Greene Robert Greene was born at Norwich, about the year Robert 1560. In 1575 already he entered St. John's College, Cambridge, where he certainly struck up a friendship with two kindred spirits, Marlowe and Nashe. After taking the usual degrees he left Cambridge in 1583 and travelled abroad, making more than one tour on the Continent and visiting Spain and Italy, France and Germany, and even Denmark and Poland, according to his own account. The autobiographical writings of Greene are almost our only authority in the matter of his life, and carry, to my mind, instant conviction of verity on the whole, allowing for a certain rosserie and journalistic tendency to extravagance. Greene speaks himself of the effects of these tours more than once, and in particular tells us that in Italy he "learnt such wickedness as he dare not speak of." A more complete account of the probable influence of such foreign travels is to be found in Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller, or Life of Jacke Wilton, which he published in 1594. Jacke Wilton gives in this book the impressions of his voyages, autobiographical reminiscences of Nashe, more or less dished up for general conssumption. Jacke has little to say of France, beyond remarking a general vanity and frivolity among the French. In Germany and Holland, he says, even the most assiduous student may learn only the lessons of drunkenness and dull verbosity. In a long disputation between Luther and Carolostadius, "a mass of words they heaped up against the Mass and the Pope, but I remember no further particulars. Luther had the louder voice, Carolostadius went beyond him in beating and banging with his fists," and Nashe adds very characteristically: "they said nothing to make a man laugh, and so I left them!" "God so love me," he continues, "as I do love the quick-witted Italians and mortally detest this surly, swinish generation." From Italy and Venice he learned more than the mere plentiful handling of beer pots. Italy and the Italians were held in extremely evil repute; their morals were incredibly corrupt, vice and cruelty reigned universally, and that Influence of foreign tra vel Life in Machiavellian virtû, which meant mere skill, will-power, and savoir-faire, was glorified in defiance of humdrum moral considerations. A virtuoso had no need to be virtuous. The emotions of love and hatred, anger and revenge, ambition, and the lust of the flesh and of the eye, were the only motives of action. Italy was the fair Circe of Europe who by her corrupt charm turned men into swine, wallowing in evil passion: "Inglese italianato, diavolo incarnato," says the proverb. Corrupted alike by Italy and London, Greene and his friend Nashe led a miserable life in London, in alternate intervals of feverish literary activity and of headlong dissipation, ever shifting to make a living and to settle the long account of their reckless debaucheries. They lived, with other fellows like themselves, brilliant and vicious, in a constant tempest, amid the thunders of the law and police, under a pelting rain of unpaid bills and debts, "Who among us," says Nashe, "but is subject to debt and deadly sin." One at least of them, Nashe himself, knew the horrors of a London prison only too well. We know that Greene, after a first plunge into the whirlpool of London life, returned to his native Eastern counties and married. Let him tell the story himself. daughter of good account, with "I married a gentleman's whom I lived for awhile, but forasmuch as she would persuade me from my wilful wickedness, 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 Lincolneshire, and I to London; where in short space I fell into favor with such as were of honorable and good calling. But heere note, that though I knew how to get a friend, yet I had not the gift to keep a friend; for hee that was my dearest friend, I would bee sure so to behave myself towards him, that he should ever after professe to bee my utter ennemie, or else vowe never to come into my company." At different times, indeed, he managed to estrange even such close friends as Marlowe and Nashe. Despite possible efforts and helpless repentance, carried away still by "wilful wickedness", he sank more and more deeply into sin. It was probably while flying from his young wife that he had that experience, recounted in the Groatsworth of Wit, which persuaded him to take to play-writing, and wherein he figures under the name of Roberto. "On the other side of the hedge sat one that heard this sorrow, who getting over came towards him and brake off his passion. When he approached, he saluted Roberto." The stranger, wishful to comfort Roberto, pitied that a man of learning should "live in lack", and Roberto uttered his grief and besought advice as to how he might be employed. "Why, easily, quoth he, and greatly to your benefit; for men of my profession get by scholars their whole living." "What is your profession?", said Roberto. "Truly, sir, said he, I am a player." "A player?,” quoth Roberto; "I took you rather for a gentleman of great living, for if by outward habit men should be censured, I tell you, you would be taken for a substantial man: "-" So I am, where I dwell, (quoth the player) reputed able, at my