It may be conceded that, like other Elizabethan dramatists, he assumed a part upon the stage. But that he adopted the calling, or ever stood a chance of enjoying "its damnable excessive gains," is only less improbable than that he was a parson. Dyce's quotation from Harvey to the effect that Greene was "a player" misapprehends the "puissant epitapher" who was merely enumerating the "thousand crotchets" that littered Greene's "wilde head, and hence his stories."[1154] None of his contemporaries hints that Greene was an actor; none regards him in that light. He himself despised the profession.
In respect of his relations with Shakespeare, I cannot but feel that he has been harshly judged. We shall be justified in calling the Shakescene remarks unduly rancorous when it has been ascertained that the "admired inventions" of Greene and of those whom he was addressing in the Groatsworth had not been borrowed by the young actor-playwright; or that Greene should have let himself be plundered without protest by this revamper of plays because the revamper was destined some day to be illustrious, in fact to be the Shakespeare. I have not observed that dramatists et id omne genus, nowadays, offer the cheek with any more Christian grace than characterized Robert Greene.
His Development as a Dramatist: Order of Plays.[1155]—A painstaking investigation of the evidence leads me to conclude that none of the plays assigned to Greene was produced before the end of 1586, or, probably, the beginning of 1587; that their order is as follows: Alphonsus, Looking-Glasse, Orlando, Friar Bacon, James IV.; and that if Selimus and the Pinner are his, they range respectively with Alphonsus and James.
1. The earliest extant exemplar of The Comicall Historie of Alphonsus, King of Aragon, by R. G.,[1156] and without motto, "as it hath bene sundrie times acted" was "brinted" by Thomas Creede, London, 1599. The play is generally supposed to have been written in emulation of the Tamburlaine, which was on the stage in 1588,—perhaps, indeed, as early as the end of 1586.[1157] While similarity of diction and conceit might indicate a contemporaneous production, the lines in Alphonsus,—
"Not mighty Tamburlaine,
Nor soldiers trained up amongst the wars,"[1158]
are proof presumptive of the priority of Marlowe's play. Indeed, Dr. Grosart is justified in asserting that "to take Alphonsus without a tacit reference to Tamburlaine is to miss the entire impulse of its writer"; for the dramatist appears to be attempting a burlesque; and the vainglorious claim that he makes for his hero[1159] is a manifest challenge to Marlowe and that bombastic brood. Greene may have been writing the play as early as 1587; he was, at any rate, interested in the hero then, for he mentions him in the Dedication to The Carde of Fancie.[1160] That the Alphonsus was well known in the early spring of 1589 would appear from an allusion in Peele's Farewell,[1161] which couples it with Tamburlaine so closely as further to suggest that it already clung like a burr to its magniloquent predecessor. Whether the series of satiric reprisals in which, between 1588 and 1590, Greene and Nashe indulged at Marlowe's expense,[1162] was stimulated by some counter-burlesque of Alphonsus is uncertain; but that Marlowe shortly before March 29, 1588, had been privy to some public burlesque of a production of Greene's, may reasonably be inferred from Greene's preface to the Perymedes of that date. For there we learn that two "gentlemen poets" had recently caused two actors to make a mockery of his motto Omne tulit punctum, because his verse fell short of the bombast and blasphemy with which Marlowe captivated the vulgar. If it was the verse of the Alphonsus that was derided by these "madmen of Rome," we have here a date before which the play had been both acted and burlesqued. Now, it is interesting to note that our earliest copy of Alphonsus (1599) has neither motto nor colophon. This is strange, for in all other respects the edition is uniform with that of James IV., which had been brought out by the same publisher, Creede, only the year before, with Greene's Omne tulit punctum upon its title-page. In fact, all other plays written by Greene alone, and bearing his name, have a motto of some kind. One may naturally query whether it was to Creede's advantage to dissociate this particular play from some eleven or twelve years' old derision; or, whether he was following, without definite purpose, the policy of some previous edition, now lost, which likewise had omitted the motto.
