The Death of the Author Robert Greene and the Birth of Shakespeare Criticism

To commemorate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Marlowe’s death in 1993, Anthony Burgess published a reconstruction of Marlowe’s double life as playwright and spy in the form of the novel A Dead Man in Deptford. Late in the book Marlowe is called away to Scotland on “Service” business, leaving behind “an aspiring playman” with whom he had been writing “The Contention Between the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster”, a play with “a most incommodious title which later would be changed to Henry VI Part One.” The narrator reports that the work was completed “with a kind of speed of insolence” by one “Will of Warwickshire”.

In the Author’s Note, Burgess makes “a certain claim to secondary scholarship” – he completed a thesis on Marlowe for his BA in 1940 – and he assures his readers that all of the historical facts in the novel are verifiable. One of the few things that all scholars of early Shakespeare agree on, however, is that the play printed in the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare as The first Part of Henry the Sixt, hereafter referred to as “1 Henry VI”, was never called “The Contention Between the Two Houses of York and Lancaster”, and with this confusion Burgess provides proof of his own assertion that “the virtue of the historical novel is its vice – the flatfooted affirmation of possibility as fact”.

One would obviously not expect to encounter this “virtuous vice” of historical fiction in Shakespeare criticism, but it nevertheless permeates the numerous studies published every year. There is one main reason for this: the extreme paucity of verifiable facts – about Shakespeare himself and about the dates and authorship of his plays. Without historical facts, historical fictions have proliferated. In A Dead Man in Deptford Burgess deliberately keeps Shakespeare on the fringes of his novel about the life and death of Marlowe. The narrator is all too conscious that “[Shakespeare’s] is another story and its nudging and shouldering into this of Kit’s harms wholeness and bids break the frame”. In this way, what is generally considered to be one of the greatest rivalries in the history of English drama stays out of the spotlight. But Burgess could not pass up the opportunity to depict the rivalry between the now all-but-forgotten playwright Robert Greene and Shakespeare, a rivalry which, unlike that between Marlowe and Shakespeare, there is extant evidence for. It is with this rivalry, or rather the description of it in the pamphlet entitled Greene’s Groatsworth of Witte, bought with a million of Repentance (Stationers’ Register 20 September 1592), that the biggest literary-critical industry the world has ever seen came into being.

The Groatsworth claims to be the swan song of Greene, which would date its composition shortly before his death on 3 September 1592. Greene’s demise was said to have been brought about by the sickness he developed after a “banquet” of pickled herring and Rhenish wine which he shared with Thomas Nashe. The Groatsworth includes a letter to a trio of playwrights, usually thought to be Marlowe, George Peele and Nashe, warning them of the emergence of a young pretender.

Base minded men all three of you, if by my miserie you be not warnd: for unto none of you (like mee) sought those burres to cleave: those Puppets (I meane) that spake from our mouths, those Anticks garnisht in our colours. Is it not strange, that I, to whom they all have beene beholding: is it not like that you, to whome they all have beene beholding, shall (were yee in that case as I am now) bee both at once of them forsaken? Yes trust them not: for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey. O that I might intreat your rare wits to be imploied in more profitable courses: and let those Apes imitate your past excellence, and never more acquaint them with your admired inventions.

While most scholars, past and present, agree that the “upstart Crow”, the “onely Shake-scene in a countrey” is Shakespeare and all agree that “Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hyde” is a distortion of the line appearing in 3 Henry VI as “O tiger’s heart wrapp’d in a woman’s hide!”, they are by no means unanimous on what the pamphlet is saying about him.

On the face of it, Greene’s authorship of the Groatsworth seems to be an open-and-shut case; his name is there in the full title, a testimony that survived virtually unchallenged well into the twentieth century. There have, however, been a few dissenting critics, the most vocal of whom recently has been John Jowett. If, as he contends, the author of the Groatsworth – specifically the author of the letter to the playwrights – was not in fact Greene but Henry Chettle, “who by his own account edited and transcribed Greene’s papers”, the earliest piece of Shakespeare “criticism” was a forgery. If we cannot be sure who wrote the pamphlet that has been employed as the cornerstone of every hypothesis for the early Shakespeare canon and chronology since 1778, any “certainties” established by critics concerning the genesis of the Henry VI plays have been built on an uncertain foundation.

