Other literary forms
Robert Greene mixed and invented literary types in order to please, and to some extent to form the taste of, the London middle class in the 1580’s. Mamillia: A Mirror or Looking Glass for the Ladies of England , his first published work, is a two-part romance presented as moral and rhetorical instruction; Morando: The Tritameron of Love is a two-part romance via Courtier -like conversation; Planetomachia sets forth tragic tales within a framework of Olympian conversation and adds a philosophical dispute in Latin. The rogue pamphlets of his last two years are collections of tales passed off as actual events.
More conventional forms used by Greene include the dream vision (for example, A Quip for an Upstart Courtier ), the poetic eulogy (A Maiden’s Dream , 1591), the political diatribe (The Spanish Masquerado , 1589), and the book of proverbs (The Royal Exchange , 1590). In drama, Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bongay (pr. c. 1589, pb. 1594) has been called the first English romantic comedy, but Greene composed at least four other plays, including the bitterly satiric A Looking Glass for London and England (pr. c. 1588-1589, pb. 1594), written in collaboration with Thomas Lodge.
Achievements
Robert Greene was a contemporary of Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. He lived during one of England’s most important literary periods—the English Renaissance. Greene was both an academic and a well-traveled student of life. He earned a B.A. from St. John’s College at Cambridge. When he was not in school, Greene journeyed to Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Poland, and Denmark. His education served him well, for it was from the early Greek romances and works of other writers that Greene borrowed elements of characterization, form, diction, and plot. Greene, however, achieved more in his works than only an elaboration of previous literary forms; he was innovative and creative. His works appealed to the imaginations of the Elizabethans.
From 1582 to 1592, Greene wrote constantly. His works were well received and widely read in England. His writings included pamphlets exposing London’s social ills, prose romances, and plays. His most notable drama, Friar Bacon and Friar Bongay , reflects a sixteenth century fascination with magic, along with an optimistic view of English life. Greene’s works are also concerned with the question of an individual’s role and identity within society and the capacity of human beings to satisfy their desires yet not exceed their human limits.
Biography
Robert Greene keeps the reader so far off-balance about the actual facts of his life that one cannot begin to write a biography of him without putting faith in statements which might otherwise be suspect. Most scholars, for example, accept that Greene was born in Norwich in 1558 and that his father was a saddler; the best evidence for this comes from Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance (1592), which mentions that its main character, Roberto, was born in Norwich. This detail sent scholars to city records, where they discovered a Robert Greene born to a saddler and his wife in 1558, a likely year. The pamphlet, however, is a bad source since it appeared after Greene’s death, and scholars label its attribution to Greene himself probably spurious.
It may be said with more certainty that Greene was educated at Cambridge (B.A., St. John’s, 1580; M.A., Clare, 1583) because Cambridge records support the “Master of Arts” appended to Greene’s name on his title pages. From 1588 onward Greene proclaimed a second master’s degree from Oxford, and the records also support this claim. Moreover, no one, including his enemy Gabriel Harvey, has ever denied his academic accomplishments. That Greene was in 1585 a “student of physic,” as he claimed in Planetomachia , has never been verified. Other speculations—that he was a rural minister and a fencing master, for example—are based solely on the presence of the common name Robert Greene on lists from history turned up by scholars.
History should probably accept Greene’s description of himself as a drinking partner of thieves and scoundrels, a denizen of low inns, and a spendthrift. His friend Thomas Nashe corroborates Greene’s words: “Hee made no account of winning credite by his workes . . . : his only care was to have a spel in his purse to conjure up a good cuppe of wine with at all times.” His self-cultivated reputation as a rakehell aside, there is no foundation for Harvey’s assertion that Greene had a whore as mistress (the sister of a known killer), with whom he had a son, Fortunatus, who died in infancy.
