Novelist and dramatist (born 1560, died 1592). A full catalogue of this writer’s Works may be found in Lowndes’ “Bibliographer’s Manual.” The following are the most important:—Romances—“Pandosto, the Triumph of Time: or, the History of Doraustus and Faunia” (1588), “The Historie of Arbasto, King of Denmark” (1617); “A Pair of Turtle Doves; or, the Tragicall History of Bellora and Fidelio” (1606); “Menaphon” (1587).—Autobiography—“Greene’s Never too Late” (1590); “Greene’s Groats-worth of Wit, bought with a Million of Repentance” (1592); “Greene’s Vision” (1592); “The Repentance of Robert Greene” (1592); “Farewell to Folly” (1591). Plays—“The Honorable Historie of Frier Bacon and Frier Bongay” (1594); “The Historie of Orlando Furioso” (1594); “The Comical Historie of Alphonsus, King of Arragon;” “A Looking-Glass for London and England” (with Lodge); “The Scottish Historie of James IV.” (1598); “Mammilia” (1593). Miscellaneous—“The Myrour of Modestie” (1584); “Morando” (1584); “Euphues, his Censure to Philatus” (1587); “Perimedes the Blacksmith” (1588); “Alcida” (1588); “The Spanish Masquerado” (1589); and numerous pamphlets exposing the sins and follies of town life.

  With him was the fifth, a man of indifferent yeares, of face amible, of body well proportioned, his attire after the habite of a scholler-like gentleman, onely his haire was somewhat long, whome I supposed to be Robert Greene, Maister of Artes.

  I was altogether vnacquainted with the man, & neuer once saluted him by name: but who in London hath not heard of his dissolute, and licentious liuing; his fonde disguisinge of a Master of Arte with ruffianly haire, vnseemely apparell, and more vnseemelye Company; his vaineglorious and Thrasonicall brauinge: his piperly Extemporizing, and Tarletonizing; his apishe counterfeiting of euery ridiculous, and absurd toy: his fine coosening of Iuglers, and finer iugling with cooseners: hys villainous cogging and foisting; his monstrous swearinge, and horrible forswearing; his impious profaning of sacred Textes: his other scandalous, and blasphemous ravinge: his riotous and outragious surfeitinge; his continuall shifting of lodginges: his plausible musteringe, and banquetinge of roysterly acquaintaunce at his first comminge; his beggarly departing in euery hostisses debt; his infamous resorting to the Banckside, Shorditch, Southwarke, and other filthy hauntes: his obscure lurkinge in basest corners: his pawning of his sword, cloake, and what not, when money came short; his impudent pamphletting, phantasticall interluding, and desperate libelling, when other coosening shifts failed.

  Hee inherited more vertues than vices: a jolly long red peake, like the spire of a steeple, hee cherisht continually without cutting, whereat a man might hang a Jewell, it was so sharpe and pendant. Why should art answer for the infirmities of manners? Hee had his faultes, and thou thy follyes. Debt and deadly sinne, who is not subject to? With any notorious crime I never knew him tainted.

  As Achilles tortured the dead body of Hector; and as Antonius and his wife Fulvia tormented the lifeless corpse of Cicero; so Gabriel Harvey hath showed the same inhumanity to Greene, that lies full low in his grave…. As Archesilaus Prytanœus perished by wine at a drunken feast, as Hermippus testifieth in Diogenes: so Robert Greene died by a surfeit taken of pickled herrings and Rhenish wine; as witnesseth Thomas Nash, who was at the fatal banquet.

  The shamelessness of the man is a sufficient guarantee for the truth of his personal revelations. Vain, and desirous of keeping his name before the public, but without a character to lose, he made a cynical exposure of his vices. These confessions, moreover, are stamped with indubitable signs of earnestness. The accent of remorse is too sincere and strongly marked in them to justify a suspicion of deliberate fiction…. Greene deserves almost unmitigated reprobation. He was not only profligate, but bad-hearted, and, as we shall see, he indulged a rancorous animosity upon his death-bed. Yet we may believe that had his youth escaped the contamination of Italian vices, had his abilities been recognised by society, or had a place among men of education and good manners been open to his choice, he might perhaps have prospered.

  I am myself by no means sure that Greene’s supposed debauchery is not, to a great extent, “copy.”

