Tag: groatsworth

Greene Was Dying in Poverty

Context matters. Careful scholars, rather than unquestioningly adopting ‘facts’ established by men in powdered wigs, should consider the exact context in which Robert Greene wrote Groatsworth in 1592.

THE THEATRE SCENE IN 1592

We have no evidence of William Shakespeare’s involvement in the London theatre scene at this time (the first evidence is dated two years later).  He was not, like Edward Alleyn, a leading tragedian of the scene-shaking variety. If he was acting before 1594, it must have been in very minor roles, since there are no reports of him. Nor is there any evidence he was known, even among playwrights, as a writer of plays. Two plays now thought to be his (the fore-runners of Henry VI Parts 1 and 3) were first mentioned in 1592, but as we’ve seen, their authorship has been disputed by orthodox scholars.  In 1594, two years after Groatsworth, the first plays of the Shakespeare canon were published, but not with his name on.

The earliest evidence of William Shakespeare’s involvement in theatre: a payment from December 1594 to shareholders of the Lord Chamberlain’s men.

No-one had mentioned Shakespeare before Robert Greene, and let’s not forget that Greene doesn’t mention Shakespeare either.  This is a possible allusion, not a factual reference. In the rest of Groatsworth, Green’s complaint against a certain actor (The Player) seems to be directed at Edward Alleyn.  In his earlier work Francesco’s Fortunes his complaint against actors is also directed at Alleyn, and compares him to the crow beautified with other’s feathers.  Is it really likely that the complaint against an actor comparing him to that same crow in the Groatsworth letter is about anyone other than Alleyn?

GREENE’S CIRCUMSTANCES IN 1592

Greene has no documented link to Shakespeare, but has a documented relationship with Alleyn.  When he wrote Groatsworth, he knew he was dying, and dying in poverty.  By contrast, Edward Alleyn was wealthy and successful, thanks to the wit and words of Greene and his fellow playwrights.  The orthodox reading is that Greene, with his dying words, takes a jealous swipe at an up-and-coming playwright no-one has heard of, but this would hardly be a dying man’s concern.

By Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. http://www.cngcoins.com, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4053776His chief concern, which he could hardly make more obvious, is the disparity of wealth between successful actors (‘those puppets that spake from our mouths’) and the poverty-stricken gentleman scholars (chiefly himself) who ‘spend their wits making plays’, supplying the actors with the source of their riches and fame.  From its title (A Groatsworth of Wit, Bought With A Million of Repentance), through its main text, to its accompanying letters, the focus of Groatsworth is on money, and specifically on the comparatively low monetary value placed on the ‘wit’ of Greene and his fellow writers, despite the fact that it provides actors with their entire living.[1]

The fact that the most successful of these actors has begun to believe he can do without them, plagiarising ‘the best of [them]’ with a blank verse play of his own, is little more than an irritated footnote in Greene’s furious diatribe against injustice.

CONTINUE>>>

[1] The ‘groat’ of the title was a small coin worth four pence.


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Posted on by Dr Barber

Tiger’s Heart Wrapped in a Player’s Hide

So Robert Greene (who can be safely identified as the author of Groatsworth) had an existing beef with Edward Alleyn, had called him a Crow beautified with other’s feathers before, and through details in the main part of Groatsworth clearly identifies Alleyn (not least through the ownership of a windmill) as the wealthy Player who promised him riches but is now allowing him to die in poverty.  There are grammatical, typographical and etymological reasons why his ‘Shake-scene‘ means ‘actor’ not ‘Shakespeare’.

But what of the parodied line from the play that would later become the third part of Henry VI, originally referring to a ‘tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide’?  Surely quoting a Shakespeare play means his finger is pointed at Shakespeare?

Associations

It’s time for a short quiz.   With whom do you associate the following lines?

  1. ‘I coulda been a contender.’
  2. ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.’
  3. ‘Go ahead, make my day.’
  4. ‘Here’s looking at you, kid.’
  5. ‘I’ll be back.’

Arnie I'll be back memeMost people would answer Marlon Brando, Clark Gable, Clint Eastwood, Humphrey Bogart and Arnold Schwarzenegger.  We recall the actors who spoke the lines, not the writers who wrote them. Unless you’re a screenwriter yourself — and even if you are — it’s most unlikely that you thought of

  1. Budd Schulberg and Malcolm Johnson
  2. Sidney Howard
  3. Joseph Stinson
  4. Julius and Philip Epstein with Howard Koch
  5. James Cameron and Gale Ann Hurd.