That he died in poverty in September, 1592, after a month-long illness is virtually certain. Certain also is the flurry of pamphlets attributed to him, about him, or including him as a character, which appeared in the half dozen years following his death. Of his dealings with patrons it is known that he termed himself the “adopted son” of one Thomas Burnaby, to whom Greene dedicated several works. How much support Burnaby gave is not known, but Greene’s epistles to his middle-class readers show clearly that he knew them to be his main source of income and prestige.
Analysis
Robert Greene’s writing should be understood as the work of a man trying always to put forward an image of both himself and his characters to his readers. That image, elucidated in his prefaces, was one of a socially conscious writer using his God-given talents for the good of his countrymen. Specifically, Greene wished his readers to become better citizens and more adept judges of language and personality through exposure to his loyal, learned, patriotic, and humble heroines and penitent heroes.
In the Christian universe of Greene’s romances, men and women suffer, and their communities suffer with them through perversion of virtue into greed, lust, arrogance, and self-pity. All such suffering, however, is seen by Greene as an opportunity for humility and a subsequent return to charity. The Greene romance plot usually moves through fragmentation of both spirit and society to unity and community. The harmonious monarchies which emerge are always based on mutual respect by all social classes; patriotism includes respect and charity toward foreigners, particularly the exiles and prodigals who move through all Greene stories. Rarely does an important character fail to follow the perversion-regeneration path, so that Greene’s stories are peopled by the falling and the rising, not by villains and heroes. Ironically, Greene’s best-known romance, Pandosto: The Triumph of Time , (best known because Shakespeare used it for the plot of The Winter’s Tale , pr. c. 1610-1611, pb. 1623), ends with the suicide of the title character; thus modern readers who know only this work have misjudged Greene’s muse.
Menaphon
No work better displays the usual Greene pattern than Menaphon , his popular attempt to write a brief, uncynical Arcadia (1590). In Greene’s romance, Arcadia’s King Democles, insecure and suspicious because of a Delphic oracle which seems to portend his ruin, discovers that his daughter Sephestia has married a low noble, Maximius, and borne him a son, Pleusidippus. The enraged Democles threatens Maximius’s murder and the young man flees at his wife’s urging. Soon she, too, escapes, but is shipwrecked with her infant along the Arcadian coast. Fearing discovery, she pretends to be a shepherdess, Samela, and soon is accepted by the pastoral Arcadians as a poor widow. Her new anonymity, however, makes her prey to the arrogant courtship of Menaphon, the king’s chief herdsman, who proceeds from love lyrics to bribes to threats of force in order to win her. Meanwhile, Pleusidippus grows up brilliant, but ungoverned. Then one day he is carried off by pirates to Thessaly, where he charms the royal court and is further indulged.
Years pass. Menaphon continues to ply his suit, although Samela has fallen in love with another shepherd, Melicertus, who shyly returns her interest. Melicertus, it is learned, is the disguised Maximius; but neither recognizes the other because both are convinced that his/her spouse is long dead—a symbol for Greene of how the fragmented spirit misperceives reality.
The scene shifts to Thessaly. Pleusidippus, now a prince, hears reports of a paragon of shepherdesses in Arcadia, and, inflamed with lust, he sails away to possess her. Back in Arcadia, King Democles, grown even more tyrannical, hears a similar report, and he, too, enters the country to claim the rustic beauty. Thus, father, son, and husband of Sephestia become rivals, and no man recognizes another because time has disguised them all. When they meet, harsh words grow to combat, and combat to warfare, with thousands of Arcadians falling before the army of their own king. Then, just as Democles is about to execute Samela and Melicertus, an old prophetess steps forth proclaiming that the king is about to murder his daughter. Suddenly, truth springs forth out of all the disguises and all realize how close to disaster their perversions and fears had brought them. Democles sees that their adventures have paralleled the oracle, and suddenly humble, he resigns his kingship to his regal grandson. Sephestia and Maximius return to honor. Menaphon, meanwhile, gives up his courtly wooing, returns to his sheep, and marries his rustic sweetheart.
