Defer not with me to this last point of extremity, for little knowest thou how, in the end, thou shalt be visited.
Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of
Repentance (1592)
The shadows were now deepening in Gloriana’s England although the climate of the times had been changing since the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, followed by the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. For the threat from Spain did not end with the vanquishing of the Armada. From then until his death two years later, Sir Francis Walsingham’s intelligencers were continually telling him of negotiations going on between factions in Ireland and the Spanish government to land a Spanish force there, a matter of great concern and one proved all too real during the later 1590s when two attempts were made to do just that. No longer were Catholics allowed to get on with their lives so long as they put in an appearance at church or paid their fines for not doing so and anti-Catholicism in general was on the rise. Nor did the Queen’s refusal to name King James VI of Scotland as her heir help, and throughout the decade of the 1590s and up until her death in 1603 there were undercover communications with Edinburgh both on a semiofficial basis and by those who sought to ingratiate themselves with the man who would one day be their King. To add to the general feeling of unease the plague, Nashe’s ‘King Pest’, returned in 1592; the epidemic was to last for well over a year but when the theatres were open audiences flocked in to escape the reality of what was going on around them.
During the early 1590s they had a rich field of drama from which to choose. The dating of plays has academics at each others’ throats not least because the date on which a play was registered at Stationer’s Hall is no real guide, as often the registration did not take place until several years after its first performance even though it was one of the few ways a writer could attempt to protect his work. While there has never been copyright on ideas, unscrupulous dramatists were more than capable of sitting in on a public performance and making notes on the text. But in view of what was to come we know for certain that all Marlowe’s plays had been written by May 1593 even if, apart from the two parts of Tamburlaine, there is disagreement as to the order in which this happened. Several sources however do suggest that his next play was The Jew of Malta, followed by Edward II, then A Massacre at Paris (of which only fragments remain) and finally Dr. Faustus.
The Jew of Malta proved extremely popular even if it was not as exciting as Tamburlaine with its great processions, magnificent court scenes and battles, not to mention the pampered jades of Asia. However the average Elizabethan was deeply suspicious of Jews, associating them with money-lending and worse, and considering them to be devious, cunning and untrustworthy. Therefore Barabas, the Jew of Malta, was bound to be a scoundrel. But Marlowe’s play is not as simple as that. First he brings on to the stage an actor playing the part of a real historical person, Niccolo Machiavelli, considered wrongly by those who had heard of him as the epitome of evil rather than as the devious political pragmatist he actually was. But few in the audiences or beyond were likely to have read The Prince and both Barabas, and Shakespeare’s Richard III, have been described ever since as ‘machiavellian’ villains.
We first meet Barabas checking out his great wealth in his counting house congratulating himself on the amount he has amassed. Almost immediately, however, he is attacked by Christian soldiers who seize his wealth and make off with it simply because he is a Jew. Not surprisingly he is determined to be revenged and we follow his progress to this end, and his playing off of Christians against Muslims, until he meets his death by being boiled in a cauldron. This was obviously the high spot of the afternoon’s entertainment and ‘a Cauldron for the Jew’ appears prominently on one of Henslowe’s lists of current props. There is a good deal of black humour in the play, not least the competitive exchange between Barabas and the Turk, Ithamore, as to who has carried out the most evil deeds and in which Barabas brags that he has sometimes ‘gone about and poisoned wells’, the device suggested to students at Douai. The Jew might be the obvious villain and the Christians supposedly the ‘heroes’, cheering to the echo as he boils away in his cauldron – but Marlowe, in a final twist, reveals that the only honourable men in the play are the Muslims, betrayed then murdered by those very Christians to whom they have offered the hand of friendship.
But it was Edward II that would raise the danger stakes for Marlowe. The source for his subject was Holinshed’s Chronicles, his perspective on it his own. Plays about kings were now extremely popular but Edward II was quite unlike any previous play about a king or, for a very long time, any succeeding one, dealing as it does with the obsessive love of the King for two male favourites, especially the first, Piers Gaveston. Of recent years it has been generally accepted that Edward was homosexual (though it would seem from two new biographies that this is now open to question) but the extravagant affection and language used between Edward and Gaveston in Marlowe’s play leaves one in little doubt as to what he thought, and the relationship between them is entirely believable. Marlowe’s real difficulty is with Queen Isabella. He was simply unable to create credible female characters and she is no exception. In the first part of the play she is one of his usual lifeless women. In the second, by which time she has taken Mortimer as a lover and both are set to rebel against the King, she has turned without explanation into a two-dimensional harpy. Isabella is a thankless part for an actress. At the end of the play Edward meets his death in the dungeons of Berkeley Castle in the manner popularly accepted, and no doubt considered apposite by the average playgoer of the day – at the end of a red hot poker.