Likewise, most of Greene’s readership, reading the line ‘tiger’s heart wrapped in a Player’s hide’, would think of the actor who played Richard Duke of York, not the writer, whose name in any case they were unlikely to know.

edward alleyn tiger's heartShakespeare was not publicly known as the author of this play for another 27 years.  Indeed, we have no evidence he was known as the author of any play (or poem) when Groatsworth was written; ‘William Shakespeare’ would not appear on the title page of a play for another six years.  The parody of the line from The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York turns out to be yet another piece of evidence pointing towards Edward Alleyn.  The True Tragedy at this time was being performed by Lord Strange’s Men (the company for whom Greene had been writing).  Edward Alleyn, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, was established with Lord Strange’s Men by 1592.[1] As the company’s leading actor, Alleyn was the man most likely to have taken the title role and spoken these words.  Though some have argued that he wouldn’t have played York, because he is killed in Act I, the part is clearly written so as to allow it to be doubled with the part of Clarence.

Whose words?

You might argue that Greene’s letter, even though it was published at his request, wasn’t addressed to the general populace. It was addressed to three playwrights who very likely would know who wrote the line ‘Tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide’.  But who was that, exactly?   The early versions of the plays that eventually became Henry VI are widely acknowledged to be co-authored, and are not universally acknowledged, even by orthodox scholars, to be by Shakespeare.

In fact Tom Merriam, who undertook a computer-based stylometric analysis of Henry VI, concluded that The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York was written by Christopher Marlowe.[2]  His opinion, shared by a number of well-respected scholars of the early twentieth century, was that Marlowe’s play was adopted and adapted by Shakespeare into the play we now know as Henry VI Part 3, a view that in 2016 was adopted, with considerable fanfare, by the editors of The New Oxford Shakespeare.

In this circumstance, Robert Greene, and ‘his quondam acquaintance, that spend their wits in making plays’ would not have associated the ‘tiger’s heart’ line with William Shakespeare but with Marlowe, the first of those people Greene warns against the ‘upstart Crow’.  If this is so, Green’s parodic reference would be even more satisfying, tying together both his target (Alleyn) and his chief addressee.

CONTINUE>>>

[1] S. P. Cerasano, ‘Alleyn, Edward (1566–1626)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://0-www.oxforddnb.com.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/view/article/398, accessed 22 June 2017].
[2] T. Merriam, Tamburlaine Stalks in Henry VI’, Computers and the Humanities 30, 267–280, 1996.


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Posted on by Dr Barber

Shake-Scene

Perhaps, despite the strong evidence that identifies Edward Alleyn as Robert Greene’s ‘Player’ and ‘Crow’, you are nevertheless persuaded that the upstart Crow is Shakespeare because he thinks himself ‘in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country’?  Surely the similarity between ‘Shake-scene’ and ‘Shakespeare’ is too close to be a coincidence?

Shake-scene Groatsworth of Wit Shakespeare Greene

Yet the typography of the text counts against ‘Shake-scene’ meaning ‘Shakespeare’. Throughout Groatsworth, quotations, and most names, are printed in the much clearer italic lettering rather than blackletter, even the name ‘Johannes fac totum’. Epithets (such as ‘upstart Crow’) are not.  Shake-scene is not in italic print, suggesting it is not a name, but a common noun. Being preceded by an article — ‘the… Shake-scene’ — points in the same direction; proper nouns (names) don’t need to be prefaced with ‘a’ or ‘the’.

SHAKE-STUFF

There was a similar word in use at the time: ‘shake-rag’, a term found in printed sources from 1571, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, for ‘a ragged disreputable person’.  ‘It is no marvel that shakerags [L. sordidos homines] (which have no regard of honesty) did … rail without shame’ wrote Arthur Golding in his translation of Calvin’s The Psalms of David.  Here are some more examples:

  • ‘You totter’d shake-rag’d rogues, what domineer you?’ — Anon, A Larum for London (1602).
  • ‘Pecunia, a name of one of the shake-rag goddesses in our fourth booke’ — St Augustine, tr. J.Healey, Of the City of God (1610).
  • ‘If you ask but a shake-rag who he is, he will answer, that (at the least) he is descended from the Goths, & that his bad fortune hath thus dejected him’ — Juan de Luna, The pursuit of the historie of Lazarillo de Tormez (1622).
  • ‘this shake-rag, this young impudent Rogue’ — Mateo Aleman, The Rogue (1623).
  • ‘Do you talk Shake-rag: Heart yond’s more of ‘em. I shall be Beggar-maul’d if I stay’ — Richard Brome, A Joviall Crew (1641).

By adapting ‘Shake-rag’ (beggar) into ‘Shake-scene’ (actor), Greene could not only refer to the physical vigour with which an actor such as Alleyn would stride around the stage, shaking the scenery, but also hint at a certain disreputable quality associated with the original term.