While a plot summary demonstrates the typical movement of the Greene romance from chaos to harmony, distortion to clarity, Greene is more interested in the mental steps by which each character determines and justifies his or her actions. Greene’s characters come to be known through their soliloquies, which always strike one by their logical order, so that the reader often ignores how distorted the character’s perspective is until the decisions that arise lead to disaster. Because Greene so fully presents his characters’ motives and thought processes, he rarely creates a character with whom the reader cannot to some degree sympathize. In Menaphon , for example, the tyrant Democles seems, as a result, more pitiable than odious, even though Greene details his slaughters. It is this sympathy, this feeling which causes the reader to believe that, as fearful and selfish as these figures may be, they are capable of a charity and trust, that keeps the ending’s sudden harmony from seeming contrived.
A Notable Discovery of Cozenage
Greene set himself a more difficult task when he tried to show that the whores and thieves of his connycatching pamphlets were deserving of the sympathy of his bourgeois, puritanical readers. He increased the potential for his success by putting himself forward in the first pamphlet, A Notable Discovery of Cozenage , as an avowed foe of “those pernitious sleights that have brought many ignorant men to confusion.” Once having won his readers’ confidence that he was on their side, however, he began to discriminate gradually between the lesser evils of nipping purses and prostitution and the greater evils of judicial bribes and merchant fraud. As the connycatching series proceeded, Greene’s nips, foists, and whores become more lively personalities, often speaking directly to the reader not so much to defend their trades but to attack what could be called “white-collar” crime. In these monologues, the rogues come across as witty, practical, and satiric, while their victims appear to be greedy, fat upstarts trying to pass themselves off as gentlemen. Willing readers might find themselves identifying with the thief against the merchant, and that seems to be Greene’s purpose, although he continued throughout the six works to call himself the rogues’ foe.
A Disputation Between a Hee Conny-Catcher and a Shee Conny-Catcher
A Disputation Between a Hee Conny-Catcher and a Shee Conny-Catcher , the fifth pamphlet in the series, takes the reader most deeply into the underworld and into the minds of the rogues by making the reader an eavesdropper on an alehouse debate between “Laurence, a foyst, and Nan, a traffique.” Authenticity and intimacy are provided by the slangy, joking speech of the pair and by their reference by name to others of their professions. The subject of the dispute—that of which of them more endangers the commonwealth—seems set up by Greene to allow his reader to indulge their self-righteous anger at the evils of the criminal world; but not far into the dialogue Laurence and Nan take aim at their victims. Nan credits her success as a prostitute to the insatiable lust of her clients; this appetite, she continues, also supports the respectable commercial world:
the Hospitall would want patients, and Surgians much worke, the Apothecaries would haue surphaling water and Potato roots lye deade on theyr handes, the Paynters could not dispatche and make way theyr Vermiglion . . . , why Laurence, [the taverns] would be moord . . . if we of the Trade were not to supply [their] wants. . . .
She spits her choicest venom at the “good auncient Matron” who sets her “faire wench . . . her daughter . . . out to sale in her youth” to draw on “sundrie to bee suters.” To Nan and Laurence the underworld has no limits.
This blackening of all humanity by the connycatching pair recalls the similar process in Greene’s romances, whereby each character perverts love in some way and thus endangers society. The rising action of the romances, wherein souls and society are reformed, has its parallel in the sequel to Laurence and Nan’s dialogue, “The Conversion of an English Courtizan,” which makes up the second half of A Disputation Between a Hee Conny-Catcher and a Shee Conny-Catcher . Greene presents this as the true story of a country girl, made vain and greedy by her doting, ambitious bourgeois parents, who never learns humility or loyalty and thus takes to crime. Having gone from bad to worse, she eventually meets a young merchant who differs from all other Londoners she has met by neither buying her nor scorning her; this quiet fellow respects her, wins her confidence, promises his loyalty, and marries her. The community of the story is harmonized, at least for the time being.
