Part 2

“Kemp started at seven o’clock in the morning on the first Monday in Lent, the starting point being in front of the Lord Mayor’s house, and half London was astir to see the beginning of the great exploit. His suite consisted of his taborer, Thomas Sly; his servant, William Bee; and his overseer or umpire, George Sprat, who was to see that everything was performed according to promise. According to custom, he put out a sum of money before his departure on condition of receiving thrice the amount on his safe return. His own fatigues caused him many delays and he did not arrive in Norwich until twenty-three days after his departure. He spent only nine days in actual dancing on the road. Kemp himself on this occasion contributed nothing to the music except the sound of the bells, which were attached to his gaiters. In Norwich thousands waited to receive him in the open market-place with an official concert. Kemp, as guest of the town, was entertained at its expense and received handsome presents from the Mayor who arranged a triumphal entry for him. The freedom of the Merchant Adventures Company was also conferred upon him, thereby assuring him a share in the yearly income to the amount of forty shillings—a pension for life. The very buskins in which he had performed his dance were nailed to the wall in the Norwich Guild Hall and preserved in perpetual memory of the exploit, which was long remembered in popular literature. In an epilogue Kemp announced that he was shortly to set forward as merrily as I may; whither, I myself know not,” and begged ballad makers to abstain from disseminating lying statements about him. Kemp’s humble request to the impudent generation of ballad-makers, as he terms them, reads in part, “My notable Shake-rags, the effect of my suit is discovered in the title of my supplication, but for your better understanding for that I know you to be a sort of witless bettle-heads that can understand nothing but that is knocked into your scalp; so farewell and crosse me no more with thy rabble of bold rhymes lest at my return I set a crosse on thy forehead that all men may know that for a fool.” It seems certain that Kemp kept his word in exhibiting his dancing powers on the continent. In Week’s “Ayers” (1688) mention is made of Kemp’s skipping into France. A ballad entitled “An Excellent New Medley” (dated about 1600) refers to his return from Rome. In the Elizabethan play “Jack Drum’s Entertainment” (1616), however, there is introduced a song to which Kemp’s morris dance is performed. Heywood, writing at this period, in his “Apology for Actors” (1612), says William Kemp was a comic actor of high reputation, as well in the favor of Her Majesty as in the opinion of the general audience. There is also a tribute from the pen of Richard Rathway (1618). Ben Jonson, William Rowley and John Marston also make mention of him.

Pretty much all that relates to the gambols of sportive Kemp in the foregoing pages is a mere transcription from the “Camden Society Papers.”

Our prime object is to establish Kemp’s eligibility as claimant for Greene’s censure, before alluded to. We are content to advance the claim of another if found more decisive. We would elect to name Robert Wilson, senior, an old enemy, doubtless, of Robert Greene, if we did not think that Kemp has the better claim to that distinction. According to Collier, Wilson was not only an excellent performer, but also a talented dramatist, especially renowned for his ready repartee. Some writers affirm that the authors of the dramas “Faire Emm” and “Martin Marsixtus” were one and the same person, and that this person was Robert Wilson, senior, author of “Three Ladies of London” and “Three Lords and Ladies of London,” the first published in 1584, and the other in 1590. “Faire Emm” and “Martin Marsixtus” having been posthumously printed, Greene was severe on the author of the former for his blasphemous introduction of quotations from the Bible into his love passages. “We know that the author attacked Greene’s own works in return and called them lascivious.” He had not read the works, but, then, an anonymous writer may not very scrupulously confine himself to the truth. “Loth I was to display myself to the world but for that I hope to dance under a mask and bluster out like the wind, which, though every man heareth yet none can in sight descrie.” “I must answer in print what they have offered on the stage” are the words of Greene.

Robert Wilson may be advanced as claimant for Greene’s reproof by some persons who are of the opinion that “upstart crow” was both actor and playwright. Supposition says Kemp also wrote pamphlets and plays, although at this time he had not given his first and only work to the press. It matters little at whom he aimed, Kemp or Wilson, so long as Shakespere was not the object of the aimer. In the Parish Register of St. Giles, Cripplegate, we read, “Buried, Robert Wilson, yeoman, a player, 20 Nov., 1600.”