Although Alleyn doubtless gave a splendid performance in the title role, it never achieved the popularity of either Tamburlaine, The Jew or Dr. Faustus. Even today it remains a difficult role for an actor, who is faced with having to present Edward as deeply unsympathetic in the first half of the play, yet somehow has to gain our sympathy in the second, again without showing how he progresses from one to the other. Also, even today, some audiences seem to find it hard to take the overt exchanges of passion between Edward and Gaveston.
Dr. Faustus, however, was a different matter altogether. The legend of Faust was an old one but a new translation of The Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Dr. Faustus was published in 1592 and it immediately grabbed Marlowe’s imagination. Marlowe, amoral, intellectually brilliant, fascinated by the ‘new learning’, driven by demons of his own and loving to shock, had found the perfect theme. The boast he gives to Faustus that ‘this word damnation terrifies not me’ might have applied just as well to the character’s creator. The concept that man will do literally anything, including selling his own soul for power and forbidden knowledge, remains as potent as ever even in an age when there is no longer any widespread belief in Heaven and Hell. People who have never seen or read the play still know the meaning of the term ‘Faustian bargain’.
Audiences were thrilled to the core. Here was the overreacher to end them all, a man prepared to sell his soul to Satan through his messenger, Mephistopheles, and sign the bargain in his own blood. Already they knew how it would end, of course – the excitement was in the anticipation. ‘How comes it then that thou art out of hell?’, enquires Faustus, to which his tempter responds, ‘Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it’. It was obvious where Faustus was bound. So as well as following Faustus’s progress to damnation and seeing him try out his supernatural powers, not least ordering up Helen of Troy as a tasty dish, the drama enabled the theatre to show off its most spectacular special effects. Turning to Henslowe once again, we know that the Rose Theatre boasted a huge ‘Hell Mouth’, and that at the end of the play Faustus was dragged down to Hell by a host of howling demons, most likely in a cloud of red smoke and to the rattle of thunder sheets.
Because of its subject matter, not to mention what soon befell its author, Dr. Faustus acquired something of the reputation that still attaches to Macbeth today. So awful was the scale of Faustus’s sin that we are told that when Alleyn played the role he always wore a cross around his neck and a surplice under his costume, just in case. There are also tales of performances during which audiences were convinced that they had seen ‘the visible appearance of the Devil on the stage’. A widely recorded account from Exeter states that:
certain players acting upon the stage the tragical story of Dr. Faustus the Conjuror, as a certain number of devils kept everyone his circle there, and as Faustus was busy in his magical invocations, on a sudden they were all dashed, everyone harkening the other in the ear, for they were all persuaded that there was one devil too many among them. And so after a little pause desired the people to pardon them, they could go no further in this matter: the people also understanding the thing as it was, every man hastened to be first out of the doors. The players, as I heard it, contrary to their custom of spending the night in reading and in prayer, got them out of town the next morning.1
Meanwhile Shakespeare was rapidly becoming established as a popular dramatist. Here too there is tremendous disagreement among the experts as to what was written when but almost certainly Titus Andronicus, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew and Richard III were written and performed between the years 1589 and 1594. Indeed opinion is divided into two camps over Comedy of Errors, one putting its first performance some time in 1589, the other in 1594. There is no doubt that the play was in Burbage’s repertoire by 1594 because of a somewhat unfortunate incident or series of incidents leading to the arrest of the cast. Burbage and his actors had been hired to provide an entertainment for the law students at the Inns of Court. There are no details as to what actually took place after the performance, only that it resulted in a court case ‘due to the great disorders and abuses done and committed during the evening by a company of base common fellows under the leadership of a sorcerer or conjuror’.2
The plot, taken from the Roman author Plautus, concerns two sets of twins, each pair consisting of a master and his servant, who were parted shortly after their births. The master and servant of one pair find themselves in Ephesus where their counterparts have been living since they were children, with genuinely funny and confusing results. Adriana, the wife of the Ephesus twin, having taken the ‘wrong’ twin back home assuming it is her husband (and possibly spending the afternoon in bed with him) then finds his behaviour so inexplicable that she decides he must be mad and sends for a ‘conjuror’ to cast out his devils. Presumably it was the actor playing this part who was accused of causing mayhem. Whoever he was, he defended himself and his fellow-actors so well, accusing the attorney and solicitor who brought them to court of ‘knavery and juggling’ in presenting their case, that it was promptly dismissed.3
Commenting on the incident, one Henry Helmus noted that as an evening out the entertainment ‘was not thought to offer much of account, save Dancing and Revelling with Gentlewomen and after such Sports a Comedy of Errors, like to Plautus his Menechmus, was played by the Players. So that the night was begun, and continued to the end, in nothing but confusion and errors, whereupon it was ever afterwards known as the Night of Errors.’ He then adds: ‘Gray’s Inn Hall, Innocents Day, December 28 1594. There was such a row and such crowding by gentlewomen and others on the stage, that the Temple visitors to Gray’s Inn went away disgusted. And so the Gray’s Inn Men had only Dancing and Shakespeare’s Play.’
