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Biographies of Shakespeare suffer from a dearth of information about the playwright's presence in London. Perhaps the most enthusiastically cited reference to Shakespeare is from Robert Greene's Greene's Groats-worth of Wit, bought with a million of Repentance, a publication from 1592.
Who wrote the book? Why did the author craft its unusual mid-course transition? Was Greene's famous repentance sincere or pretended? Is Shakespeare involved, and if so, how?
One: Robert Greene Is a Pen-Name
Orville Ward Owen (1893-5) was the first to postulate that the name Robert Greene was a pseudonym; his candidate was Francis Bacon. Stephanie Hopkins Hughes (1998, 2009) and Nina Green (1999) have made a better case that Robert Greene was a pen-name of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. This paper offers some contributions to this line of thought.
Robert Greene's canon comprises thirty-six prose pamphlets and an estimated seven plays. Surely a writer this active would have a sound biography. Yet there is no record of a public life.
The Repentance of Robert Greene, written immediately prior to Greene's alleged death in September 1592, has the dying Greene testify to his own notoriety: "I became an Author of Playes, and a penner of Love Pamphlets, so that I soone grew famous in that qualitie, that who for that trade growne so ordinary about London as Robin Greene" (Grosart 12: 173). Yet, to the contrary, Greene's absence from the scene is a consistent theme in biographical research. Two of Greene's plays are noted, "As it was plaid before the Queenes Majestie" and "As it was plaid by her Majesties servants," yet no courtier wrote of having met the famous author or having seen his dazzling plays.
Even Greene's literary contemporaries never ran into him. Gabriel Harvey, who battled Greene quite personally in the press, in Foure Letters (1593) admits, "I was altogether unacquainted with the man, never once saluted him by name" (Grosart 1: 168). In Kind Harts Dreame (1592), Henry Chettle talks not of meeting Greene personally, but of seeing a figure in a dream "whome I supposed to be Robert Greene, maister of Artes_" A certain "B.R." (widely presumed to be Barnabe Rich) in his preface to Greenes Newes from Heaven and Hell (1593) similarly speaks of the...