Greene

“ 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. ”

“ SCENE III.—At Wakefield.
Enter George-a-Greene.
Geo. The sweet content of men that live in love
Breeds fretting humours in a restless mind;
And fancy, being check'd by fortune's spite,
Grows too impatient in her sweet desires;
Sweet to those men whom love leads on to bliss,
But sour to me whose hap is still amiss.
Enter Jenkin.
Jen. Marry, amen, sir.
Geo. Sir, what do you cry "amen" at? ”

“ Greene and a few others, however, with a malignity that spoke an interested motive, did not fail to turn this statement into ridicule. Greene in particular, who had displayed great anxiety and uneasiness during the absence of Henry and George, at the conclusion of the tale which the boys had requested George to relate, burst into loud and excessive laughter, and exclaimed, "This is one of the finest tales I ever heard. Is it likely, in the first place, that any gentleman would give them a sovereign? ”

“ For I am Wily, boy to George-a-Greene,
Who for my master wrought this subtle shift.
K. Edw. What, is it a boy?—what say'st thou to this, Grime?
Grime. Marry, my lord, I think this boy hath
More knavery than all the world besides. ”

“ This struggle between the forces of good and evil is exceedingly well depicted in Greene's Repentances, under his own or fictitious names; of all the heroes of his tales he is himself the most interesting and the most deeply studied. As a novel writer and an observer of human nature, his own portrait is perhaps his masterpiece. ”

“ Warren and Ermsby are Englishmen of a sturdy type, and Sir Cuthbert Anderson and Lady Anderson are studied as if in their Scotch castle. But Greene did something more than present the exteriors of men as types. He studied their psychology, and knew the warring forces within the individual soul, the power of circumstance, and ambition, and love to direct the forces of character into untoward paths. He knew that logic of human nature that counts consistency untrue, and constructs motives out of the syllogisms of perversity. ”

“ Wily. Alas, sir, it is Hebrew unto me,
To tell me of George-a-Greene or any other!
Search me, good sir, and if you find a letter
About me, let me have the punishment that's due.
Grime. Why are you muffled? I like you the worse for that.
Wily. I am not, sir, asham'd to show my face;
Yet loth I am my cheeks should take the air:
Not that I'm chary of my beauty's hue,
But that I'm troubled with the toothache sore.
[Unmuffles.
Grime. [aside] . A pretty wench, of smiling countenance!
Old men can like, although they cannot love ”

“ 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 representing Greene himself. This ill-starred production may almost be said to have done more to excite the resentment of posterity against Greene’s name than all the errors for which he professed his repentance. ”

“ Greene was concerned, along with Thomas Lodge, in writing another extant play, entitled A Looking-Glass for London and England. This is little better than a piece of stage trash, being a mixture of comedy, tragedy, and Miracle-Play; an Angel, a Devil, and the Prophet Hosea taking part in the action. The verse parts are in Greene's puffiest style, the prose parts in his filthiest. ”

“ Is better than an earl, if he be false;"
and
"'tis more credit to men of base degree,
To do great deeds, than men of dignity."
George's words, "Tell me, sweet love, how is thy mind content," "Happy am I to have so sweet a love," and "I have a lovely leman, as bright of blee as is the silver moon," sound like Greene's style matured and softened by experience. Yet that the play is Greene's one would not dare to say. Its present form displays either hasty composition or garbled version, or both, for it is neither consistent nor well integrated. ”

“ The poetry of Greene abounds still more than his prose with the most exquisite delineations of rural peace and content, and the following lines feelingly paint this short and only happy period of his life:—
"Sweet are the thoughts that savour of content,
The quiet minde is richer than a crowne:
Sweete are the nights in carelesse slumber spent,
The poor estate scornes Fortune's angry frowne:
Such sweete content, such mindes, such sleepe, such blis,
Beggers injoy, when princes oft doe mis. ”

“ He was seeking free play for his gladiatorial instincts, and his claim to intervene solely as Greene's champion cannot be accepted quite literally. In the second edition of his ‘Pierce,’ issued within a month of Greene's death, he had himself denounced Greene's ‘Groatsworth of Wit,’ his friend's dying utterance, as ‘a scald trivial lying pamphlet.’ His new tract was entitled ‘Strange Newes of the Intercepting certaine Letters and a Conuoy of Verses as they were going priuilie to victuall the Low Countries,’ i.e. to be applied to very undignified purposes, London, by John Danter, 1593. ”

“ Of Greene, as the creator of our lighter English prose, we have already spoken. But his work as a poet was of yet greater importance, for his 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. In spite of the rudeness of his plots and the unequal character of his work, Greene must be regarded as the creator of our modern comedy. No figure better paints the group of young playwrights. ”

“ Her health, never robust, has, however, at times made literary work impossible for her. Mrs. Greene is a member of some of the literary clubs in Portland, and numbers among her acquaintance several prominent New England authors. ”

“ Bon. What says fair Bettris?
Grime. My lord, she is praying for George-a-Greene:
He is the man, and she will none but him.
Bon. But him! why, look on me, my girl:
Thou know'st, that yesternight I courted thee,
And swore at my return to wed with thee.
Then tell me, love, shall I have all thy fair?
Bet. I care not for earl, nor yet for knight,
Nor baron that is so bold;
For George-a-Greene, the merry Pinner,
[Pg 412] He hath my heart in hold. [302]
Bon. Bootless, my lord, are many vain replies:
Let us hie us to Wakefield, and send her the Pinner's head. ”

“ Greene did not fail to choose his associates among people of this sort, and with some of them he crossed over to the continent in his turn to visit "Circe." "Being at the University of Cambridge, I light amongst wags as lewd as my selfe, with whome I consumed the flower of my youth, who drew me to travell into Italy and Spaine, in which places I saw and practizde such villainie as is abhominable to declare...." He comes back, and after the pleasures and excitement of travel, ordinary every-day life seems to him tasteless; the mere idea of a regular career of any sort is abhorrent to him. ”