Be this as it may, there is, in the preface of March 29, 1588, undoubted allusion[1163] to Greene and Lodge's Looking-Glasse, which, as will presently be shown, was written before June, 1587. The Alphonsus must be assigned to a still earlier date, because, in its prologue,[1164] it gives evidence of priority to Greene's other efforts in serious or heroic style. This conclusion is confirmed by an examination of the play. The copious crude employment of mythological lore, the creaking mechanism of the plot, the subordination of vital to spectacular qualities, betray an inexperience not manifest in Greene's other dramatic output. Moreover, in spite of the fact that our edition of Alphonsus appears to preserve the details of the author's holograph, the versification makes a clumsier showing than in the rest of his plays. The lines are frequently rhymed, sometimes within the speeches, but more often in a perfunctory fashion at speech-ends. And, though this practice wanes as the play proceeds, the verses are throughout more frequently endstopped, and the rhythm more mechanical, than in the other dramas. Between two-thirds and three-quarters of the lines have the monotonous cæsura at the end of the second foot; and of the lyric cæsuræ, which should par excellence lend variety to the verse, about eleven-twelfths fall in the middle of the third foot. We may indeed say that in four-fifths of the lines these sources of sameness prevail. Of prose there is no sign. Both in material and style the play is inelastic, only too easily open to attack. That Greene should prefix the Omne tulit punctum of his popular prose romances was natural, but it was also courting the attack of Marlowe, Kyd, or any gentleman-poets derisively inclined.
2. A Looking-Glasse for London and England made by Thomas Lodge, Gentleman, and Robert Greene, in Artibus Magister, is called by Professor Brown the "finest and last" of the plays in which Greene had a hand, and is assigned to a date "after Lodge's return from Cavendish's expedition in 1591." This conjecture may at once be dismissed,[1165] for that expedition did not start till August 26, 1591; none of its ships returned before June 11, 1593; and, by that time, Greene was dead. The play was registered in May, 1594, and our earliest exemplar (Creede) was printed in the same year. Henslowe records the presentation of the play, but not as new, March 8, 1591-92. We have abundant proof of its popularity. Therefore, since only four representations are recorded during the remainder of that season, which lasted till June 22, 1592,[1166] it must have had its run at an earlier date. Spencer's line in The Tears of the Muses, 1591, about the "pleasing Alcon" has been regarded as an allusion to Lodge's authorship of that character in the Looking-Glasse; and with some show of reason, for nearly all the speeches of Alcon are distinctively the work of Lodge.[1167] But an earlier reminiscence of the play may be found in Greene's mention of Ninevie and Jonas in the dedication and epilogue of the Mourning Garment, 1590. Since it appears, moreover, from a passage in Scillaes Metamorphosis, that Lodge had renounced play-writing as early as 1589,[1168] Storojenko and Grosart date the composition of Looking-Glasse between the close of 1588 and the summer of 1589. I am sure that the date was earlier still; for, since the Metamorphosis followed immediately upon Lodge's return from a voyage with Captain Clarke to Tercera and the Canaries, any such playwriting as that of the Looking-Glasse must have been done before the departure of this expedition. According to Mr. Lee,[1169] the Expedition sailed "about 1588." Now the play contains no allusion to the Armada; it is, therefore, antecedently improbable that it was written in 1588 later than the 29th of May. And since a modernized morality of God's wrath impending over London, if written in that year, could not have failed to echo the first mutterings of the Spanish thunderstorm, I am led to fix the composition before June, 1587, when Philip and Sixtus concluded their treaty against England.
The date of first presentation must have been appreciably before March 29, 1588, for a character, the 'priest of the sun,' which figured in the Looking-Glasse, but "in no other early play,"[1170] is mentioned in the introduction to Perymedes, already cited. Here, Greene asserts that even if his verse did not always "jet upon the stage in tragicall buskins," or his "everie worde" blaspheme, he could, an he pleased, fill the mouth "like the fa-burden of Bo-Bell, daring God out of heaven with that Atheist Tamburlan"; and, by way of proof, he sets side by side with Tamburlan, the impious ranting of his own "mad preest of the Sonne." The reference is, of course, to the scene in the Looking-Glasse, where the mitred priests of the sun, "carrying fire in their hands," hail Rasni as a "deitie";[1171] and he assumes that the mention of one of the characters will indicate the play,—a justifiable expectation if the play had been before the public for nine or ten months.