[149.] Robert Greene, one of the popular playwrights of the time, who attacked Shakespeare in a pamphlet called "A Groat's Worth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance." The pamphlet, aside from its jealousy of Shakespeare, is a sad picture of a man of genius dying of dissipation, and contains a warning to other playwrights of the time, whose lives were apparently almost as bad as that of Greene.
[150.] Love's Labour's Lost, Comedy of Errors, Two Gentlemen of Verona.
[151.] Henry VI, Richard III, Richard II, King John. Prior to 1588 only three true Chronicle plays are known to have been acted. The defeat of the Armada in that year led to an outburst of national feeling which found one outlet in the theaters, and in the next ten years over eighty Chronicle plays appeared. Of these Shakespeare furnished nine or ten. It was the great popular success of Henry VI, a revision of an old play, in 1592 that probably led to Greene's jealous attack.
[152.] See Lee's Life of William Shakespeare, pp. 188-196.
[153.] Like Henry VIII, and possibly the lost Cardenio.
[154.] A name given to the privilege--claimed by the mediæval Church for its clergy--of being exempt from trial by the regular law courts. After the Reformation the custom survived for a long time, and special privileges were allowed to ministers and their families. Jonson claimed the privilege as a minister's son.
[155.] A similar story of quackery is found in Chaucer, "The Canon's Yeoman's Tale."
[156.] In this and in A Fair Quarrel Middleton collaborated with William Rowley, of whom little is known except that he was an actor from c. 1607-1627.
[157.] The reader will find wholesome criticism of these writers, and selections from their works, in Charles Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, an excellent book, which helps us to a better knowledge and appreciation of the lesser Elizabethan dramatists.
[158.] The first five books were published 1594-1597, and are as Hooker wrote them. The last three books, published after his death, are of doubtful authorship, but they are thought to have been completed from Hooker's notes.