  Early in August 1592 Greene fell ill after a dinner, at which Nashe was present, of pickled herrings and Rhenish wine. The account of his last illness and death given by his malignant enemy, Gabriel Harvey, may be exaggerated in some particulars, but appears to be substantially true. Harvey called on Greene’s hostess, and professes to record the information that she supplied. If his account be true, Greene was deserted by all his friends, Nashe among the number, and died in the most abject poverty. He lodged with a poor shoemaker and his wife, who attended him as best they could, and his only visitors were two women, one of them a former mistress (sister to the rogue known as “Cutting Ball,” who had been hanged at Tyburn), the mother of his base-born son, Fortunatus Greene, who died in 1593. Having given a bond for ten pounds to his host, he wrote on the day before his death these lines to the wife whom he had not seen for six years: “Doll, I charge thee by the loue of our youth and by my sovles 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.” He died 3 Sept. 1592, and his devoted hostess, obeying a wish that he had expressed, crowned his dead body with a garland of bays. On the following day he was buried in the New Churchyard, near Bethlehem Hospital.

  There were two separate selves in him, and they proved incompatible. One was full of reasonable, sensible, and somewhat bourgeois tendencies, highly appreciating honour, respectability, decorum, civic and patriotic virtues; of women liking only those that were pure, of men those that were honest, religious and good citizens. Greene’s other self was not, properly speaking, the counterpart of the first, and had no taste for vices as vices, nor for disorder as disorder, but was wholly and solely bent upon enjoyment, immediate enjoyment whatever be the sort, the cost, or the consequence. Hence the glaring discrepancies in Greene’s life, his faults, not to say his crimes, his sudden short-lived repentances, his supplications to his friends not to imitate his example, his incapacity to follow steadily one course or the other. His better self kept his writings free from vice, but was powerless to control his conduct.

  It is easy to condemn the man, impossible not to love him, important to understand him, for his is a typical figure. He may be taken as the very epitome of many writers of the time, wild, profligate Bohemians in their lives, and in their writings earnest and often terrible moralists. Yet it surely is not necessary, with M. Jusserand, to assign to Greene “two separate selves” in order to understand this. Rather, the man who should preach repentance without having felt, as Greene did, all the anguish of self-reproach and self-abasement, all the bitterness of the fruits of his misdoing, is in need of two selves, one for the pulpit, another for the complacent regulation of his private affairs. Greene had but one self, full of impulse, readily kindled to generosity, or carried by sympathy or ridicule into vice, and above all filled with that artistic instinct which compelled him to give expression in poetic or literary form to what he felt and knew.

Romances

  Robert Greene was a man who possessed all the advantages of education: he was a graduate of both Universities—he was skilled in ancient learning and in modern languages—he had, besides, a prolific imagination, a lively and elegant fancy, and a grace of expression rarely exceeded; yet let any person well acquainted with “The Winter’s Tale” read the novel of “Pandosto,” upon which it was founded, and he will be struck at once with the vast pre-eminence of Shakespeare, and with the admirable manner in which he has converted materials supplied by another to his own use. The bare outline of the story (with the exception of Shakespeare’s miraculous conclusion) is nearly the same in both; but this is all they have in common, and Shakespeare may be said to have scarcely adopted a single hint for his descriptions, or a line for his dialogue; while in point of passion and sentiment Greene is cold, formal, and artificial: the very opposite of everything in Shakespeare.

  As a writer he was one amongst the most popular of his day. His little romances of some fifty pages each were the delight of readers for amusement, for half a century. They were the companions of the courtly and the humble,—eagerly perused by the scholar of the University and the apprentice of the City. They reached the extreme range of popularity. In Anthony Wood’s time, they were “mostly sold on ballad-monger’s stalls;” and Sir Thomas Overbury describes his Chambermaid as reading “Greene’s works over and over.” Some of these tales are full of genius, ill-regulated no doubt, but so pregnant with invention, that Shakspere in the height of his fame did not disdain to avail himself of the stories of his early contemporary.

  For his keen perception of character and the relations of social life, the playfulness of his fancy, and the liveliness of his style exerted an influence on his contemporaries, which was equalled by that of none but Marlowe and Peele. No figure better paints the group of young playwrights…. Wild as was the life of Greene, his pen was pure. He is steadily on virtue’s side in the love pamphlets and novelettes he poured out in endless succession, and whose plots were dramatized by the school which gathered round him.

  Greene’s tales had immense popularity. Some of them ran through several editions, and even held their ground until the modern English novel had fairly come in to supersede them.

  “Menaphon,” although equipped with a sub-title fathering this book also upon “Euphues,” was in truth a direct challenge to the popularity of Sidney’s “Arcadia,” published about a year earlier. Although not his first, it proved Greene’s most sustained and successful attempt to clothe chivalrous sentiment in the fashionable shepherd’s weeds, trimmed with the inevitable Euphuistic garniture.