These facts and concurring events in the life of William Kemp convince us that Shakspere was not, and Kemp very probably was, the person at whom Greene leveled his satire by bearing witness to his (Kemp’s) extemporizing power and his haughty and insolent demeanor in introducing improvisions and interpolations of his “own wit into poet’s plays.”

From the foregoing, it is evident that, at the time the letter was written, William Kemp enjoyed an unequaled and wide spread notoriety and transient fame, extending not only throughout England, but into foreign countries as well.

And further, by reason of his great prominence, in a calling which Greene loathed, and despised, he was brought easily within the range of the latter’s contemptuous designation, of “upstart crow.”

III

We have now reached the crucial matter of the address which, according to the speculative opinion of many of Shakspere’s biographers, contains all the words and sentences which they hope, when racked, may be made to yield support to their tramp conjecture that Robert Greene was the first to discover Shakspere as a writer of plays, or the amender of the works of other poets. The identifiable words, so called, are contained in the following sentences: “Yes, trust them not; for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that, with his Tyger’s heart wrapt in a Player’s hide.”

“Upstart Crow” in Elizabethan English meant in general, one who assumed a lofty or arrogant tone, a bragging, boastful, swaggerer suddenly raised to prominence and power, as was Kemp after the death of Richard Tarlton (1589). In an epistle prefixed to Greene’s “Arcadia” (1587), Thomas Nash speaks of actors “As a company of taffaty fools with their feathers;” and “The players decked with poets’ feathers like Aesop’s Crow” (R. B.); and again, “That with his Tyger’s heart wrapt in a Player’s hide.” Tiger in the plain language of the day stood for bully, a noisy, insolent man, who habitually sought to overbear by clamors, or by threats. These characteristics are identifiable with Kemp; but the biographers of Shakspere are content to conjecture that Robert Greene’s parody on the line “Oh Tyger’s heart wrapt in a woman’s hide” is not only a contumelious reference to actor, William Shakspere, but also a declaration of his authorial integrity by their assignment of “Henry VI. Part III,” which was in action at the “Rose,” when Greene’s celebrated address was written.

There is _prima-facie_ evidence that Greene authored the line, which he semi-parodied in the address, which is found in two places. It appears in its initial form “Oh Tyger’s heart wrapt in a serpent’s hide” in the play called, “The Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York,” and “The Death of Good King Henry the Sixth,” and later with “woman” substituted for “serpent,” again, it is found in the third part of “Henry VI.”, founded on the true tragedy, which was acted by Lord Pembroke’s company, of which, as Nash tells us, Greene was chief agent, and for which he wrote more than four other plays. “Henry VI. Part III” is generally admitted to be the work of Greene, Marlowe and perhaps Peele. Furthermore, the catchwords in the lines parodied betray their author, which is a confirmatory fact. To borrow a citation from the pages of Dr. A. Grosart, “Every one who knows his Greene knows that over and over again he returns on anything of his that caught on, sometimes abridging and sometimes expanding;” and in semi-parodying his own lines, wrapt “Tyger’s heart” in several kinds of hides. It was William Kemp, the comic actor and dancer, not Shakspere, whom Greene wanted to hit. He did not consider as an author at all the “upstart crow” with his “Tyger’s heart wrapt in a player’s hide,” who bombasted orally his own improvisions and interpolations out in blank verse.

