Thomas Greene

“ Shortly after he died, his Gratsworth of Wit was given to the public by Henry Chettle. Near the close of this tract, Greene makes an address "to those gentlemen his quondam acquaintance, who spend their wits in making plays," exhorting them to desist from such pursuits. One of those "gentlemen" was Christopher Marlowe, distinguished alike for poetry, profligacy, and profanity; the others were Thomas Lodge and George Peele. Greene here vents a deal of fury against the players, alleging that they have all been beholden to him, yet have now forsaken him ”

“ When Warner spoke, apparently, of Greene as a "scholler" better than himself he was quite right, and as a matter of fact, Lyly's two most famous disciples were Thomas Lodge, a friend of Riche, who helped him to revise his works and corrected his faulty verses, and Robert Greene, a novelist and dramatist like Lodge and Lyly, and a friend of the former. Endowed with a less calm and sociable temperament than their model, Greene and Lodge led a chequered existence very characteristic of their epoch. ”

“ As it was playd by the Queenes Maiesties Players,’ 1594, 4to, has been plausibly assigned to Greene. Robert Allott, in ‘England's Parnassus,’ 1600, gives two extracts from it, ascribing both to Greene. Langbaine and others claim it for Thomas Goffe [q. v.] , who was about two years old when the first edition was published. It is highly probable that Greene had some share in the authorship of the original ‘Henry VI’ plays.
Greene's fame rests chiefly on the poetry that is scattered through his romances. The romances themselves are frequently insipid ”

“ I called to Henry Greene and Wilson, and prayed them not to go in hand with it in the dark, but to stay till the morning. Now every man, I hope, would go to his rest; but wickedness sleepeth not. For Henry Greene keepeth the master company all night, and gave me bread which his cabin-mate gave him; and others [were] as watchful as he.
Then I asked Henry Greene whom he would put out with the master. He said, the carpenter, John King, and the sick men. I said they should not do well to part with the carpenter, what need soever they should have. ”

“ GREENE, ROBERT (1678?–1730) , philosopher, the son of Robert Greene, a mercer of Tamworth, Staffordshire, by his wife Mary Pretty of Fazeley, was born about 1678. His father, who according to the son was a repository of all the Christian virtues, died while Greene was a boy, and it was through the generosity of his uncle, John Pretty, rector of Farley, Hampshire, that he was sent to Clare Hall, Cambridge. He graduated B.A. 1699, and M.A. 1703. He became a fellow and tutor of his college and took orders. ”

“ Geo. Tell me, sweet love, what good fortune brought thee hither?
For one it was that favour'd George-a-Greene.
Bet. Both love and fortune brought me to my George,
In whose sweet sight is all my heart's content.
Geo. Tell me, sweet love, how cam'st thou from thy father's?
Bet. A willing mind hath many slips in love:
It was not I, but Wily, thy sweet boy.
Geo. And where is Wily now?
Bet. In my apparel, in my chamber still.
Geo. Jenkin, come hither: go to Bradford,
And listen out your fellow Wily.—
Come, Bettris, let us in,
And in my cottage we will sit and talk. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Greene,” interposed Vance, “was your sister Julia in the habit of leaving her door unlocked at night?”
Greene’s jaw dropped a little, and his eyes opened wider.
“By Jove—no! Now that you mention it . . . she always locked herself in.”
Vance nodded absently, and we passed out into the hall. A thin, swinging baize door hid the servants’ stair-well at the rear, and Markham pushed it open.
“Nothing much here to deaden the sound,” he observed.
“No,” agreed Greene. “And old Sproot’s room is right at the head of the steps. He’s got good ears, too—too damned good sometimes.” ”

“ The guy that’s tearing things wide open in that dump isn’t going to stop just because we take his dinky thirty-two away from him, or grab his poison.—After Chester or Rex was shot we could’ve arrested all the rest of the family and put ’em through a third degree. But there’s too much noise in the papers now every time we give anybody the works; and it ain’t exactly healthy for us to grill a family like the Greenes. They’ve got too much money and pull ”