Dramas

  If, as a dramatist, Greene fails to exhibit character with force and discrimination, if he has much both of the fustian and the meanness which are found more or less in all the plays of the period, and if his blank-verse is so monotonous as to pall upon the ear; it must be allowed, on the other hand, that he not unfrequently writes with elegance and spirit, and that in some scenes he makes a near approach to simplicity and nature.

  Greene succeeds pretty well in that florid and gay style, a little redundant in images, which Shakspeare frequently gives to his princes and courtiers, and which renders some unimpassioned scenes in his historic plays effective and brilliant.

  Greene was a prolific and versatile author. Besides dramas, he was a writer of novels and poetical pieces, especially of instructive or moral works, which were occasionally in a semi-poetic and romantic form, and of several pamphlets of a satirical character. In all he displayed no common powers of mind—great sensibility and tenderness of feeling, a quick and lively fancy, a graceful vein of humour and raillery, but without profundity of genius, or deep and solid feelings, without fixed opinions in religion and morals, and above all, without that energy of character which is required to hold with a firm hand the reins of poesy not less than of life…. His dramas possess, indeed, form and proportion; they are not without keeping and light nimble movement; but this external regularity of form, this outward advance of the plot, does not compensate for the want of inward unity and organic necessity of the several parts. In perfect agreement with all this, his dramatic characters are, it is true, correctly drawn, and are also lively and graceful, but yet devoid of an inner motive of development provided and existing from the beginning; they are not full and well-finished figures, but, for the most part, as it were, sculptured in half-relief, or like ancient illuminations, in which the figures do not at all stand out from the brilliant ground of gold on which they are emblazoned. They are deficient in intrinsic massiveness and solidity of mind; like Greene himself, their life does not pass outwards from within, but conversely, and consequently their inmost and real personality is never laid bare, but reality and appearance float alike before us in a broad, loose, and vague indeterminateness. The language is pure, clear, and graceful, but without ebb and flow; proceeding in one broad unbroken line, and not so much the language of mind, feeling, and passion, as of conversation and narrative.

  Greene was too cynical to have command of language for a character of sustained pride; he could pump up expression for a good many emotions, but his nature was dry in that region. He is, indeed, a standing refutation of the plausible idea that rant belongs to the infancy of the drama. Rant goes rather with the nature of the individual; and Greene, with all his roughness and recklessness, was fitted to be the pupil of Lyly more than of Marlowe.

  In style, again, Greene is father of Shakespere—as far, at least, as an ordinary man may be said to be father of a giant. When matured, their plays have none of the “thundering eloquence” or unrelieved passion of Marlowe’s best work, nor of the delicate sweetness of Peele’s. They have the irregular strength, the granite of Teutonic art. The gloom of gathering passion in them does not break in shower of tears and sorrow alone, but with lightning of laughter. They have as strong guiding intellects as they have emotions, and their emotions are therefore anything but one-sided. In the midst of some great passion, the thought turns upon itself, and a passing smile saves it from turgidity or paroxysm. Their humour ever dashes in, and makes softer as well as grander the storm of their tragedy. Contrast, relief, marks off their dramatic style; little touches of pathos breathe across their comedies; humorous passages chequer their serious plays as gratefully as clouds the midsummer sunlight. That humour of theirs, too, is, more frequently than other dramatists’, of that wise, refreshing sort, which has the fear of fate before its eyes. The rollicking, reckless kinds—farce, burlesque, wit—have their place, but it is a subordinate one.

  Certainly the title of “a vulgar writer” suits no one so well as Greene; for in the works of no other dramatist of his day shall we find so many scenes taken bodily, so to speak, out of English real life, and put into so pure and popular a language, free from all euphuistic admixture and florid classical figurativeness. Exactly half of those plays of Greene’s which we still possess are devoted to the representation of the life of the people. For Chettle, who knew all Greene’s plays, affirms that the percentage of the popular was considerably greater. Even in Greene’s earlier dramatic attempts,—in which he imitated Marlowe’s gorgeous manner and Lylly’s euphuistic style.—we shall always find two or three scenes of popular life, which are so witty, lively and fresh, that they leave nothing to be desired. But another circumstance contributed not a little to Greene’s popularity as a dramatist. His plays, with their fantastical characters and their numerous unexpected adventures, reminded the public of their favourite novels, tales of chivalry, and wonderful romances.

