Shakespeare: A Life (27 page)

play we call John of Bordeaux, which has a few lines in Henry Chettle's
hand in an extant script. Greene Orlando Furioso, his A LookingGlass
for London and England (written with Thomas Lodge), as well as Friar
Bacon, ensured that he had something produced every month from
February to June that year.

But he
was accused in April of selling Orlando Furioso to both the Queen's
and the Strange-Admiral's players. Then, when theatres were under a
double interdiction in the summer, Greene became ill. Nashe did not
deny that a 'banquet' of Rhenish wine and pickled herring with this
friend was the cause. Abandoned it seems even by his mistress, Greene
fended for himself, wrote a confessional pamphlet and some acerbic
notes about the players and Shakespeare, and apparently collapsed in the
street one day near Dowgate wharf. He was taken in by a shoemaker,
one Isam, and near Dowgate's water-carriers he feebly lingered on.
Lacking clothes, he borrowed a shirt when his own was being washed -- a
fact that led Harvey later to sneer over his poverty. Early in
September 'he walked to his chaire and back againe', and wrote to his
wife after nine o'clock that night, but the next day Robert Greene
died. The shoemaker saw to his burial after wrapping a wreath about
the scholar's waist.

The first to
descend on Greene's papers, it seems, was Henry Chettle, formerly a
partner of the printer John Danter (who brought out a quarto of Titus
Andronicus). Chettle, at the time, would have lacked a first-hand
knowledge of the theatre, but he was inclined towards the stage and
would write for it, in penury, after his daughter Mary died (in 1595).
At the moment he had in hand some fascinating material. On 20
September 1592 he licensed a work to be called
Greenes Groatsworth of
witte, bought with a million of Repentance. Describing the follie of
youth, the falshood of make-shifte flatterers, the miscrie of the
negligent, and mischiefes of deceiving Courtezans. Written before his
death and published at his dyeing request.

Greenes Groats-worth, printed from a text in Chettle's handwriting, was
virtually a rape of Shakespeare, or an insinuating attack on not only
his

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plays but his person, and it had the force of seeming to be a candid
statement by a dying man. Greene uses a popular formula in which a
parable is told, embellished with damaging details to fit an individual.
Complex and witty,
Groats-worth
begins with a 'prodigal son'
story about a bookish Roberto -- who is meant to resemble Robert
Greene. Having accused his greedy father of usury, Roberto is left one
coin to buy a 'groats-worth of witte', and after luring his rich
brother to ensnarement by a prostitute 'in the suburbes', he is cast
out to starve.

Cursing his fate, he
now meets a stage player, who has been a 'countrey Author' and has an
odd voice. 'Truly', Roberto remarks with distaste, it is strange 'you
should so prosper in that vayne practise [of acting] for that it
seemes to me your voice is nothing gratious.'

Who is the country poet and actor with vile tones? Is Greene thinking
of another enemy, or does he imply that Shakespeare's pitch, timbre, or
Midlands vowels were unpleasant? At any rate, Roberto becomes a
playwright himself. His purse swells like the sea until, demoralized by
servitude, he cheats actors, takes up with lewd friends, and ends with
just one groat. At this point, Greene intervenes to admit that his
life has been like Roberto's and to advise Peele, Nashe, and Marlowe
apparently about the actors. 'Base minded men all three of you, if by
my miserie you be not warned', he says, 'for unto none of you (like
race) sought those burres to cleave.' The 'burres' may be the Burbages,
and the next lines are the bitterest and nearly the most famous lines
ever written of Shakespeare. 'Yes trust them not', writes Greene,

for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his
Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde,
supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute
Johannesfac totum,
is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey. O that I
might intreat your rare wits to be imploied in more profitable
courses: & let those Apes imitate your past excellence, and never
more acquaint them with your admired inventions. I know the best
husband of you will never prove an Usurer . . .
¹⁶

Does the 'upstart Crow' resemble proud, vain crows in Macrobius,
Martial, and Aesop, or is he like the thieving crow in Horace's third
Epistle, and so a plagiarist? Only vaguely is Shakespeare linked with
dishonesty, but he is vicious (with a
'Tygers hart'),
presumptuous, and