The Shrew needs little or no explanation and was likely based on an older, existing drama on the same subject; Titus Andronicus is a blood-stained tale of murder and rape which culminates with children being eaten in a pie, while Two Gentlemen is a gentle comedy which introduces one of Shakespeare’s favourite themes where a boy player, dressed as a girl, disguises him/herself as a boy. As for Richard III, after Spanish Tragedy, it remained the most popular play in repertoire through until the end of the decade and no fewer than six editions of it were published in Shakespeare’s lifetime. It offered the audience everything: a supposedly machiavellian villain who takes the audience into his confidence from the start, love (or lust) with the widow across the coffin of her husband whom he has only recently killed, executions and murders galore, hauntings by ghosts and an all-out battle scene at the end in which the protagonist almost redeems himself by his outstanding courage. For Elizabethans it was important to have ‘a good death’.
This play too acquired a mythology of its own, including the famous tale which appears in the Diary of John Manningham, a student at the Middle Temple, in the year 1602:
Upon a time when Burbage played Richard III there was a female citizen grew so far in liking with him, that before she went from the play she appointed him to come that night unto her by the name Richard III. Shakespeare, overhearing their conclusion, went before, was entertained, and at his game ere Burbage came. The message being brought that Richard III was at the door, Shakespeare caused the return to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard III.4
True or not it gives a good idea of what actors and dramatists were up to when the opportunity arose.
Another reason for the change in the climate of the times, which bred general suspicion and unease, was the death of Sir Francis Walsingham. His demise resulted in a major political vacancy, that of Secretary of State to the Privy Council, bringing with it the role of spymaster. It was a position which had been coveted by Lord Burleigh’s son, Sir Robert Cecil, for many years, and his father, as Elizabeth’s oldest and most trusted minister, did all he could to ensure his son achieved it, which he did in all but name. However, for whatever reason Elizabeth showed little enthusiasm for making his position official with the result that Cecil was the ‘acting’ Secretary of State (unpaid) for the next seven years. No doubt the Queen saw this as a useful economy.
It was during the winter of 1591/2 that the first signs of plague began to appear. There was scarcely a year without a handful of cases, but this was to prove an epidemic of appalling proportions, killing 10,675 people before it finally ran its course. Almost at once the government ordered the closure of theatres and other public places where people gathered, as a result of which the Rose Theatre was shut from February until the following Christmas; this forced the players, faced with the prospect of having no income at all, to go on the road. Alleyn headed a company made up of actors from several London companies which toured under the name of Lord Strange’s Men. In spite of it being such a gloomy spring, Alleyn had married Henslowe’s stepdaughter, Joan Woodward, thus bringing about, as one commentator has it, ‘Henslow-Alleyn theatrical enterprises’. While it might have been very useful for Alleyn to stitch himself into the Henslowe family, his letters to Joan when out on tour also show a true and genuine affection for her.
However neither the onset of the plague nor his monarch’s obvious lack of enthusiasm in any way diminished Sir Robert Cecil’s zeal for the job in hand, whether or not his position had been officially confirmed. While Walsingham was a clever politician who could when necessary be quite ruthless, Cecil was an even less sympathetic character. Clever, cold, calculating and in both senses of the word truly Machiavellian, he saw the internal security of the country as his top priority. His intelligencers were everywhere. Jesuit priests were hunted down with ruthless efficiency and when found were tortured before being hanged, drawn and quartered. Those whose loyalty was only mildly questionable, or who were thought to be making overtures to King James in Edinburgh as they looked to their future, were put under the sixteenth-century equivalent of surveillance. The atmosphere became increasingly one of unease and suspicion bordering on paranoia.