  In Greene’s plays we can always trace the hand of the novelist. He did not aim at unity of plot, or at firm definition of character. Yet he manages to sustain attention by his power of telling a story, inventing an inexhaustible variety of motives, combining several threads of interest with facility, and so arranging his incongruous materials as to produce a pleasing general effect. He has the merit of simplicity in details, and avoids the pompous circumlocution in vogue among contemporary authors. His main stylistic defect is the employment of cheap Latin mythology in and out of season. But his scenes abound in vivid incidents, which divert criticism from the threadbare thinness of the main conception, and offer opportunities to clever actors.

  With a few touches from the master’s hand, Margaret, the fair maid of Fressingfield, might serve as handmaid to Shakespere’s women, and is certainly by far the most human heroine produced by any of Greene’s own group.

  It was Greene who first brought Comedy into contact with the blithe bright life of Elizabethan England, into contact with poetry, into contact with romance. He took it out into the woods and the fields, and gave it all the charm of the idyll; he filled it with incident and adventure, and gave it all the interest of the novel. A freshness as of the morning pervades these delightful medleys. Turn where we will—to the loves of Lacy and Margaret at merry Fressingfield, to the wizard friar and the marvels of his magic cell at Oxford, to the patriot Pinner and his boisterous triumphs, to Oberon with his fairies and antics revelling round him, to the waggeries of Slipper and Miles—everywhere we find the same light and happy touch, the same free joyous spontaneity. His serious scenes are often admirable. We really know nothing more touching than the reconciliation of James and Dorothea at the conclusion of “James IV.,” and nothing more eloquent with the simple eloquence of the heart than Margaret’s vindication of Lacy in “Friar Bacon.” The scene again in the second act of “James IV.,” where Eustace first meets Ida, would in our opinion alone suffice to place Greene in the front rank of idyllic poets. Greene’s plots are too loosely constructed, his characters too sketchy, his grasp and range too limited, to entitle him to a high place among dramatists, and yet as we read these medleys we cannot but feel how closely we are standing to the Romantic Comedies of Shakspeare.

  His best plays breathe a thoroughly national spirit, and they are instinct with love of English traditions, English virtues, and English familiar scenes. “Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay” and “George-a-Greene” set before us pictures of country life as natural and attractive as any in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” or “The Merry Wives of Windsor.” A pure and fragrant air ripples through their pages, blowing from over homestead, and meadow, and stream. Here too we meet with members of every social class, prince and peasant, earl and shoemaker, philosopher and clown, all mixing in easy familiarity. So it is in the world of Shakspere, where rank is never the measure of merit, and where the ideal ruler wandering in disguise among his soldiers declares to them that the King is but a man as other men, with like senses and conditions. But Greene in his popular sympathies goes further than Shakspere, who can never be strictly called democratic, and of whose heroes and heroines not one is taken from humble life. The portrait gallery of the greater dramatist, wide and varied as it is, contains no such figures as Margaret of Fresingfield or the Pinner of Wakefield. The village maid, who is really what she seems, not, like Perdita, a princess in disguise, and who yet may be worthy of an Earl’s love; the yeoman, with the sturdy independence of his class united to genuine loyalty and ardour of heart—these are not types over which Shakspere lingers lovingly. For them we are indebted to Greene, who thus takes his place on the long list of our writers headed by Langland, and numbering Burns, Crabbe, and Wordsworth among its foremost names, who have found their truest inspiration in the joys and sorrows of the poor.

  In Greene, the new spirit of Renaissance sensuousness, so unbridled in Marlowe, is found to be restrained by those cool and exquisite moral motives, the elaboration of which is the crowning glory of Shakespeare. Faint and pale as Greene’s historical plays must be confessed to be, they are the first specimens of native dramatic literature in which we see fore-shadowed the genius of the romantic English stage.

General

  Other newes I am advertised of, that a scald triviall lying Pamphlet, called “Greens Groats worth of Wit” is given out to be of my doing. God never have care of my soule, but utterly renounce me, if the least word or syllable in it proceeded from my penne, or if I were any way privie to the writing or printing of it.

  Be not dismaied (my good freends) that a deade man shoulde acquaint you with newes; for it is I, I per se I, Robert Greene, in Artibus Magister, he that was wont to solicite your mindes with many pleasant conceits, and to fit your fancies, at the least every quarter of the yere, with strange and quaint devises, best beseeming the season, and most answerable to your pleasures.

  He was … a pastoral sonnet-maker and author of several things which were pleasing to men and women of his time. They made much sport and were valued among scholars; but since they have been mostly sold on ballad-mongers stalls.

  He had great vivacity of intellect, a very inventive imagination, extensive reading, and his works abound with frequent and successful allusions to the Classics. It is surprising to see how polished and how finished some of his pieces are, when it is considered that he wrote most of them to supply his immediate necessities, and in quick succession one to another.