proper cost, to build a windmill. What though the world once went hard with me, when I was fain to carry my playing fardel a foot-back; Tempora mutantur, I know you know the meaning of it better than I, but I thus construe it; it is otherwise now; for my very share in playingapparel will not be sold for two hundred pounds:" " Truly, said Roberto, it is strange that you should so prosper in that vain practise, for your voice is nothing gracious:" " Nay, then, said the player, I mislike your judgement; why, I am as famous for Delphrigas and the King of Fairies as ever was any of my time. The twelve labours of Hercules have I terribly thundered on the stage, and placed three scenes of the devil on the highway to heaven:" "Have ye so? (said Roberto) then, I pray you, pardon me.... Nay, it is enough....but how mean you to use me?" "Why sir, in making plays, said the other, for which you shall be well paid, if you will take the pains" Greene took then to play-writing and soon made a considerable reputation. "I became an Author of Playes and a penner of The call of the stage Greene's Quarrel with rival dramatists Love-pamphlets, so that I became famous in that qualitie that who for the trade grown so ordinary about London as Robert Greene". His success was hardly due to any vein of bold, genial originality, for Greene contented himself, in the main, with following up, in facile talented imitation, successes already attained by Marlowe. So Tamburlaine engendered Alphonsus, King of Aragon, and Greene made his great hit in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, an English history of Black Art, obviously written in emulation of Marlowe's German history of Doctor Faustus. This play, Greene's masterpiece, makes quaint reading in those passages wherein Friar Bacon's patriotic wizardry routs the arrogant German sorcerer, Vandermast. We gladly imagine, moreover, a reminiscence of Greene's happier years, perhaps even of the young wife whom he had loved and left in the Eastern counties, in the charming picture of Margaret, the "fair Maid of Fressingfield, lovely in her country-weeds", of the green and leafy spring-time of the year in Suffolk. Despite the eminent success of Greene's catering for the public taste, no less pleased by his other efforts, of which the Scottish History of James IV, slain at Flodden, is the most notable, he became hotly jealous of the rising reputation of the young generation, the rival Actor-School of playwrights. In the Groatsworth of Wit, written shortly before his death, Greene vents his spleen, warning his fellows of the academic school, Marlowe, Peele and Nashe, against those "upstart crows" whom, he denounces in virulent terms, aimed transparently in particular against Shakespeare. "Base-minded men all three of you if by misery ye be not warned, for into none of you (like me) sought these burrs to cleave; those puppets I mean that speak from our mouths, those anticks garnished in our colours. Is it not strange that I, to whom they have all been beholding, is it not like that you, to whom they have all been beholding, shall, were ye in that case that I am now, be both of them forsaken? Yet trust them not, for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers that, with his " tiger's heart wrapped in a players's hide", supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you, and being an absolute Johannes Fac-totum is, in his own conceit, the only Shake-scene in a country." If Greene was " in that case he was then", it was by no means due to the unfair competition of plagiarists, for his accusation of Shakespeare remains unproved, but to the irremediable fault of his own temperament, which reduced him to that deep degradation of misery, weakness and vice wherein the last years of his life were spent. Like Marlowe, his love of debauch brought about his death. In a last banquet, a lavern feast, says Gabriel Harvey, "he ate too much" red herring, and drank a surfeit of "Rhenish" wine. Nash was there among other friends of the poet, but all deserted their comrade in the illness which followed. A month he lay ill, taken in by two common folk of London, who had all the kindness of heart of the common folk, Isam, a shoemaker, and his wife. Alone, and cared for by none save by these two and by the mother of his bastard son, Fortunatus, he wrote, dying, to the wife whom he had deserted, and asked her to pay his last debt. "Doll, I charge thee by the love of our youthe, and by my soul's rest, that thou wilt see this man paid; for if he and his wife had not succoured me, I had died in the streete.'' This his poor last will written, the end came, on September 3, 1592. Greene was only 32 years old. Nine years before, buried in eager study, in ideal imaginings, he had wandered under the shady trees, round the fair college greens of Cambridge, and only six years ago, in the fresh Eastern country, the love of his fair English Dorothy might well have sealed him to worthiness and manhood. What we know of the life of Christopher Marlowe, the most powerful genius of the Elizabethan age, except for Shakespeare alone, bears a considerable likeness to that of his disciple Greene. Born at Canterbury in the same year as Shakes Last days and death Christopher |