Jowett begins his article with a critical evaluation of Warren B. Austin’s 1969 computer-aided study of the authorship of the Groatsworth. This is a series of comparisons of word frequencies in the Greene and Chettle corpora which uncovers an array of statistical data in support of Chettle being the author of the pamphlet. Barring the discovery of new evidence, irrefutable proof is, of course, unobtainable but Austin’s work should establish in the minds of contemporary scholars that irrefutable proof of Greene’s authorship of the Groatsworth is equally unobtainable. Jowett sees the need to ask “what further internal and contextual considerations might be adduced to clarify the nature of Chettle’s part in putting the pamphlet together”. His process of clarification shows how the pamphlet’s jibe at Shakespeare (he is called a “Johannes fac totum” or “Jack of All Trades”) is in fact a most apt epithet for Chettle himself.

In 1592 Chettle falsely signed his epistle to Anthony Munday’s Il Gerileon with Nashe’s initials, “T. N.”, a forgery which he confessed (while simultaneously blaming the printers) in his Kind-Heart’s Dream. He was obliged to publish that work three months after the appearance of the Groatsworth in an attempt to quash the charges of his contemporaries that either he or Nashe had fabricated it. Nashe, Jowett explains, had no case to answer; he was dwelling out of London, in Croydon, at the time. Only Chettle had access to Greene’s papers, the duty of transcribing Greene’s Groatsworth, and that of “preparing” it for publication. There are no other suspects.

Jowett is careful to keep Chettle’s actions in their original context. Certainly, the “notion of intellectual property had weak foundations at the time”. Although property rights were then held by the Stationer, not the author, this clearly does not absolve Chettle. As Jowett notes,

the Groatsworth itself provides excellent firsthand testimony that the concept of plagiarism did exist, that it could be extended even to plays that had not reached print, and even located between the dramatist and actors who realised the text in performance.

Returning to the Groatsworth’s remarks concerning Shakespeare, the acceptance of the possibility that Chettle rather than Greene made them must complicate our reading of an already difficult text.

Once Greene’s authorship is denied, we find the passage deprived of its correlative in experience. The speaker is not actually the failed and bitter dramatist Greene but an imagined representation of him. A key “fact” of literary history has evaporated. But it has not disappeared; it is replaced with the ambiguous simul[a]crum of a fact. This, then, is the problem. The delegitimized diatribe against Shakespeare will not quietly go away.

But just what is this “delegitimized diatribe” saying about Shakespeare? Opinions have tended to cluster around two poles: either that Shakespeare is being charged with plagiarism, specifically by Greene, of his own work, or that Shakespeare, the young actor-prodigy, has ideas above his station and is beginning to write his own material. The first surmise is championed by Edmund Malone in his 1787 Dissertation on the Three Parts of King Henry VI, tending to shew that those plays were not originally written by Shakespeare, a work that has been called “the fountainhead of disintegrationist theories”. Malone’s interpretation follows his citation of the Groatsworth passage quoted above:

That Shakespeare was here alluded to, cannot, I think be doubted. But what does the writer mean by calling him “a crow beautified by our feathers?” My solution is, that Greene and Peele were the joint-authors of the quarto plays, entitled The first part of the Contention of the two famous houses of Yorke and Lancaster, &c and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of Yorke, &c, or that Greene was the author of one, and Peele of the other.

The flights of Malone’s fancy aside, there can be no doubt that the three men Malone refers to knew of each other and of each other’s work – the close quarters of London’s theatrical community would have ensured that. Greene and Peele were university men, whereas Shakespeare’s official education had ended at Stratford Grammar School. Peele had taken the degree of Master of Arts at Oxford in 1579; Greene took the same degree at Cambridge in 1583. As an established actor turning his hand to playwriting, the unqualified Shakespeare was, it seemed to the author of the Groatsworth, breaking too many of the established playwrights’ rules and, according to Malone, appropriating and improving their plays.

Going by the dates of Greene’s and Peele’s first printed works, 1583 and 1584 respectively, Malone thinks “it is highly probable” that the originals of 2 and 3 Henry VI, Contention and True Tragedy, were written between 1583 and 1591. And further: “I suspect they were produced in 1588 or 1589”. At this point he stiffens his resolve:

We have undoubted proofs that Shakespeare was not above working on the materials of other men. His Taming of the Shrew, his King John, and other plays, render any argument on that point unnecessary.