In their great desire to discover Shakspere as the author, the words “bombast out in blank verse” are seized upon by Shakspere’s commentators with evident greediness. But these words yield nothing in support of author-craft, for bombast or bombastry, in the idiom of the time, stood for high sounding words which might have proceeded from the mouth of a buffoon, clown, jester, montebank or actor, whose profession was to amuse spectators by low antics and tricks, and whose improvisions and extemporizings were destitute of rhyme, but possessed of a musical rhythm called “blank verse.” The words “blank verse” were doubtless intended for the ear of Marlowe, the great innovator, who was thus reminded that the notorious jig-dancer and clown, William Kemp, declaimed his own improvisions and interpolations in the “swelling bombast of a bragging blank-verse,” as Nash called it, and was an absolute “Johannes Factotum in his own conceit”—that is, a person employed to do many things. Who could do more “in his own conceit” than Kemp, who spent his life in mad jigs, as he says? Who but Kemp, the chief actor in the low comedy scenes, who angered the academic play-writers by introducing “his own wit into their plays and make a merriment of them?”

Greene’s address to his fellow craftsmen does not convey plagiary, or a furbishable, imputation, nor give color to, nor the slightest circumstance for, the conjecture that Shakspere’s authorial career had been begun as the amender of other poet’s plays anterior to the putative authorship of “Venus and Adonis.” Halliwell-Phillips, the most indefatigable and reliable member of the Congress of Speculative Biographers, says that not one such play has been found revised, or amended, by Shakspere in his early career. Still in their extremity, Shakspere’s commentators give hospitality to stupid conjectures that are not reasonable inferences from concurrent facts, and construe Greene’s censure of Kemp, (inferentially) as the first literary notice of Shakspere. It shows an irrepressible desire without proof to confer authorship upon Shakspere one hundred and fifty years after his death. The Shakspere votaries cannot point to a single word, or sentence, in this celebrated address of Robert Greene which connects the contumelious name “Shake-scene” (dance-scene) with the characteristics of either the true, or the traditional, Shakspere.

The biographers of Shakspere never grow weary of charging Robert Greene with professional jealousy and envy. The charge has no argumentative value, even if granting Shakspere’s early productivity as a play-maker, or the amender of the works of other men, for Greene’s activities ran in other lines; play-making was of minor importance, a sort of by-production of his resourceful and versatile pen. The biographers of Shakspere are unfortunate in having taken on this impression, because there is _prima-facie_ evidence that Greene had forsworn writing for the stage a considerable time before the letter was written; thus he followed his friend Lodge, who in 1589 “vows to write no more of that whence shame doth grow.”

The biographers and commentators, agreeing in their asperities, charge Robert Greene with that worst of passions, envy, basing it conjecturally on the assumption of Shakspere’s proficiency as a drama-maker, notwithstanding the sincere and earnest words contained in his most pathetic letter, addressed to three friends, in which he counsels them to give up play writing, which he regarded as degrading, placing their very necessities in the power of grasping shareholding actors, and rendering it no longer a fit occupation for gentlemen. They fail to see the dying should be granted immunity from this ignoble and base passion. Our own rule of law admits as good evidence the testimony of a man who believes himself to be dying, and so the letter states, “desirous that you should live though himself be dying.”

Robert Greene’s charge against “upstart crow” stands unshaken. Henry Chettle, the hack writer, and self admitted transcriber of the letter, does not retract Greene’s statement. He denies nothing on behalf of an “upstart crow” (Kemp); for the author of “Kind Hearts Dreams” does not identify “Shake-scene” (dance-scene) with Shakspere, or Shakespeare, who was not one of those who took offense. It is expressly stated that there were two of the three fellow dramatists, addressed by Greene (Marlowe, Nash and Peele). Still we are told by Shakespearean writers that the dying genius was pained at witnessing the proficiency of another in the very activity (play-making), which he had come to regard as congruous with strolling vagabondism. He enjoined his friends to seek better masters “for it is a pittie men of such rare wit should be subject to the pleasure of such rude groomes, painted monsters, apes, burrs, peasants, puppets,” not play-makers, but actors, who had been beholden to him and his fellow craftsmen whom he addressed.