“ Greene thinks, there is another explanation of last night’s crime, then it’s essential to acquaint ourselves with the conditions existing here. And it’s equally essential not to rouse the suspicions of the servants. Hence, my apparent irrelevancies. I’m trying to size up the various human factors we have to deal with; and I think I’ve done uncommonly well. Several rather interesting possibilities have developed.”
Before Markham could reply Sproot passed the archway and opened the front door to some one whom he greeted respectfully. Greene immediately went into the hall. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Hence large standing armies bind in the fetters of ignorance a vast amount of intellect that would be brought into mellow life and usefulness in a free enlightened republican government like our own.
Among the Heroes of the American Revolution whose merit brought him into notice was Nathaniel Greene, born at the town of Warwick, Rhode Island, in 1741. His parents were respectable members of the Society of Friends—of course opposed to the profession of arms. His father was an anchor manufacturer and gave his son a limited chance to obtain a common education. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Markham nodded reflectively.
“I’m afraid he is. The original Greene stock was sturdy, but the present generation seems to have gone somewhat to pot. Old Tobias the Third—Chester’s father—was a rugged and, in many ways, admirable character. He appears, however, to have been the last heir of the ancient Greene qualities. What’s left of the family has suffered some sort of disintegration. They’re not exactly soft, but tainted with patches of incipient decay, like fruit that’s lain on the ground too long. Too much money and leisure, I imagine, and too little restraint. ”

“ And then think of those six ill-sorted, restless, unhealthy beings compelled to live there in daily contact for a quarter of a century—such was old Tobias Greene’s perverted idealism. And they’ve lived there, day in and day out, in that mouldy miasma of antiquity—unfit to meet the conditions of any alternative, too weak or too cowardly to strike out alone; held by an undermining security and a corrupting ease; growing to hate the very sight of one another, becoming bitter, spiteful, jealous, vicious; wearing down each other’s nerves to the raw ”

“ 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. ”

“ Caitiff, what sayest thou?
Slip. I say, sir, that if she call you shifting knave, you shall not put her to the proof.
Ateu. And why?
Slip. Because, sir, living by your wit as you do, shifting is your letters-patents: it were a hard matter for me to get my dinner that day wherein my master had not sold a dozen of devices, a case of cogs, and a suit of shifts, [264] in the morning. I speak this in your commendation, sir, and, I pray you, so take it.
Ateu. If I live, knave, I will be revenged. What gentleman would entertain a rascal thus to derogate from his honour? ”

“ Markham had got up and now moved restlessly toward the archway.
“The Medical Examiner will be here any minute,” he said; “and I want to look over Rex’s room before he arrives. You might come with us, doctor.—And you, Sproot, had better remain at the front door.”
We went up-stairs quietly: I think it was in all our minds that we should not advertise our presence to Mrs. Greene. Rex’s room, like all those in the Greene mansion, was spacious. It had a large window at the front and another at the side. There were no draperies to shut out the light, and the slanting midday sun of winter poured in. ”

“ Not to treat the matter too precisely, where precision is apt to be illusory even if attainable in appearance, was there not a plain growth of Greene as a man of letters closely attached to his time which will illustrate the general development of the age and its art, and naturally bring out those analogies between his work and Shakespeare's that have been thought of as formative elements in him by which his successor on the stage profited? The line of descent does not matter, on the personal side, if the general direction of progress be made out. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When Pen told his grandfather that a snowball fight had been decided upon as the method of settling the controversy between the Hilltops and the Riverbeds, and that Miss Grey had given her permission to that effect, the old gentleman chuckled gleefully.
"A very wise young woman," he said; "very wise indeed. When will the sanguinary conflict take place?"
"Why," replied Pen, "the first day the snow melts good."
"I see. I suppose you will lead the forces of Chestnut Hill?"
"I expect to; yes, sir."
"And our young friend, Master Sands, will marshal the troops of the Valley?" ”

“ With Greene we come to something at once very different from Lyly, and quite new,—to the vehement exuberant Elizabethan drama, which in strong hands reaches the loftiest heights of poetry [240] and passion, but in others falls to the lowest depths of rant, or runs to the very madness of fustian. It is not the greater achievement that we must look for in Greene. ”

“ To the imaginative reader there is material enough and to spare, but to the exact scientist there is a bare modicum. Without rash assumptions it seems safe to imagine that Greene's father, like Rabbi Bilessi and Gorinius, was well-to-do; that with the exception of the duration of his domestic life, Greene's married life is substantially represented by the story of Isabel and Francesco; that as a playwright Greene experienced the vicissitudes suggested in Never too Late and A Groatsworth of Wit; and that his death is substantially represented by Harvey in Four Letters. ”

“ 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. ”