At the urgent request of Washington, on the 2nd of March 1778, at Valley Forge, he accepted the office of quartermaster-general (succeeding Thomas Mifflin), and of his conduct in this difficult work, which Washington heartily approved, a modern critic, Colonel H. B. Carrington, has said that it was “as good as was possible under the circumstances of that fluctuating uncertain force.” He had become quartermaster-general on the understanding, however, that he should retain the right to command troops in the field; thus we find him at the head of the right wing at Monmouth on the 28th of June. In August Greene and Lafayette commanded the land forces sent to Rhode Island to co-operate with the French admiral d’Estaing, in an expedition which proved abortive. In June 1780 Greene commanded in a skirmish at Springfield, New Jersey. In August he resigned the office of quartermaster-general, after a long and bitter struggle with Congress over the interference in army administration by the Treasury Board and by commissions appointed by Congress. Before his resignation became effective it fell to his lot to preside over the court which, on the 29th of September, condemned Major John André to death.
On the 14th of October he succeeded Gates as commander-in-chief of the Southern army, and took command at Charlotte, N.C., on the 2nd of December. The army was weak and badly equipped and was opposed by a superior force under Cornwallis. Greene decided to divide his own troops, thus forcing the division of the British as well, and creating the possibility of a strategic interplay of forces. This strategy led to General Daniel Morgan’s victory of Cowpens (just over the South Carolina line) on the 17th of January 1781, and to the battle at Guilford Court House, N.C. (March 15), in which after having weakened the British troops by continual movements, and drawn in reinforcements for his own army, Greene was defeated indeed, but only at such cost to the victor that Tarleton called it “the pledge of ultimate defeat.” Three days after this battle Cornwallis withdrew toward Wilmington. Greene’s generalship and judgment were again conspicuously illustrated in the next few weeks, in which he allowed Cornwallis to march north to Virginia and himself turned swiftly to the reconquest of the inner country of South Carolina. This, in spite of a reverse sustained at Lord Rawdon’s hands at Hobkirk’s Hill (2 m. N. of Camden) on the 25th of April, he achieved by the end of June, the British retiring to the coast. Greene then gave his forces a six weeks’ rest on the High Hills of the Santee, and on the 8th of September, with 2600 men, engaged the British under Lieut.-Colonel James Stuart (who had succeeded Lord Rawdon) at Eutaw Springs; the battle, although tactically drawn, so weakened the British that they withdrew to Charleston, where Greene penned them during the remaining months of the war. Greene’s Southern campaign showed remarkable strategic features that remind one of those of Turenne, the commander whom he had taken as his model in his studies before the war. He excelled in dividing, eluding and tiring his opponent by long marches, and in actual conflict forcing him to pay for a temporary advantage a price that he could not afford. He was greatly assisted by able subordinates, including the Polish engineer, Tadeusz Kosciusko, the brilliant cavalry captains, Henry (“Light-Horse Harry”) Lee and William Washington, and the partisan leaders, Thomas Sumter and Francis Marion.
South Carolina and Georgia voted Greene liberal grants of lands and money. The South Carolina estate, Boone’s Barony, S. of Edisto in Bamberg County, he sold to meet bills for the rations of his Southern army. On the Georgia estate, Mulberry Grove, 14 m. above Savannah, on the river, he settled in 1785, after twice refusing (1781 and 1784) the post of secretary of war, and there he died of sunstroke on the 19th of June 1786. Greene was a singularly able, and—like other prominent generals on the American side—a self-trained soldier, and was second only to Washington among the officers of the American army in military ability. Like Washington he had the great gift of using small means to the utmost advantage. His attitude towards the Tories was humane and even kindly, and he generously defended Gates, who had repeatedly intrigued against him, when Gates’s conduct of the campaign in the South was criticized. There is a monument to Greene in Savannah (1829). His statue, with that of Roger Williams, represents the state of Rhode Island in the National Hall of Statuary in the Capitol at Washington; in the same city there is a bronze equestrian statue of him by H. K. Brown.
See the Life of Nathanael Greene (3 vols., 1867-1871), by his grandson, George W. Greene, and the biography (New York, 1893), by Brig.-Gen. F. V. Greene, in the “Great Commanders Series.”