These “undoubted proofs” obviously do not need any elaboration as far as Malone is concerned. But what do they consist of? What exactly does “working on the materials of other men” entail? If Malone means Shakespeare adopted and adapted the plots of other men, without ever inserting large chunks of their verse verbatim into his own, then Malone would be in agreement with the modern consensus. But it is clear from his Dissertation that this is not the case.

Malone holds that the line famously adapted from 3 Henry VI in the Groatsworth, “O tiger’s heart wrapp’d in a woman’s hide!”, was originally penned by Greene; it appears identically in the 1595 octavo of True Tragedy. Greene, to emphasise his contempt for the “upstart crow” Shakespeare after his shameless bombasting of the elder playwrights’ Contention and True Tragedy into the First Folio’s 2 and 3 Henry VI, redirected his own line (according to Malone) at Shakespeare, in order to publicly expose his plagiarism. Shakespeare, Malone tells us, carried out what is called in Italian a “Rifacimento” or rewriting of the old plays.

[Shakespeare] did not content himself with writing new beginnings to the acts; he new-versified, he new-modelled, he transposed many of the parts, and greatly amplified and improved the whole. Several lines, however, and even whole speeches which he thought sufficiently polished, he accepted, and introduced to his own work, without any or with very slight, alterations.

In the present edition, all those lines which he adapted without any alteration, are printed in the usual manner; those speeches which he altered or expanded, are distinguished by inverted commas; and to all the lines entirely composed by himself, asterisks are prefixed. The total number of lines in our author’s Second and Third Part of K. Henry VI. is six thousand and forty-three: of these as I conceive, 1771 lines were written by some author who preceded Shakespeare; 2373 were formed by him on the foundation laid by his predecessors; and 1899 lines were entirely his own composition.

Malone’s precision is still disarming more than 200 years later. Astonishing as his remarks sound today, the essential tenets of Malone’s Dissertation were not toppled by a more complete hypothesis for nearly 150 years. While critics after Malone begged to differ on the exact number of lines in the Henry VI plays Shakespeare was responsible for, the “facts” that the two “old” plays Contention and True Tragedy served as Shakespeare’s sources for the plays that appear in the Folio, and that Shakespeare had plagiarized nearly 2,000 lines from those plays by Greene and Peele, were not convincingly refuted until 1929.

In that year Peter Alexander published his Shakespeare’s ‘Henry VI’ and ‘Richard III’ which concludes that 2 and 3 Henry VI were actually composed before Contention and True Tragedy. Alexander’s study and the less trumpeted contemporaneous work of Madeleine Doran dramatically turned the tide of scholarly opinion. The Henry VI plays, according to Alexander, were conceived and written by Shakespeare alone. The so-called “old” plays were in actuality “younger” ones – pirated versions patched together by actors and recorders for commercial gain. Alexander’s Shakespeare, far from being the agent of plagiarism, was, in reality, the victim of it.

Alexander built his argument on the same foundation – his interpretation of the Groatsworth passage – on which Malone had built his. He exposes Malone’s suppression of Thomas Tyrwhitt’s full opinion on the Groatsworth (published in the George Steevens/Samuel Johnson edition of Shakespeare in 1778) as a piece of critical skulduggery. It emerges that Malone selectively quoted his contemporary “who was the first not only to direct the attention of scholars to the punning allusion to Shakespeare, but to point out its true interpretation”. Tyrwhitt had written:

Though the objections raised [by Theobald and Warburton] to the genuineness of the three plays of Henry the Sixth have been fully considered and answered by Dr. Johnson, it may not be amiss to add here, from a contemporary writer, a passage [from the Groatsworth], which . . . points at Shakespeare as the author of them.

Alexander shows how the only problems Malone’s Dissertation solves are ones that it creates itself, that

there remains no excuse for continuing to accept Malone’s complete misinterpretation of Greene’s letter. It must be rejected as not only a contradiction to Greene’s very words, but as framed to agree with what are only Malone’s false assumptions.

But as we have seen, the opinions of the Groatsworth may well be those of Chettle and not Greene. After citing the pamphlet as evidence that “Greene regarded 3 Henry VI as a work by Shakespeare”, Alexander goes on to make his own false assumption that, if 2 and 3 Henry VI are all Shakespeare’s, then 1 Henry VI is as well.