It is therefore not surprising that Marlowe’s increasingly reckless behaviour was beginning to draw the attention of the authorities. His first real clash with the law had occurred as far back as 1589 and it was by no means all his fault. The report of the subsequent inquest held in September 1589 on one William Bradley, ‘lying dead and slain of a wound, six inches in depth and one inch in breadth, in the right side of his chest’, records the results of a fatal sword fight.5 Bradley, a quarrelsome young man prone to easy violence, was the son of an innkeeper in Gray’s Inn Lane and had been in a long-running quarrel with Marlowe’s friend and fellow university wit, Thomas Watson. Marlowe had probably first met Watson through Thomas Walsingham, for Watson had been in Paris in 1581 when Walsingham’s uncle, Sir Francis, was spending some time there. Apparently Sir Francis admired Watson’s poetry and his ‘tunes’, or madrigals, and encouraged him to have his work published, which he did to considerable acclaim. Music remained a great love and as well as the poets and dramatists, he numbered composers like William Byrd among his friends. His background was, however, an odd one for while he appears to have studied Law in Italy, he is also said to have spent time in the English College at Douai, although it has never been suggested that he, like Marlowe, was acting as an intelligencer.
The original quarrel between Bradley and Watson had arisen over a debt of £14 owed by Bradley to another innkeeper, John Alleyn, brother of the famous actor. Bradley ignored all John Alleyn’s attempts to get him to repay his debt, even when Alleyn threatened him with court action to be brought through his lawyer, Hugh Swift. Bradley’s reaction was akin to something out of the long-running soap opera, EastEnders: he threatened to send a heavy mob round to Swift to see to him if he dared take the matter to court. Swift appealed to the Queen’s Bench for ‘securities of the peace’, which was granted and the matter continued to rumble on. Swift’s brother-in-law was no other than Thomas Watson and in spite of their appeal to the Bench being granted, Bradley’s threats had reached the point where Watson and John Alleyn decided to take the matter into their own hands and sort Bradley out themselves, resulting in Bradley in turn appealing to the Bench for securities of the peace. So, for a while, there was stalemate until Bradley, who had somehow decided that all his troubles were down to Watson in the first place, buckled on his rapier and dagger and set off to settle the matter once and for all.
He made his way to Norton Folgate where both Watson and Marlowe lodged, and lurked around waiting for his quarry. But as time passed and there was no sign of Watson, Bradley went looking for him in nearby Hog Lane. So it was that by fatal chance he came across Marlowe, whom he knew to be Watson’s friend and whom he then publicly and loudly insulted. What he said is not recorded – though it might be imagined since Marlowe made no secret of his proclivities – but the result was that Marlowe promptly drew his sword and challenged him to fight; an exciting piece of entertainment for passers-by who no doubt stood cheering them on. It is clear that Marlowe, no mean fighter, would have taken the engagement to its ultimate conclusion but at that point Watson himself turned up, whereupon Bradley called out ‘art thou now come, then I will have a bout with thee’ and turned his attention to his real enemy, leaving Marlowe with no option but to step aside.
The subsequent fight moved up and down Hog Lane, the combatants using both rapier and dagger, until Bradley drove Watson, now bleeding from a wound, to a ditch at the north end where, with nowhere else to run, he turned and thrust his rapier home, running Bradley badly through. He died almost at once. By this time someone had gone to fetch the Constable who immediately took Watson and Marlowe before the local Justice of the Peace, Sir Owen Hopton, who drew up a warrant ‘on suspicion of murder’ and had them both taken to Newgate prison.
As was the custom, the inquest on Bradley was held the next day before the Middlesex coroner, Ian Chalkhill. The twelve-man jury, after hearing all the evidence, concluded that Watson slew Bradley in self-defence and ‘not by felony’. That being the case Watson and Marlowe must have expected to be set free almost immediately but they remained in Newgate even though Marlowe had not actually struck the fatal blow. He finally managed to get himself out on bail a couple of weeks later bound over to attend the next Sessions on 3 December, but poor Watson languished in Newgate for no good reason until 12 February 1590, by which time he was a sick man as his wound had become infected.