GREENE, ROBERT (c. 1560-1592), English dramatist and miscellaneous writer, was born at Norwich about 1560. The identity of his father has been disputed, but there is every reason to believe that he belonged to the tradesmen’s class and had small means. It is doubtful whether Robert Greene attended Norwich grammar school; but, as an eastern counties man (to one of whose plays, Friar Bacon, the Norfolk and Suffolk borderland owes a lasting poetic commemoration) he naturally found his way to Cambridge, where he entered St John’s College as a sizar in 1575 and took his B.A. thence in 1579, proceeding M.A. in 1583 from Clare Hall. His life at the university was, according to his own account, spent “among wags as lewd as himself, with whom he consumed the flower of his youth.” In 1588 he was incorporated at Oxford, so that on some of his title-pages he styles himself “utriusque Academiae in Artibus Magister”; and Nashe humorously refers to him as “utriusque Academiae Robertus Greene.” Between the years 1578 and 1583 he had travelled abroad, according to his own account very extensively, visiting France, Germany, Poland and Denmark, besides learning at first-hand to “hate the pride of Italie” and to know the taste of that poet’s fruit, “Spanish mirabolones.” The grounds upon which it has been suggested that he took holy orders are quite insufficient; according to the title-page of a pamphlet published by him in 1585 he was then a “student in phisicke.” Already, however, after taking his M.A. degree, he had according to his own account begun his London life, and his earliest extant literary production was in hand as early as 1580. He now became “an author of playes and a penner of love-pamphlets, so that I soone grew famous in that qualitie, that who for that trade growne so ordinary about London as Robin Greene?” “Glad was that printer,” says Nashe, “that might bee so blest to pay him deare for the very dregs of his wit.” By his own account he rapidly sank into the worst debaucheries of the town, though Nashe declares that he never knew him guilty of notorious crime. He was not without passing impulses towards a more righteous and sober life, and was derided in consequence by his associates as a “Puritane and Presizian.” It is possible that he, as well as his bitter enemy, Gabriel Harvey, exaggerated the looseness of his conduct. His marriage, which took place in 1585 or 1586, failed to steady him; if Francesco, in Greene’s pamphlet Never too late to mend (1590), is intended for the author himself, it had been a runaway match; but the fiction and the autobiographical sketch in the Repentance agree in their account of the unfaithfulness which followed on the part of the husband. He lived with his wife, whose name seems to have been Dorothy (“Doll”; and cf. Dorothea in James IV.), for a while; “but forasmuch as she would perswade me from my wilful wickednes, after I had a child by her, I cast her off, having spent up the marriage-money which I obtained by her. Then left I her at six or seven, who went into Lincolnshire, and I to London,” where his reputation as a playwright and writer of pamphlets of “love and vaine fantasyes” continued to increase, and where his life was a feverish alternation of labour and debauchery. In his last years he took it upon himself to make war on the cutpurses and “conny-catchers” with whom he came into contact in the slums, and whose doings he fearlessly exposed in his writings. He tells us how at last he was friendless “except it were in a fewe alehouses,” where he was respected on account of the score he had run up. When the end came he was a dependant on the charity of the poor and the pitying love of the unfortunate. Henri Murger has drawn no picture more sickening and more pitiful than the story of Greene’s death, as told by his Puritan adversary, Gabriel Harvey—a veracious though a far from unprejudiced narrator. Greene had taken up the cudgels provided by the Harvey brothers on their intervention in the Marprelate controversy, and made an attack (immediately suppressed) upon Gabriel’s father and family in the prose-tract A Quip for an Upstart Courtier, or a Quaint Dispute between Velvet Breeches and Cloth Breeches (1592). After a banquet where the chief guest had been Thomas Nashe—an old associate and perhaps a college friend of Greene’s, any great intimacy with whom, however, he seems to have been anxious to disclaim—Greene had fallen sick “of a surfeit of pickle herringe and Rennish wine.” At the house of a poor shoemaker near Dowgate, deserted by all except his compassionate hostess (Mrs Isam) and two women—one of them the sister of a notorious thief named “Cutting Ball,” and the mother of his illegitimate son, Fortunatus Greene—he died on the 3rd of September 1592. Shortly before his death he wrote under a bond for £10 which he had given to the good shoemaker, the following words addressed to his long-forsaken wife: “Doll, I charge thee, by the loue of our youth and by my soules rest, that thou wilte see this man paide; for if hee and his wife had not succoured me, I had died in the streetes.—Robert Greene.”
Four Letters and Certain Sonnets, Harvey’s attack on Greene, appeared almost immediately after his death, as to the circumstances of which his relentless adversary had taken care to inform himself personally. Nashe took up the defence of his dead friend and ridiculed Harvey in Strange News (1593); and the dispute continued for some years. But, before this, the dramatist Henry Chettle published a pamphlet from the hand of the unhappy man, entitled Greene’s Groat’s-worth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance (1592), containing the story of Roberto, who may be regarded, for practical purposes, as representing Greene himself. This ill-starred production may almost be said to have done more to excite the resentment of posterity against Greene’s name than all the errors for which he professed his repentance. For in it he exhorted to repentance three of his quondam acquaintance. Of these three Marlowe was one—to whom and to whose creation of “that Atheist Tamberlaine” he had repeatedly alluded. The second was Peele, the third probably Nashe. But the passage addressed to Peele contained a transparent allusion to a fourth dramatist, who was an actor likewise, as “an vpstart crow beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygres heart wrapt in a player’s hyde supposes hee is as well able to bombast out a blanke-verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Iohannes-fac-totum, is in his owne conceyt the onely shake-scene in a countrey.” The phrase italicized parodies a passage occurring in The True Tragedie of Richard, Duke of York, &c., and retained in Part III. of Henry VI. If Greene (as many eminent critics have thought) had a hand in The True Tragedie, he must here have intended a charge of plagiarism against Shakespeare. But while it seems more probable that (as the late R. Simpson suggested) the upstart crow beautified with the feathers of the three dramatists is a sneering description of the actor who declaimed their verse, the animus of the whole attack (as explained by Dr Ingleby) is revealed in its concluding phrases. This “shake-scene,” i.e. this actor had ventured to intrude upon the domain of the regular staff of playwrights—their monopoly was in danger!