Both Malone in 1787 and Alexander in 1929 caused critical sensations because of the way they interpreted a 1592 allusion to Shakespeare which they believed to have been written by Greene. They both changed the way the world thought about Shakespeare’s beginnings as a playwright and profoundly influenced the thinking of subsequent generations.

Re-integrating “disintegration”

E. K. Chambers, the most influential Shakespearean scholar of his generation, delivered a lecture to the British Academy in 1924 entitled “The Disintegration of Shakespeare”, in which he inveighed against what he saw as the undisciplined attempts of some of his contemporaries to “disintegrate” the Shakespeare canon. Chambers used the occasion to dissect publicly the criticism of J. M. Robertson and John Dover Wilson, “disintegrating critics” who, though their methodologies and conclusions are completely different, both insist that Shakespeare revised, to varying degrees, the work of other playwrights. Many of the plays in the accepted Shakespeare canon, they held, contain the work of other playwrights like Marlowe, Chapman, Greene and Peele.

The passion Chambers felt for the good reputation of his (which he expands at every opportunity into “our”) Shakespeare erupts into his prose, and the lecture consistently employs emotive language to emphasise the polar opposition he sees between “us” (himself and his audience) and “them” (the “disintegrators”). The opening of the second paragraph, for example, suggests that the claims of the disintegrators should have the same physical effect on us as those who maintain that the most famous plays in the English language were not written by William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon:

I propose to consider certain critical tendencies which, in their extreme manifestations, offer results hardly less perturbing than those with which the Baconians and their kin would make our flesh creep.

Chambers then implies that the theories – “heresies, if you will” – of these “certain critical tendencies” are blasphemous; that the disintegrators are going against God with their attacks on Shakespeare. With remarks like these Chambers is hardly presenting an objective and disinterested critical point of view. But it is easy to imagine his audience transfixed by his magisterial tone, which seems to confer upon his words a divine authority. He effectively turns a critical debate over the limits of the Shakespeare canon into a Holy War and enters the lists like a crusader.

It is surprising to say the least to find the scholar who introduced the terms “disintegration” and “disintegrationist” into the Shakespeare critical lexicon advocating six years later that Shakespeare revised the work of other playwrights to create 1 Henry VI.

Shakespeare’s presence is only clear to me in [2.4], the Temple Garden scene, and [4.2], an unrhymed Talbot scene . . . These I take to be new scenes, written in or later than 1594. Probably both replaced scenes of the original play; almost certainly [2.4] did, as later passages carry on the motive of the roses . . . As to the authorship of the original play, I feel no assurance. If Shakespeare is in it at all, it must be in [1.1, 1.3; 2.5; 3.1, 3.4; 4.1, 4.4; 5.1, 5.4. 94–end]. The evidence of F is not very strong here, since clearly by 1623 the piece was regarded as an integral part of his Henry VI.

Robertson and Dover Wilson, the disintegrators who bear the brunt of Chambers’s critical and religious opprobrium in his 1924 essay, constructed their theories on the same kind of foundation Chambers laid in his discussion of the authorship of 1 Henry VI six years later: personal impressions of style. This is not to say that there are no major differences in the methodologies of the three critics – rather that when attribution techniques are more subjective than objective, radical and conservative authorship hypotheses alike will always be ultimately grounded in the critic’s own idiosyncratic impressions of Shakespeare’s works and of what he would have and would not have written.

It is important to stress at this juncture that Chambers can be distinguished from his predecessors, his contemporaries, and indeed most of his successors, by his espousal of an inclusive rather than exclusive philosophy concerning Shakespeare criticism: after railing against the disintegration of the canon in his lecture, in his conclusion he actually encourages his audience to be thankful for the efforts of the disintegrators. While there is certainly an element of theatricality in Chambers’s remarks – he is rather like a priest concluding a fire-and-brimstone sermon with “Lord forgive them, for they know not what they do” – there is also the unmistakeable conviction that our knowledge of Shakespeare is ultimately advanced by critical “heresy”.