“The Conversion of an English Courtizan”
Not until “The Conversion of an English Courtizan” has Greene suggested in the pamphlet series that his rogues have the potential for reform—in fact, he explicity denies it in the first pamphlet. As in the romances, Greene will not allow the rebuilding of his fictional society until all parties have acknowledged their share in the earlier destruction. Since the connycatching series begins as an indictment of one element of the city, Greene will not depict repentance by that element until the entire society has been implicated in the evil, as it is most vehemently in A Disputation Between a Hee Conny-Catcher and a Shee Conny-Catcher . In Greene’s Christian vision, repentance can be accepted only by a penitent, whose forgiving includes the desire to be forgiven. For Greene, “The Conversion of an English Courtizan” cannot succeed as a story unless the reader understands that the courtesan represents each segment of society, not merely the stereotyped criminal.
Bibliography
Alwes, Derek B. “‘He Who Cannot Dissemble Cannot Live’: Robert Greene’s Romances.” In Sons and Authors in Elizabethan England . Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004. Explores how Greene and two other Elizabethan writers created new forms of fiction writing. Focuses on Greene’s stories about “conny catching.”
Carroll, D. Allen. “The Player-Patron in Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit .” Studies in Philology 91 (Summer, 1994): 301-312. Discusses the character and identity of the anonymous actor who recruits Greene’s persona to be a playwright; suggests he may be a fictional character rather than based on William Shakespeare or someone else.
Crupi, Charles W. Robert Greene . Boston: Twayne, 1986. Crupi’s book addresses Greene’s life based on relevant biographical and historical research printed since 1960. Crupi includes two comprehensive chapters dealing with Greene’s prose works and plays. The book also contains extensive notes and references, a chronology, and a select bibliography of primary and secondary sources.
Davis, Walter R. Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction . Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969. Devotes one chapter to Greene’s works and the elements of Greek romance inherent in these works. Divides Greene’s career into four periods—the euphuistic mode; the short tales or novellas; the pastoral romances; and the pamphlets of repentance, roguery, and other nonfiction. These works are discussed in terms of plot and Greene’s development among genres.
Jordan, John Clark. Robert Greene . New York: Octagon Books, 1965. Jordan’s book is considered a main source for critics concerned with Greene’s work. He presents Greene as a man of letters, who was an expert at narrative. The text includes a discussion of Greene’s poetry, plays, and nondramatic work. A bibliography and appendixes are included. The appendixes contain a framework for Greene’s tales, misconceptions about Greene’s life and career, as well as accounts of early allusions to Greene.
Melnikoff, Kirk, and Edward Gieskes, eds. Writing Robert Greene: Essays on England’s First Notorious Professional Writer . Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2008. Although several of these essays focus on Greene’s plays, some of the others discuss his fiction writing and subjects that are applicable to all of his works.
Mentz, Steve. Romance for Sale in Early Modern England: The Rise of Prose Fiction . Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2006. Describes how the advent of print and the emerging market for books in early modern England created new forms of writing and new interest in reading. Discusses how Greene and other writers developed prose fiction romances in response to the changing literary culture.
Newcomb, Lori Humphrey. Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England . New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Newcomb’s examination of Elizabethan fiction includes a study of Greene’s Pandosto , describing the book’s role in the development of the novel and its readership.
Simpson, Richard, ed. The School of Shakespeare . Vol. 2. New York: J. W. Bouton, 1878. Simpson’s work is a nineteenth century account of Greene’s life and work. He explores the relationship between William Shakespeare and Greene as contemporaries and rivals. The volume also contains plot information and a discussion of themes in Greene’s fiction and plays.
Wilson, Katharine. Fictions of Authorship in Late Elizabethan Narratives: Euphues in Arcadia . New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Examines the work of Greene and the other Elizabethan era pamphleteers known as the University Wits, describing how they created a new vernacular literature. Includes discussions of Greene’s Pandostoand Menaphon .