Robert Greene

Robert Greene 1558?-1592, English author. His short romances, written in the manner of Lyly's Euphues, include Pandosto (1588), from which Shakespeare drew the plot for A Winter's Tale, and Menaphon (1589). His best plays, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594) and The Scottish History of James IV (1598), are a potpourri of romance, fantasy, and history. He wrote numerous tracts and pamphlets reflecting his knowledge of the London underworld as well as his own bohemian life. An alleged attack on Shakespeare—one of the earliest references to the man—is in Greene's Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance (1592). A Quip for an Upstart Courtier (1592), a social allegory, is considered his best pamphlet. Greene's short life ended in dire poverty. After his death he became the subject of a heated quarrel between Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe .

Bibliography: See his Life and Complete Works (ed. by A. B. Grosart, 15 vol., 1881-86; repr. 1964).

Greene, Robert (c.1560–92), English dramatist, who led a wild and dissolute life, and shortly before his early death published his famous recantation A Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance, which contains the first known reference to the emergence of Shakespeare as a playwright—‘an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers … in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country’. Greene was a prolific writer, and as the friend of Marlowe, Nashe, and Peele—the so-called University Wits—may have helped in the writing and rewriting of some of their works. How far he collaborated with Shakespeare—he is believed, for instance, to have had a hand in the trilogy of Henry VI—is still hotly debated. Certainly Shakespeare took the plot of The Winter's Tale (1611) from one of Greene's prose romances, Pandosto; or, The Triumph of Time (1588). Of Greene's own eight plays, the most successful seem to have been James IV of Scotland and The Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (both c.1591). The latter, a study of white magic, was probably intended as a counterblast to Marlowe's black magic in Dr Faustus (c.1589).

Greene, Robert (1558–92), was attacked at length by G. Harvey in Foure Letters (1592) as the ‘Ape of Euphues’ and ‘Patriarch of shifters’; Nashe defended him in Strange Newes in the same year, claiming that ‘Hee inherited more vertues than vices.’ Greene's 37 publications, progressing from moral dialogues to prose romances, romantic plays, and finally realistic accounts of underworld life, bear out Nashe's assertion that printers were only too glad ‘to pay him deare for the very dregs of his wit’.

Among the more attractive of his romances are the Lylyan sequel Euphues his Censure to Philautus (1587); Pandosto: The Triumph of Time and Perimedes the Blacke-Smith (1588); and Menaphon (1589). Among his ‘repentance’ pamphlets are Greenes Mourning Garment and Greenes Never too Late (1590), and the work attributed to him, Greenes Groats-Worth of Witte (1592). Greenes Vision (1592) is a fictionalized account of his death-bed repentance in which he receives advice from Chaucer, Gower, and King Solomon. The low-life pamphlets include A Notable Discovery of Coosenage (1591) and three ‘conny-catching’ pamphlets in 1591–2. The best-known of his eight plays are Orlando Furioso (1594), Frier Bacon, and Frier Bongay (1594), and James the Fourth (1598). Greene is now best known for his connections with Shakespeare. His attack on him in the Groats-Worth of Witte (below) is the first reference to Shakespeare as a London dramatist; and his Pandosto provided Shakespeare with the source for The Winter's Tale.