There is a strong possibility that the intelligencer, Robert Poley, witnessed the fight since he lived nearby at the time and it has been said that Shakespeare who, if he did not actually see it, most certainly would have heard about it, used the incident of a three-cornered sword-fight in Romeo and Juliet. It is also suggested that the character of Mercutio was based on Marlowe.
Perhaps now is the time to introduce another character to the London scene, one Dr Gabriel Harvey, the eldest son of a wealthy Essex rope-maker, described by Nashe as ‘the Harveys of Hemp Hall’.6 After graduating at Christ’s College, he had become first a Fellow of Pembroke Hall, then a Trinity Fellow where he studied Civil Law. He was considered an excellent scholar destined for greatness; he had a powerful patron, the Earl of Leicester, while his friends included Spenser and Sidney. But that was as good as it was going to get for so certain was he that he was indeed destined for greatness, he became notorious for his pomposity, grandiose behaviour and overwhelming conceit. In fact he appears to have been a gentleman version of Shakespeare’s Malvolio who also expected greatness to be ‘thrust upon’ him.
He had no time whatsoever for the University Wits and wrote scathingly even of the respectable John Lyly, whom he saw as ‘an odd, light-headed fellow . . . a professed jester, a Hick-scorner, a scoff-master, a playmonger, an Interluder; once the foil of Oxford, now the stale of London, and ever the Apesclogg of the press’. Needless to say the objects of his dislike paid him back in kind. Nashe describes how he went abroad of an evening ‘holding his gown up to his middle, that the wenches may see what a fine leg and a dainty foot he hath’, a ‘mere lute-pin put in a suit of apparel’. But Harvey too would have a role to play before the end of 1593.
On 9 May Marlowe was once again in trouble with the law. He had been drinking heavily, nothing unusual by then. Nor was there anything unexpected about the effect it had on him and his subsequent behaviour after several hours on the wine or sack. Roaring back towards his lodgings, he (literally) ran into Allen Nicholls, constable of Shoreditch, who was walking the other way with his assistant constable, Nicholas Helliot. What happened next depends on who tells the story – whether Marlowe merely behaved aggressively and failed to apologise or actually took a swing at Nicholls – but either way he ended up in court brought before no other justice than that very same Sir Owen Hopton who had presided over his previous court appearance after Bradley’s death.7
Obviously this was nothing like so serious a charge but even famous poets and dramatists cannot be allowed to get away with insulting the authorities. He was fined the sum of £20, no small amount in 1592, and released:
Upon Condition that he will personally appear at the next general Session of the peace held in and for the aforesaid county [Middlesex]: and meanwhile will keep the peace towards the whole people of the said lady Queen Elizabeth and especially towards Allen Nicholls, Constable of Hollowwell street in the aforesaid county, and Nicholas Helliot, underconstable of the same; Which sum aforesaid he permits to be raised for the use of the said lady Queen in the form of a Recognizance from his goods, chattels, land and tenements, if he should fail in his promise.
In other words Marlowe had been bound over to keep the peace. There is no doubt that he often caused offence, indeed almost took pride in it. In so many ways he is a very modern figure, the boy from the sticks, born into a humble background who, through his own undoubted talent, soars to the top of his profession, achieves fame and adulation, becomes overarrogant, drinks far too much and heads toward disaster.
The number of plague victims was growing inexorably. Alleyn, out on tour and increasingly worried, wrote to Joan, his ‘Mouse’:
I commend me heartily to you, and to my father and my mother and my sister, Bess, hoping in God though the sickness be round about you, yet by his mercy it may escape your house, which by the grace of God it shall. Therefore use this course: keep your house fair and clean, which I know you will, and every evening throw water before your door and in your back side, and have in your windows good store of rue and herb of grace, and with all the grace of God, which must be obtained by prayers and so doing, no doubt but that the Lord will mercifully defend you.8
Henslowe replied on Joan’s behalf, possibly because she was illiterate, saying that she prayed day and night for his good health and ‘hoping in the Lord Jesus that we shall have again a merry meeting; for I have been flyted with fear of sickness, but thanks be unto God we are all at this time in good health in our house. But all round about us it hath been almost in every house, and whole households are dead. . . . There hath died this last week 1,603 . . . which has been the greatest that came yet.’ Among them was the entire family of one of his actors, Robert Browne. ‘Robert Browne’s wife in Shoreditch and all her children and household be dead, and her doors shut up.’
