GREENE, ROBERT English dramatist and miscellaneous writer, was baptized at Norwich on July I1, 1558. He entered St. John's college, Cambridge, as a sizar in 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 humor ously refers to him as "utriusque Academiae Robertus Greene." Between the years 1S78 and 1583 he had travelled abroad, accord ing to his own account very extensively, visiting France, Ger many, 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." After taking his M.A. degree, he went to London, and his earliest extant literary production was in hand as early as 1580. 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. 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 (159o), 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 ac count of the unfaithfulness and desertion which followed on the part of the husband. In his last years he made war on the cut purses 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. The story of his death is told by Gabriel Harvey, whose family Greene had attacked 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, 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 Sept. 3, 1592. Shortly before his death he wrote under a bond for f I o which he had Oven 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. Nashe took up the defence of his dead friend and ridiculed Harvey in Strange News 0593); 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 repre senting Greene himself. 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 trans parent 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, etc., 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) 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 35 prose-tracts are ascribed to Greene. 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. His "love-pamphlets" brought upon him the outcry of Puritan censors. The earliest of his novels, as they may be called, Mamillia, was licensed in 1583. Part ii., of which, though probably completed several years earlier, the earliest extant edition bears the date had a sequel, The Anatomie of Love's Flatteries, which con tains 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 two of Greene's novels are by their titles announced as a kind of sequel to the parent romance : Euphues his Censure to Philautus 0587), Menaphon. Camilla's Alarm 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." On his Pandasto, 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 subor dinate characters in the play, including Autolycus, were added by Shakespeare, together with the pastoral fragrance of one of its episodes.
Greene's Never too Late (159o) 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 (159o), 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 rhetori cian 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 Dis covery of Coosnage (1591), The Blacke Bookes Messenger. Lay ing 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 com pounded, was pamphlet-spinning and story-telling rather than dramatic composition.
Only four plays remain to us of which Greene was indisputably the sole author. The earliest of these seems to have been the Comicall History of Alphonsus, King of Arragon (c. 1587), written in emulation as well as in direct imitation of Marlowe's tragedy. In the Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (not known to have been acted before Feb. 1592, but probably written in 1589) Greene once more attempted to emulate Marlowe; and he succeeded in producing a masterpiece of his own. Friar Bacon remains a dramatic picture of English Elizabethan life with which The Merry Wives alone can vie. The History of Orlando Furioso, one of the Twelve Peeres of France, known to have been acted on Feb. 21, 1592, is a free dramatic adaptation of Ariosto, Harington's translation of whom appeared in 1591. In The Scottish Historie of James IV. (c. 1591, licensed for publication 1594) the story has no pretence to be historical, but is taken from one of Giraldi Cinthio's tales. It contains a prelude and some dances between the acts—"pre sented by Oboram, King of Fayeries," who is, however, a very different person from the Oberon of A Midsummer Night's Dream. George-a-Greene the Pinner of Wakefield (acted printed 1599), a delightful picture of English life fully worthy of the author of Friar Bungay, has been attributed to him on slight evidence. The conjecture as to his supposed share in the plays on which the second and third parts of Henry VI. are founded has been already referred to. He was certainly joint author with Thomas Lodge of the curious drama called A Looking Glasse for London and England (acted in 1592 and printed in 1J94)—a dramatic apologue conveying to the living generation of English men the warning of Nineveh's corruption and prophesied doom, often reproduced as a street puppet play.
Greene's dramatic genius has nothing in it of the intensity of Marlowe's tragic muse; nor perhaps does he ever equal Peele at his best. His comic humour is undeniable, and he had the gift of light and graceful dialogue. His diction is overloaded with classical ornament, but his versification is easy and fluent, and its cadence is at times singularly sweet. He creates his best effects by the simplest means ; and he is indisputably one of the most attractive of early English dramatic authors.
Greene's dramatic works and poems were edited by Alexander Dyce. His complete works were edited for the Huth Library by A. B. Grosart (15 vols. 1881-86) ; by J. C. Collins (2 vols., 1905) ; and by T. H. Dickinson (Mermaid Series, 1909) . Grosart's edition contains a translation of Nicholas Storojhenko's monograph on Greene (Moscow, 1878) . An account of his pamphlets is to be found in J. J. Jusserand's English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare (Eng. trans., 189o) . See also F. M. Bodenstedt, in Shakespeare's Zeitgenossen and ihre Werke (1858) ; W. Bernhardi, Robert Greenes Leben and Schriften (1874) ; an introduction by A. W. Ward to Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1886, 4th ed., 1901) ; C. R. Gayley, "Robert Greene: His Life and the Order of his Plays in Representative English Comedies (vol. i., 1903) ; and an account by E. K. Chambers in The Elizabethan Stage (vol. iii. 1923) where other references will be found.