1 Major recent reassessments include Derek Alwes, Sons and Authors in Elizabethan England (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2004); Steve Mentz, Romance for Sale in Early Modern England: The Rise of Prose Fiction (Aldershot: Ashgate 2006); Lori Humphrey Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Katharine Wilson, Fictions of Authorship in Late Elizabethan Narratives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006); and Kirk Melnikoff and Edward Gieskes, eds., Writing Robert Greene (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). The last includes an invaluable final chapter listing ‘Recent Studies in Robert Greene (1989–2006)’, which complements Kevin J. Donovan, ‘Recent Studies in Robert Greene (1968–88)’, English Literary Renaissance, 20.1 (1990): 163–75.

² For an account of the changes in Greene’s critical fortunes see Kirk Melnikoff and Edward Gieskes, ‘Introduction: Re-imagining Robert Greene’, in Melnikoff and Gieskes, eds., Writing Robert Greene, 1–24.

³ Brenda Cantar argues that it was largely rival pamphleteers who represented Greene as a hack; see the introduction to her edition of Menaphon (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1996), 20. On Harvey’s part in forging his reputation see Sandra Clark, The Elizabethan Pamphleteers (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1983), 47. Greene’s own part in forging his reputation is discussed in detail by Newcomb, Wilson, and Alwes.

⁴ Except where indicated, all quotations from Greene are from the first extant edition as given in STC.

⁵ For the authorship of the Groatsworth, see John Jowett, ‘Johannes Factotum: Henry Chettle and Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 87 (1993): 453–85.

⁶ See Steve Mentz, ‘Forming Greene: Theorizing the Early Modern Author in the Groatsworth of Wit’, in Melnikoff and Gieskes, eds., Writing Robert Greene, 115–31.

⁷ For an elegant discussion of his life see L. H. Newcombe, ‘Greene, Robert’, ODNB <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/11418?docPos=1> accessed 18 March 2013.

⁸ The fullest account of Greene’s afterlife is given in Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance.

⁹ The phrase comes from Constance Relihan’s Fashioning Authority: The Development of Elizabethan Novelistic Discourse (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1994).

¹⁰ See Walter R. Davis, Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 139. See also Mentz’s sevenfold division of his career in ‘Forming Greene’, 123–5.

¹¹ The account of the works of Painter, Fenton, Gascoigne, and Lyly that follows draws on my Elizabethan Fictions: Espionage, Counter-Espionage and the Duplicity of Fiction in Early Elizabethan Prose Narratives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).

¹² Another important story-collection from this point of view is George Pettie, A Petite Pallace of Pettie his Pleasure (1576), whose author claims to desire only women as readers.

¹³ For the date of Mamillia see Wilson, Fictions of Authorship, 75.

¹⁴ See Alwes, Sons and Authors, 112–26.

¹⁵ The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, 5 vols. (London: A. H. Bullen, 1904), 1.10.

¹⁶ Alwes, Sons and Authors, 112–26. On romances ostensibly addressed to women, but clearly directed at men, see also Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1994), 99, passim.

¹⁷ For the influence of ancient Greek romance on Greene see Wilson, Fictions of Authorship, 85–111 and 124; Davis, Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction, 138–88; and Arthur F. Kinney, Humanist Poetics (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 181–229.

¹⁸ Wilson, Fictions of Authorship, 89–91.

¹⁹ For the date of Pandosto see Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance, 55–6.

²⁰ Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, 4.1.9.

²¹ For the economics of Greene’s career, see Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance, 59–70.

²² See the modern edition ed. by Carmine G. Di Biase, Barnabe Riche Society (Ottawa: Dovehouse, 2003). Andrew Hadfield offers an excellent analysis of Gwydonius in Literature, Travel and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance, 1545–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 180–4.

²³ See Ros King, ed., The Works of Richard Edwards (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001).

²⁴ See my Elizabethan Fictions, chap. 6.

²⁵ All references to Pandosto are taken from J. H. P. Pafford, ed., The Winter’s Tale, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1963), Appendix 4.

²⁶ For ‘card’ as meaning part of a compass, see Helmut Bonheim, ‘Robert Greene’s Gwydonius. The Carde of Fancie’, Anglia, Zeitschrift für englische Philologie, 96 (1978): 45–64. For ‘card’ as map, see ‘Card’ n. 2 OED <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/27830?rskey=F0VKFT&result=2&isAdvanced=false#eid> accessed 18 March 2013. For the playing card sense, see John Lyly, Euphues, ed. Leah Scragg (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 88.

²⁷ See my ‘Robert Greene and the Uses of Time’, Writing Robert Greene, 157–88.

²⁸ The opening is based on Achilles Tatius’s Leucippe and Clitophon: see Wilson, Fictions of Authorship, 89.

²⁹ On Greene’s use of mottoes see Wilson, Fictions of Authorship, 166–7.

³⁰ On Greene’s dedications see Melnikoff and Gieskes, eds., Writing Robert Greene, ‘Introduction’, 9–10; and Derek Alwes, ‘Robert Greene’s Duelling Dedications’, English Literary Renaissance, 30.3 (2000), 373–95.

³¹ A more detailed account of Greene’s Vision in relation to time is given in my ‘Robert Greene and the Uses of Time’, Writing Robert Greene, 182–7.

³² Quoted from the 1590 edition, STC 12253.

³³ The fullest account of the Prodigal Son motif in the period is Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976).