Many people, not least most of the physicians, fled London for the safety of the country – a point made somewhat acidly in his diary by Dr Forman. He had contracted the plague himself in April and ‘cured’ himself of it. In fairness, once he had recovered, he worked tirelessly among the sick going into houses where no other doctor would venture, to do what he could for the victims.9 As is always the case there were those too who saw it as a way of making a quick guinea. One such was Simon Kellaway who published a Defensative Against the Plague, which lists a number of supposed prophylactics. Customers buying his pamphlet to find out how they might save their lives were informed that the most effective method was ‘fugi locis’. Those unable to read Latin had to have it translated only to discover they had paid good money to be told to ‘flee the place’.
Robert Greene, meanwhile, had parted from Emma Ball and was now living as indigent as ever in lodgings with a cobbler and his wife. He had walked out on Emma when she was pregnant, leaving her to give birth to a sickly baby which she was now struggling to rear and to whom she had given the unsuitable name of Fortunatus. She no longer had any support from her brother either, for Cutting Ball Jack had finally paid the price for his activities – on the scaffold at Tyburn, an execution which had drawn large crowds.
In spite of having no money, Greene kept up his dissolute lifestyle, causing Gabriel Harvey to deliver one of his all-too-frequent homilies:
Who in London has not heard of his dissolute and licentious living; his fond disguising of a Master of Arts with ruffianly hair, unseemly apparel, and more unseemly company; his vainglorious and Thrasonical bragging; his piperly extemporising and Tarletonising; his apish counterfeiting of every ridiculous and absurd toy; his villainous cogging and foisting; his monstrous swearing and horrible forswearing; his impious profaning of sacred texts; his other riotous and outrageous surfeitings; his continual shifting of lodgings; his plausible mustering, and banqueting of roisterly acquaintance at his first coming; his beggardly departure in every hostess’s debt; his infamous resorting to the Bankside, Shoreditch, Southwark and other filthy haunts; his obscure lurking in the basest corners; his pawning of his sword, cloak and what not, when money came short; his impudent pamphleteering, fantastical interluding and desperate libelling; when other cozening shifts failed; his employing Ball (known as Cutting Ball), ’til he was intercepted at Tyburn, to lend a crew of his trustiest companions to guard him in danger of arrest; his keeping of the aforesaid Ball’s sister, a sorry ragged quean, of whom he has had a base born son, Infortunatus Greene; his forsaking of his own wife, too honest for such a husband. Particulars are infinite: his condemning of his superiors, deriding of others, and defying all good order?10
Needless to say Greene responded in kind, insulting Harvey’s father as a mere ‘halter-maker’, following this up with scandalous gossip about his brothers, alleging that the eldest, although he was a parson, chased after his parishioners’ wives, that the second was a fool who dabbled in astrology, while the third, supposedly given to academic study, had recently been ‘clapped in the Fleet Prison’. Yet most of those who knew Greene had a soft spot for him, however appalling his behaviour, among them Henry Chettle who published the works of a number of dramatists including those of Greene. He described the poet/playwright at this time as ‘a man of indifferent years’ (actually he was thirty-five), ‘of face amiable, of body well proportioned, his attire after the habit of a gentleman, only his hair is somewhat long’.
But throughout that plague-ridden summer, Greene was becoming increasingly ill due, most likely, to years of heavy drinking added to past venereal infections, and by the end of it he was no longer writing plays or ‘Interludes’. By mid-August it was clear that he was dying, hounded to the end by his creditors and pursued by Harvey who was threatening to sue him for defamation of character. As death drew ever nearer, Greene became terrified of what was to come and, fearful of damnation, produced two pamphlets warning others of his fate, his Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance and The Repentance of Robert Greene in which he turned his venom on his friends and the players and writers among whom he had lived and worked for so many years.
His view of Shakespeare is well known:
for unto none of you, like me, sought these burrs (actors) to cleave; those puppets, I mean, that spake from our mouths, those antics garnished in our colours. Is it not strange that I, to whom they have all been beholding, shall – were that ye were in that case as I am now – be both at once of them forsaken? Yea, trust them not; for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his ‘Tiger’s heart wrapped in a Player’s hide’, supposes he is well able to bombast out blank verse as the best of you, and being an absolute Johannes Factotum is, in his own conceit, the only Shake-Scene in the country.