A GRAMMATICAL TEST

If you want proof that ‘Shake-scene’ is not a proper noun, and does not stand for Shakespeare, try substituting one for the other: it makes no sense for Greene to accuse this actor of being ‘in his own conceit the only Shakespeare in a country’.   It is simply another way for Greene to say ‘actor’ without repeating the words he has already used, as a substitution demonstrates: the upstart Crow is ‘in his own conceit the only actor in a country’.

The perceived ‘punning allusion to Shakespeare’s name’ is not proven and may not be there at all.  As much as we might want Greene to be referring to Shakespeare, we should not leap upon the word Shake-scene for the mere fact that it begins with the same first syllable.  Wishful thinking will lead us to see connections that the author never intended, and to identify the ‘Shake-scene’ [actor] as Shakespeare, when the main text of Groatsworth, and Greene’s previous writings, implicate Edward Alleyn, is no more valid than the tendency of some Oxfordians to see every use of the common English word ‘ever’ as an anagram pinpointing their candidate, Edward de Vere.

CONTINUE>>>


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Posted on by Dr Barber

Was Groatsworth Greene’s?

Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit was published in September 1592 as the final work of England’s first celebrity author, Robert Greene, who had died at the beginning of that month.  Green was a famous writer of prose romances, stage plays, and best-selling pamphlets on ‘coneycatchers’, unmasking the techniques of London’s tricksters, cutpurses and cardsharps. Groatsworth, according to its title page, was ‘written before his death and published at his dying request’.  The extract about the ‘upstart Crow’ comes from a section intended as a ‘warning to my old consorts which have lived as loosely as myself’ and is addressed ‘To those gentlemen, his quondam [former] acquaintance, that spend their wits in making plays’.  Groatsworth was licensed for publication in the Stationers Register on 20 September 1592 ‘upon the peril of Henry Chettle’; unusual wording indicating that the work was acknowledged as potentially inflammatory.  And so it proved.

Immediately, there were accusations that it had been written by someone other than Greene.  Thomas Nashe, whom scholars believe was the third of the three playwrights addressed in Groatsworth’s letter, felt compelled to deny accusations

that a scald trivial lying pamphlet called Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit is given out to be of my doing. God never have care of my soul, but utterly renounce me, if the least word or syllable in it proceeded from my pen, or if I were any way privy to the writing or printing of it.[1]

A more immediate suspect was Henry Chettle.  Within ten weeks, the preface to his Kind-Heart’s Dream contained his own denial of authorship, and an apology to one of the two playwrights who had been offended.  His involvement in the text, he said, was merely to copy it out,

as sometime Greene’s hand was none of the best. Licensed it must be ere it could be printed, which could never be if it might not be read. To be brief, I writ it over, and as near as I could, followed the copy; only in that letter I put something out, but in the whole book not a word in, for I protest it was all Greene’s, not mine nor Master Nashe’s, as some unjustly have affirmed.

Chettle’s denial was widely accepted until the 1990s, when the editor of a new edition of Groatsworth was persuaded by the findings of a 1969 paper by Warren B Austin that the text bore signs of Chettle’s hand — including his common spellings of certain words — and insufficient of Greene’s. As a result, many scholars now refer to Groatsworth as being by Chettle, rather than Greene.

But Austin’s methods were deeply flawed.  In 2006, a reassessment by Richard Westley[2]  notes ten categories of error. Key amongst these is the issue of missing controls: Austin compares Groatsworth with just five of Greene’s thirty-two known prose-works, and omits several works that were close to Groatsworth in time of composition. Austin also deliberately excludes, on the basis of context, a number of key words that strongly argue for Greene as the author, and fails to take into account Chettle’s role as compositor. What Austin refers to as the ‘strongest piece of evidence’ that Chettle wrote Groatsworth is its preference for ‘-ever’ over ‘-soever’: Greene always uses the latter, Chettle the former.  But Chettle admitted to copying out the text, and could very easily have introduced the change subconsciously.  Westley concludes that ‘Austin’s findings should… be set aside’, and that the text is by Greene.  The identity of an author (as we all instinctively know) is important, and Robert Greene’s personal circumstances — particularly his impending death — make a great deal of difference to our understanding of Groatsworth.

With authorship established as Greene’s, let us return to the ‘upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers’.

CONTINUE>>>

[1] Thomas Nashe’s denial of the authorship of Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit is in the preface to the second edition of Pierce Penniless (1595).
[2] Richard Westley, ‘Computing Error: Reassessing Austin’s Study of Groatsworth of Wit’, Literary and Linguistic Computing (2006) 21 (3): 363-378.

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Posted on by Dr Barber