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common, if not ungrateful ('upstart' and 'beautified' by the
achievements of others), and smug and conceited ('the onely
Shake-scene'). In coining
'Johannes fac totum'
from
dominus
or
magister factotum
Greene makes him as reckless as Jack Cade, who was known as ' Jack
Mend-All', and links him also with the author's pettily cruel Queen
Margaret. The Duke of York's phrase in 3 Henry VI (O tiger's heart
wrapped in a woman's hide!, 1. iv. 138) is aptly misquoted, and that
allusion echoes Margaret's earlier attack on Gloucester in 2 Henry VI
('His feathers are but borrowed, | For he's disposed as the hateful
raven', 111. i. 75-6).

Greene had
listened very well to his rival's works, since none of Henry VI was in
print, and he conveys a final hint that Shakespeare had viciously
refused to lend money. A poor, starving Grasshopper approaches a busy
Ant for aid. Like the cruel, maleficent Shake-scene with his tiger's
heart, the Ant has the inner being of a 'waspish little worme'. And so
when the Grasshopper calls for food, the Ant waspishly replies:

now thou feelst the storme, And starvst for food while I am fed with
cates. Use no intreats, I will relentlesse rest, For toyling labour
hates an idle guest.
¹⁷

The pamphlet was not written by a deranged observer. Its charges
against a Stratford man, whose voice cannot be mistaken for a Cambridge
graduate's, are not very precise; but they add up to a glimpse of an
actor-poet -- seen through a thick glass of hatred -- who holds himself
aloof from other poets, blends with a group such as Burbage's players,
serves a troupe diversely, and writes scripts to rival those of his
social betters. In brief, its assertions are not fantastic. Shakespeare
perhaps avoided Wits and others at Shoreditch, but whether or not he
ever refused to aid Greene is unknown.

Printed in an edition of about 500 copies,
Groats-worth
did not sell very briskly -- it was not reissued until 1596 -- but its
rechcrché
theatreallusions would have had some effect. The proof of Greene's
straits was that he was dead, whereas Henry VI's success might well
imply a 'Shake-scene'. Warfare between Nashe and Harvey in the autumn
called attention to Greene's strange demise: 'what a coyle there is
with

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pamphleting on him after his death' wrote Nashe, adding that
he
had had no hand in a 'scald trivial lying pamphlet' called
Greenes groatsworth
which is 'given out to be of my doing'.
¹⁸
Others took Chettle as the work's real author, a matter that still fuels speculation.

With his integrity under attack, Shakespeare must at first have felt
sharply cut, and his stoicism cannot have left him immune to
embarrassment and pain. Some 'friends' who read his manuscripts
presumably heard of a scandal touching him, and he may allude to it. In
Sonnets 110-12, the Poet refers to his dire troubles, the stage's
iniquity, and defects in his own behaviour. He has gone 'here and there'
in miserable, compromising journeys,

made myself a motley to the view, Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap
what is most dear, Made old offences of affections new. Most true
it is that I have looked on truth Askance and strangely.

The public stage even now colours him like a dye: 'my name receives a brand', he declares,

And almost thence my nature is subdued To what it works in, like the dyer's hand. Pity me then.

One scandal burns, whether or not he refers to the name ' Greene' in
'o'er-green' -- a word used only this once by Shakespeare and printed
in 1609 as 'ore-greene'. 'Your love and pity doth th'impression fill',
the Poet begins in Sonnet 112,

Which vulgar scandal stamped upon my brow; For what care I who calls
me good or ill, So you o'er-green my bad, my good allow? You are my
all the world, and I must strive. To know my shames and praises from
your tongue

Events in
his life may not be pictured exactly in the lyrics, but if he refers
here to his mood after the attack, his 'brow' clears. Yet he did not
forget easily. His exposure to 'ill' and 'shames' would continue if he
stayed in the theatre, and the pamphlet made his choice of a stage

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career riskier. However little Greene's words continued to nettle him,
he appears to mock his own sensitivity to them, as when in Hamlet he
refers to Greene's 'beautified' in Polonius's saying, of the Prince's
letter to 'the most beautified Ophelia': 'that's an ill phrase, a vile
phrase, "beautified" is a vile phrase' ( II. ii. 110-12). Later on in
the same scene, an actor in Polonius's role apparently ad-libbed with
the surprising remark 'beautified lady', since Edward Pudsey jotted
oddly in a commonplace book around 1601: 'The sunne breedes mag
Beautifyed
Ladye
gotes in a dead dog beeing good kissing carrion etc.'
¹⁹
But by then it appears, Shakespeare was amused by the 'vile phrase'.