“ This story, characteristic as it is of Greene's style when he means to be euphuistic, can scarcely be taken as a fair sample of the improbability he is able to crowd into a single novel. Most of his tales (and in this he greatly differs from Lyly) take place we do not know when, we do not know where, among men we have never anywhere come across. ”

“ Much. How now! what, art thou down?—
Come, sir, I am next.
[They fight, and George-a-Greene beats him.
Rob. Come, sirrah, now to me: spare me not,
For I'll not spare thee.
Ge. Make no doubt I will be as liberal to thee.
[They fight; Robin Hood stays.
Rob. Stay, George, for here I do protest,
Thou art the stoutest champion that ever I
Laid hands upon.
Geo. Soft, you sir! by your leave, you lie;
You never yet laid hands on me.
Rob. George, wilt thou forsake Wakefield,
And go with me?
Two liveries will I give thee every year,
And forty crowns shall be thy fee. [316]
Geo. ”

“ Without being original in structure or style Greene was individual in outlook and temper. He had a keener eye for the little things than any dramatist of his time, and he had also a better sympathy for the quick flashing moods and manifestations of human character. His knowledge of the concrete realities of character is an attribute of the man himself. In depicting fairies he lacks, as did Lyly, the imagination to vitalise an unreal world in the spirit of a Shakespeare. ”

“ Society of the times in which Greene lived was not ready to treat either a playwright or an actor as a good citizen. And a son of a nobleman, entering the ranks of the pioneers, would have given his life as a sacrifice just as did Marlowe and Greene. Lodge was the son of a Lord Mayor, Peele's father was a man of some education, and Lyly had influential connections at court; yet the only man of the entire school [Pg xv] of "university wits" who escaped a life of misery and a death of want was Lodge, and he in 1596 deserted literature for medicine. ”

“ Greene, who stood behind the other boys wiping his face, which was a little bruised by the blow he had received, then said, "that he should not be surprised if Master George himself had had something to do in it; for he [34] seemed very much offended by what he had said."
"You are a mean-spirited fellow," said George; "and——"
"Silence! silence, boys!" cried Dr. Harris. "How dare you make such accusations against each other! The money may have been mislaid, and will, no doubt, be found. I desire that a strict search may be made: until that is done, let me not hear another word about it. ”

“ A weak, conceited, self-indulgent man, with a genuine vein of lyric poetry and of tenderness, is perhaps as accurate a summing up as can be given of Greene. He was born in 1560 and died in 1592, worn out by a Bohemian life led in a very exuberant time. There seems to be no doubt that the end was very miserable. Greene has enjoyed an unfortunate notoriety on the strength of a passage in his last pamphlet, The Groat’s Worth of Wit, in which he abuses Shakespeare. ”

“ But Greene's induction is better integrated with his play than is Shakespeare's induction of Sly, the Lords and the Servants, for the two characters, Slipper and Nano, who appear first in the induction, are sent out into the play to serve as connecting links for all of its action. James IV. is the only one of Greene's plays that has unity of action. The plot is introduced with a masterly directness and economy. The fatal situation breaks on the reader at the beginning, [Pg lxii] and throughout the play the crux of the action remains the love of the King of Scots for another than his queen. ”

“ About thirty per cent of Greene's have it. But even there almost half of the 'free' rhythms display artistic handling. Speech-end rhythms are fewer than in Alphonsus; rhyme, indeed, is altogether less in evidence—except in the prophetic rhapsodies. Lodge's lines for Oseas rhyme, however, more than Greene's for Jonas. Not only is the proportion of prose larger than in any other of 408Greene's plays,—a feature which is, perhaps, due to the fact that each collaborator had his own set of mechanicals to exploit,—but the style of it is more conversational than in any preceding English play. ”

“ But in spite of the facts that are brought to his judgment the beauties of the play are such as to compel every editor to soften judgment by inclination and include the play among Greene's dramas. Certainly Greene is the only university man of his day who, knowing the affectations of literature, at the same time knew real life in the concrete well enough to write George-a-Greene. If truth were told it was through plays of the type of George-a-Greene, rather than through the more ambitious university men's plays, that the current of pure English comedy was to flow. ”

“ Greene had, in truth, only modelled the clay; Shakespeare used it, adding the soul.
Greene simply states his facts and takes little trouble about explaining them; the reader must rest satisfied with the author's bare word. There is no attempt at the study of passions; his heroes change their minds all of a sudden, with the stiff, sharp, improbable action of puppets in a show. ”

“ The statement that Greene had a share in a play on Henry VIII (Variorum, xix. 500) seems to be based on a confusion with a Robert Greene named by Stowe as an authority for his Annales (Collins, i. 69) .
Doubtful Plays
Greene’s hand has been sought in Contention of York and Lancaster, Edward III, Fair Em, George a Greene, Troublesome Reign of King John, Knack to Know a Knave, Thracian Wonder, Leire, Locrine, Mucedorus, Selimus, Taming of A Shrew, Thomas Lord Cromwell (cf. ch. xxiv) , and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Henry VI.
FULKE GREVILLE, LORD BROOKE (c. 1554–1628) . ”

“ No light is thrown upon the authorship by contemporary publications; and, as late as Kirkman's Catalogue, 1661, the play was still anonymous. It has been assigned to Greene on the manuscript evidence which has already been shown to be inconclusive. [1226] In the last resort our decision must depend upon the detection of Greenian characteristics. Dr. Ward has observed that the play possesses "one of Greene's most attractive notes,—a native English freshness of colouring,"—glimpses of which may also be had in Friar Bacon and James IV. This is true. ”