Two other prose pamphlets of an autobiographical nature were issued posthumously. Of these, The Repentance of Robert Greene, Master of Arts (1592), must originally have been written by him on his death-bed, under the influence, as he says, of Father Parsons’s Booke of Resolution (The Christian Directorie, appertayning to Resolution, 1582, republished in an enlarged form, which became very popular, in 1585); but it bears traces of having been improved from the original; while Greene’s Vision was certainly not, as the title-page avers, written during his last illness.
Altogether not less than thirty-five prose-tracts are ascribed to Greene’s prolific pen. Nearly all of them are interspersed with verses; in their themes they range from the “misticall” wonders of the heavens to the familiar but “pernitious sleights” of the sharpers of London. But the most widely attractive of his prose publications were his “love-pamphlets,” which brought upon him the outcry of Puritan censors. The earliest of his novels, as they may be called, Mamillia, was licensed in 1583. This interesting story may be said to have accompanied Greene through life; for even part ii., of which, though probably completed several years earlier, the earliest extant edition bears the date 1593, had a sequel, The Anatomie of Love’s Flatteries, which contains a review of suitors recalling Portia’s in The Merchant of Venice. The Myrrour of Modestie (the story of Susanna) (1584); The Historie of Arhasto, King of Denmarke (1584); Morando, the Tritameron of Love (a rather tedious imitation of the Decameron (1584); Planetomachia (1585) (a contention in story-telling between Venus and Saturn); Penelope’s Web (1587) (another string of stories); Alcida, Greene’s Metamorphosis (1588), and others, followed. In these popular productions he appears very distinctly as a follower of John Lyly; indeed, the first part of Mamillia was entered in the Stationers’ Registers in the year of the appearance of Euphues, and two of Greene’s novels are by their titles announced as a kind of sequel to the parent romance: Euphues his Censure to Philautus (1587), Menaphon. Camilla’s Alarum to Slumbering Euphues (1589), named in some later editions Greene’s Arcadia. This pastoral romance, written in direct emulation of Sidney’s, with a heroine called Samila, contains St Sephestia’s charming lullaby, with its refrain “Father’s sorowe, father’s joy.” But, though Greene’s style copies the balanced oscillation, and his diction the ornateness (including the proverbial philosophy) of Lyly, he contrives to interest by the matter as well as to attract attention by the manner of his narratives. Of his highly moral intentions he leaves the reader in no doubt, since they are exposed on the title-pages. The full title of the Myrrour of Modestie for instance continues: “wherein appeareth as in a perfect glasse how the Lord delivereth the innocent from all imminent perils, and plagueth the blood-thirsty hypocrites with deserved punishments,” &c. On his Pandosto, The Triumph of Time (1588) Shakespeare founded A Winter’s Tale; in fact, the novel contains the entire plot of the comedy, except the device of the living statue; though some of the subordinate characters in the play, including Autolycus, were added by Shakespeare, together with the pastoral fragrance of one of its episodes.
In Greene’s Never too Late (1590), announced as a “Powder of Experience: sent to all youthfull gentlemen” for their benefit, the hero, Francesco, is in all probability intended for Greene himself, the sequel or second part is, however, pure fiction. This episodical narrative has a vivacity and truthfulness of manner which savour of an 18th century novel rather than of an Elizabethan tale concerning the days of “Palmerin, King of Great Britain.” Philador, the prodigal of The Mourning Garment (1590), is obviously also in some respects a portrait of the writer. The experiences of the Roberto of Greene’s Groat’s-worth of Wit (1592) are even more palpably the experiences of the author himself, though they are possibly overdrawn—for a born rhetorician exaggerates everything, even his own sins. Besides these and the posthumous pamphlets on his repentance, Greene left realistic pictures of the very disreputable society to which he finally descended, in his pamphlets on “conny-catching”: A Notable Discovery of Coosnage (1591), The Blacke Bookes Messenger, Laying open the Life and Death of Ned Browne, one of the most Notable Cutpurses, Crossbiters, and Conny-catchers that ever lived in England (1592). Much in Greene’s manner, both in his romances and in his pictures of low life, anticipated what proved the slow course of the actual development of the English novel; and it is probable that his true métier, and that which best suited the bright fancy, ingenuity and wit of which his genius was compounded, was pamphlet-spinning and story-telling rather than dramatic composition. It should be added that, euphuist as Greene was, few of his contemporaries in their lyrics warbled wood-notes which like his resemble Shakespeare’s in their native freshness.