At some point he, or another hand, did remove from 2 Henry VI a line
about 'Abradas the great Masadonian Pyrate'which he had picked up from
Greene Menaphon or Penelope's Web; this line is used in the quarto of
2 Henry VI, but not in the Folio version, where it is replaced by
'Bargulus the strong Illyrian pirate'.
²⁰
And late in 1592 he was well in control of his feelings when, it
seems, he saw Henry Chettle. In Kind-Harts Dreame, licensed on 8
December, Chettle apologizes for Groats-worth and states that he had
had no previous knowledge of Marlowe (whom he has no wish to know) or
of Shakespeare either. His phrase 'the qualitie' refers to acting, and
of late he has discovered Shakespeare to be a splendid actor -- a
stunning feat since the public theatres were shut that autumn -- and,
furthermore, has found him to be a perfectly civil or polite man: 'my
selfe have seene his demeanor no lesse civill than he excel
l
ent
in the qualitie he professes. Besides, divers of worship have
reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his
fa
ce
tious grace in writting, that aprooves his Art.'
²¹
Chettle's arm has been twisted, it seems. Persons of higher than
ordinary standing, or 'divers of worship', had spoken to him about the
playwright. Just who they were is unclear, but Shakespeare had been
attracting very smart young bloods and men of rank.

Groats-worth itself was a symptom of a lasting feud between the
troupes and the poets who wrote for them, and in time the playwright
Thomas Dekker was to carry it on. 'O you that are the
Poets
of these

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sinfull times, over whom the
Players
have now got the upper hand',
²²
Dekker would lament, and, in the wake of Greene's comments,
Shakespeare in his straddling work as an actor-poet had reason to be
on guard. But he had begun to amuse some of the keenest theatre
enthusiasts, or law students and others at London's great law Inns, the
Inns of Court and Chancery. Less than thirty months after Greene's
allusion to ' Johannes fac totum', law students at Gray's Inn's
Christmas revels were warned, facetiously, of a 'Johannes Shagbag'. This
vile man is potent since he waylays literally 'all' in his part of
London.

Whether or not 'Shagbag' was meant to be Shakespeare, the 'termers', who were
au courant
with theatre news, had seen The Comedy of Errors a few days earlier
in Gray's hall where invited actors had staged it after some uproar.
When too many invited guests turned up and in the crush some stalked
out, 'it was thought good not to offer any thing of account, saving
Dancing and Revelling with Gentlewomen', reports the Gesta Grayorum,
'and after such Sports, a Comedy of Errors (like to Plautus his
Menechmus) was played by the Players. So that Night was begun, and
continued to the end, in nothing but Confusion and Errors; whereupon,
it was ever afterwards called, The Night of Errors'.
²³
Shakespeare's comedy was well suited for Gray's Inn and for Innocents
Night on 28 December 1594 -- though it may have had a Bankside
debut, if it is Henslowe's 'the gelyous comodey' (or Jealous Comedy),
staged at the Rose during a break in the plague in January 1593.
²⁴

Many students and gentlemanly sojourners near Holborn had time to
frequent public theatres, to seek out actors, and hear gossip of the
stage, and around 1594 Shakespeare would have been known particularly at
Gray's Inn. As the largest and most fashionable law Inn, Gray's
recruited members from wealthy families north and south, and here men
from great northern Catholic families were in evidence. One Gray's
Reader (later knighted) was Thomas Hesketh, an executor of the wills
of Alexander de Hoghton, and of his own namesake Sir Thomas Hesketh of
Rufford in Lancashire, who had known Lord Strange and kept players.
Gray's, indeed, had more Lancashire members than any other Inn; and
whether or not Shakespeare had known Hoghton and Hesketh, Stratford
had its Lancashire-born schoolmasters.

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