We ought to be very grateful to Mr. Robertson and Mr. Dover Wilson. We had come to think that all the critical questions about Shakespeare were disposed of; the biographical facts and even a little more than the facts chronicled, the canon and the apocrypha fixed, the chronological order determined, the text established; that there was not much left to be done with Shakespeare, except perhaps to read him. They have shown us that it is not so; and we must now go over the ground again, and turn our notional assents, with whatever modifications may prove justified, into real assents. We have all the spring joy of re-digging a well-tilled garden.

His words are as relevant today as they were 80 years ago. Reading across the broad spectrum of contemporary Shakespeare criticism one quickly discovers that the complacency Chambers nobly admitted he himself was party to has persisted into the twenty-first century.

The conclusion of Chambers’s essay is a most unexpected – and therefore all the more effective – volte face. It is also a brilliant piece of rhetorical structuring, whereby the assimilation of “them” is promoted as the best means of identifying and shrugging off the smugness Chambers believes “we” (himself and his audience) had come to feel about their knowledge of Shakespeare. With his final paragraph Chambers suddenly begins to refill the literary-critical divide separating “us” and “them” that he had been excavating throughout his lecture, and the borderline between the two camps becomes harder to discern. We begin to see why the scholar who thundered against what he saw as the disintegration of the Shakespeare canon was, just six years later, able to disintegrate 1 Henry VI in the fashion quoted above.

The critics who use the term “disintegrationist” today generally do so only with the opprobrium found at the opening of Chambers’s lecture. They show no awareness of his last-minute exhortation of his audience to assimilate the work of disintegrationists like Robertson and Dover Wilson. In Defining Shakespeare: ‘Pericles’ as Test Case, MacDonald P. Jackson refocuses the ambivalence which Chambers had built into his concept to suggest how we should best apply it to attribution studies in the twenty-first century.

 

Every disintegrationist finding (supposed to be bad) has its corresponding integrationist results (supposed to be good). Identifying Hand D’s pages of Sir Thomas More as Shakespeare’s may in one respect separate them from the rest of the manuscript, but it connects them with the plays of the First Folio. Determining that some scenes of the Folio’s All Is True, or Henry VIII are by Fletcher joins the play to Fletcher, as well as to Shakespeare. Belated recognition that in The Two Noble Kinsmen, absent from the First Folio, Shakespeare collaborated with Fletcher has resulted in its inclusion in Shakespeare’s Collected Works, as well as Fletcher’s. Scholarly research on All Is True and The Two Noble Kinsmen allows us to consider them together as Fletcher–Shakespeare collaborations. If George Wilkins wrote the first two acts of Pericles, this material augments his meagre literary and dramatic output: he was part-author of a masterpiece. A Middleton who helped Shakespeare on Timon of Athens gains in stature. The opening act of 1 Henry VI would be a significant addition to Thomas Nashe’s writing for the theatre. And whatever our discoveries about how many playwrights wrote them, the texts we analyse are neither more nor less integrated as scripts for performance than they always were.

My clarification of Chambers’s original concept of disintegration coupled with Jackson’s demonstration of the concept’s positive consequences for our understanding of the limits of the Shakespeare canon should relieve the term of the stigma it attracted in the twentieth century. Most contemporary critics, unlike Chambers, are not concerned about the very real problems in the Shakespeare canon and chronology that remain unsolved or, like the Chambers of the beginning of his lecture, are righteously indignant at the attempts of other critics to refine our understanding of what Shakespeare did and did not write.

The vast majority of Shakespeare critics do not concern themselves with the author(ity) theorizing of the kind pioneered by Roland Barthes in his 1967 essay “The Death of the Author” and the idea that a traditionally understood authorial Shakespeare was not the ultimate source of the world’s most popular plays has never gained wide acceptance in Shakespeare criticism. The Shakespeare authorship debate is contested, for the main part, on a very different plane, which has been described as the “psychobiological”, and the sweeping claim made by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, for example, that “the text belongs to language, and not to the sovereign and generating author” is rarely given house room in Shakespeare criticism. But it would be wrong to ignore the wider ramifications of what “author” and “text” signify today in discussions of the authorship of Elizabethan plays. Contemporary criticism on the changing historical conceptions of authorship and how particular eras and social structures influence the politics of authorship can inform our understanding of authorship in Shakespeare’s day, and any investigation into who can be said to have authored his plays must always be conscious of the relevance of these issues to Shakespeare studies in the twenty-first century.