child of circumstance, as early as that critical period in Norwich when his copesmates called him "Puritane and Presizian ... and other such scoffing tearmes." What more likely than "Parson," since they had gone so far, Greene tells us, as to wish him a pulpit? But if he had a pulpit, what becomes of the joke? and of his own word—"the good lesson went quite out of my remembrance ... I went forward obstinately in my misse"?
As to the manuscript notes in the 1599 copy of The Pinner of Wakefield, the first of which states that Shakespeare said that the play was "written by ... a minister who ac[ted] ye piñers pt in it himself," and the second, in another hand, that Juby said that "ys play was made by Ro. Gree[ne],"—it must be remembered that both attributions are hearsay; that both notes are anonymous; that one or both may be fraudulent; that there is no certain proof that they were written by contemporaries; and finally that, unless their contents are shown to be accurate as well as authentic, and to refer to the same author, they do not connect any Robert Greene with the ministry. Since our Greene's writings show that he was no minister, there is but one hypothesis upon which, assuming the accuracy and relevancy of both these manuscript notes, he can be the person indicated; namely, that the designation, minister, used by Shakespeare, was a nickname. And, conversely, Shakespeare's remark can be credited in its literal significance only if the play was not by our Greene. In the latter event, the attribution of authorship to a minister, taken in connection with Ed. Juby's attribution to a certain Ro. Greene, would denote some parson-playwright to whom no other play has been traced—Robert of Walkington, or Robert of Tollesbury, or some other of this not unusual name. And in that case it would be easy to understand how the name of an obscure author, if mentioned by Shakespeare, should have slipped the memory of the title-page scribe. Internal evidence, as will later be seen, is not conclusive of Greene's authorship; but even if it were, it would not prove that he was a minister.