  It must be confessed that many of the prose tracts of Greene are licentious and indecent; but there are many also whose object is useful and whose moral is pure. They are written with great vivacity, several are remarkable for the most poignant raillery, all exhibit a glowing warmth of imagination, and many are interspersed with beautiful and highly-polished specimens of his poetical powers. On those which are employed in exposing the machinations of his infamous associates, he seems to place a high value, justly considering their detection as an essential service done to his country; and he fervently thanks his God for enabling him so successfully to lay open the “most horrible Coosenages of the common Conny-Catchers, Cooseners, and Crosse Biters,” names which in those days designated the perpetrators of every species of deception and knavery…. Though most of the productions of Greene were written to supply the wants of the passing hour, yet the poetical effusions scattered through his works betray few marks of haste or slovenliness, and many of them, indeed, may be classed among the most polished and elegant of their day. To much warmth and fertility of fancy they add a noble strain of feeling and enthusiasm, together with many exquisite touches of the pathetic, and so many impressive lessons of morality, as, in a great measure, to atone for the licentiousness of several of his prose tracts.

  Greene’s style is in truth most whimsical and grotesque. He lived before there was a good model of familiar prose; and his wit, like a stream that is too weak to force a channel for itself, is lost in rhapsody and diffuseness.

  A pretty little instructive bibliographical volume might be put forth, respecting the works—with choice morsels of quotations therefrom—of the above not very harmonious quartetto. Let Robert Greene play the first fiddle.

  A pleasing wit, rich, graceful, who gave himself up to all pleasures, publicly with tears confessing his vices, and the next moment plunging into them again…. You see the poor man is candid, not sparing himself; he is natural; passionate in everything, repentance or otherwise; eminently inconstant; made for self-contradiction, not self-correction.

  There was an absolute chasm between the foulness of his life and the serenity of his intellect, and, at least until he became a repentant character, no literary theme interested him very much, unless it was interpenetrated with sentimental beauty. This element inspired what little was glowing and eloquent in his plays; it tinctured the whole of his pastoral romances with a rosy Euphuism, and it turned the best of his lyrics to the pure fire and air of poetry. From his long sojourn in Italy and Spain he brought back a strong sense of the physical beauty of men and women, of fruits, flowers, and trees, of the coloured atmosphere and radiant compass of a southern heaven. All these things passed into his prose and into his verse, so that in many of the softer graces and innocent voluptuous indiscretions of the Elizabethan age he is as much a forerunner as Marlowe is in audacity of thought and the thunders of a massive line.

  I must take this fresh opportunity of recalling that, as the converse of Herrick’s famous (or infamous) pleading that if his verse was impure his life was chaste, Greene’s writings are exceptionally clean. Nor must he be refused the benefit of this in any judicial estimate of him. It is equally harsh and uncritical to say that this confessedly dissolute-living man wrote purely because it paid to do so. It did no such thing. It would have paid, and did pay, to write impurely, and as ministering to the insatiate appetite of readers for garbage. To his undying honour, Robert Greene, equally with James Thomson, left scarce a line that dying he need have wished “to blot.” I can’t understand the nature of any one who can think hardly of Greene in the light of his ultimate penitence and absolute confession. It is (if the comparison be not over-bold) as though one had taunted David with his sin after the fifty-first Psalm.

  Crowded with similes taken for the most part from the ancient classics, and appositely applied, his poetry is at once polished and elegant. Nor, strange to say, does he betray any of those signs of slovenliness which we should expect to find in the writings of the first English poet who is said to have written for bread. Occasionally, more especially in his prose, he becomes indecent; but we must remember the manners of the times, before false modesty and hypocritical Grundyism had been born. His lessons of morality are both impressive and virtuous, so that, in his own day, he became noted alike for his good advice and bad example.

  The coherence of Greene’s paragraphs is fairly good. The movement is light and sometimes rapid, and the Euphuistic parallelism does not retard the general progress. Proportion, however, is wholly missing. Greene was guilty of numerous clause-heaps, and of unnecessary single-sentence sections. The general loose structure of his sentence does not save him from the bane of his day—the excessive use of intermediate punctuation.

  We have read and re-read his poems, his novels, and his plays, and at each perusal their pure and wholesome spirit, their liveliness, their freshness, their wealth of fancy and imagination, their humour, their tenderness, their many graces of style, have gained on us more and more.

  The richer note of Greene, full of English feeling, strangely heightened with pastoral and Renaissance fancies, varied in rhythm, but somewhat languorous and overwrought.