Robert Greene

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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).