The lad from Warwickshire had never been truly accepted by the University Wits.
In fact by this time Shakespeare must already have become a highly respected dramatist, for the printer, Henry Chettle, who had published Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, wrote later that two of those mentioned in it had taken offence:
About three months since died M. Robert Greene, leaving many papers in sundry booksellers’ hands, among them his Groatsworth of Wit, in which a letter, written to diverse playmakers is offensively by one or two of them taken; and because on the dead they cannot be avenged, they wilfully forge in their conceits a living author; and after tossing it to and fro, no remedy but it must light on me. How I have all the time of my conversing in printing scholars, it hath been very well known; and how on that I dealt, I can sufficiently prove. With neither of them that take offence was I acquainted, and with one of them I care not if I never be. The other, whom at that time I did not so much spare as since I wish I had, for that, as I have moderated in the heat of living writers, and might have used my own discretion – especially in such a case, the author being dead – that I am not as sorry as if the original fault had been my fault, because myself have seen his demeanour no less civil, than he excellent in the qualities he professes; – besides, divers of worship have reported his uprightness and his facetious grace in writing, that approves his art.11
Which, all in all, is quite a testimonial. For Marlowe, so long his rival in the theatre and close companion in drink, roistering and the enjoyment of the low life, there is now only condemnation, especially of his ‘unnatural vice’. His final warning to his old friend echoes down the centuries with a prescient and chilling resonance: ‘I know the least of my demerits merit this miserable death but wilful striving against known truth exceedeth all the terrors of my soul. Defer not with me till this last point of extremity, for little knowest thou how, in the end, thou shalt be visited.’
Marlowe was to suffer a double blow as Tom Watson died at about the same time as Greene, probably of the plague. Watson was one of his greatest and most loyal friends. There is no date recorded for his death but given the scale of the epidemic that is hardly surprising, for Thomas Dekker records how plague victims of all degrees and ages were tumbled anonymously into the plague pits at dead of night, regardless of rank, age or sex.
Greene staged his own deathbed as theatrically as he had everything else in his short life, complaining loudly to those gathered around him that he was dying only as a result of eating too many pickled herrings washed down with Rhenish wine. To the end he behaved particularly unkindly to Emma Ball who came to see him, bringing the baby with her, to beg him to recognise little Fortunatus as his son but he refused to do so, sending her away without a kind word. Finally, aware that time was running out, he sent for paper and ink and wrote to his long-estranged wife, ‘from whose sight and company I have refrained these six years: I ask God and thee forgiveness for so greatly wronging thee, of whom I seldom or never thought until now. Pardon me, I pray you, wheresoever thou art, and God forgive me all my other offences.’ He then added: ‘Sweet Wife, as ever there was goodwill or friendship between thee and me, see this bearer (my Host) satisfied of his debt. I owe him ten pounds and but for him, I had perished in the streets. Forget and forgive my wrongs done to thee, and Almighty God have mercy on my soul. Farewell till we meet again in heaven, for on earth thou shall never see me more. This second of September 1592. Written by thy dying husband, Robin Greene.’ He died the next day.
At the first whiff that the illness was fatal, Gabriel Harvey was knocking on the doors of Greene’s neighbours eager to learn all the gory details of his last days. Finally, hearing that ‘Greene had played his last part and gone to Tarlton’, he went directly to Greene’s landlady, who met him ‘with tears in her eyes and sighs from a deeper fountain (for she loved him dearly) and told me of his lamentable begging of a penny-pot of Malmsey . . .’. He then added, nastily and most likely untruthfully, that Greene’s only deathbed visitors had been two women, ‘Emma Ball, sister to the rogue, Cutting Ball lately hanged at Tyburn, demanding a name for her bastard, and a woman associate’.
However, in spite of Harvey’s bitching, tradition has it that Greene was buried in style, accompanied to his grave by his fellow writers, his corpse strewn by his landlady with garlands of bay as befitted a poet. The anonymous R.B. in Greene’s Funerals, published in 1594 writes:
Greene is the pleasing object of an eye:
Greene pleased the eyes of all that looked on him.
Greene is the ground of every painter’s dye:
Greene gave ground to all that wrote upon him,
Nay more, the men that so eclipsed his fame
Purloin his plumes: can they deny the same?