There is another aspect in which the charge of professional jealousy presents itself to the mind of the reader; those who covet that which another possesses, or envies success, popularity or fortune. To charge Greene with envy is most uncharitable by reason of his versatility. Now what was there in the possession of William Shakspere in 1592 that could have awakened in the mind of Robert Greene so base a passion as envy. The name Shakspere had no commercial value in 1592, for Shakspere of the stage is described many years after this date as merely a “man player” and “a deserving man.” Note this admission by Dr. Ingleby: “Assuredly no one during the century had any suspicion that the genius of Shakespeare was unique.” “His immediate contemporaries expressed no great admiration for either him, or his works.” There is not a particle of evidence to show that Robert Greene was envious of any writer of his time; nor had he cause to be; but the way his contemporaries and successors robbed and plundered him proves the reverse to be true.

“Nay, more, the men that so eclipst his fame, Purloynde his plumes; can they deny the same?”

The fact is, Shakspere passed through and out of life without having attained the distinction, or celebrity, won by Greene in his brief literary career of but nine short years. The more truthful of Shakspere’s biographers concede that the subject of their memoirs was not, in his day, highly regarded, and that his obscurity in 1592 is obvious. There was not the least danger of the author of “Hamlet” “driving to penury” the dean of English novelists, Robert Greene, who was supreme in prose romance, a species of literature, which appealed to the better class of the reading public. Rival-hating envy! Robert Greene cannot be brought within the scope of such a charge, for in 1592, he was not striving to obtain the same object which play writers were pursuing.

The fame of Robert Greene during his lifetime eclipsed that of his contemporaries. “He was in fact the popular author of the day. His contemporaries applauded the facility with which he turned his talents to account.” “In a night and a day,” says Nash, “would he have yearked up a pamphlet as well as in seven years, and glad was that printer that might be so blest to pay him dear for the very dregs of his wit.” Even Ben Jonson, “the greatest man of the last age,” according to Dryden, had no such assurance in his day, if we may judge from his own account of his literary life, which shows that he had to struggle for a subsistence, as no printer was found glad, or felt himself blest, to pay him dear for the cream, much less the very “dregs of his wit.” He told Drummond that the half of his comedies were not in print, and that he had cleared but 200 pounds by all his labor for the public theatre. It has been said by one: “In the breadth of his dramatic quality, his range over every kind of poetic excellence, Jonson was excelled by Shakespeare alone.” (p. 437, “A Short History of the English People.”) When not subsidized by the court he was driven by want to write for the London theatres; he lived in a hovel in an alley, where he took service with the notorious play broker. To such as he, reference is made by Henslow, who in his diary records “the grinding toil and the starvation wages of his hungry and drudging bondsmen,” who were struggling for the meanest necessities of life. This Titan of a giant brood of playwrights, in the days of his declension wrote mendicant epistles for bread, and, doubtless, in his extremity recalled Robert Greene, the admonisher of three brother poets “that spend their wits in making plaies.” “Base minded men, all three of you! if by my miseries ye be not warned, for unto none of you, like me, sought those burrs to cleave, those puppits, I mean that speak from our mouths those antics garnisht in our colors. Is it not strange that I, to whom they all have been beholding, shall, were ye in that case that I am now, be both at once of them forsaken?... O that I might intreate your rare wits to be employed in more profitable courses, and let those apes imitate your past excellence, and never more acquaint them with your admired inventions.”

It was one of this breed of puppets, we are told, who awakened incarnate envy in the breast of Robert Greene, and engendered rivalship against William Shakspere, whose votaries, in their dreams of fancy, see him revising the dramatic writings of Robert Greene, the most resourceful, versatile, tireless and prolific of literary men. He was a writer of greatest discernment from the viewpoint of the people of his time, “for he possessed the ability to write in any vein that would sell.” He only, of all the writers of his time, gave promise of being able to gain a competence by the pen alone, a thing which no writer did, or could do, in that day, by writing for the stage alone. Hon. Cushman K. Davis in “The Law in Shakespeare” says, “He (Shakspere) is the first English author who made a fortune with his pen.” In the absence of credible evidence, Mr. Davis assumes that the young man who came up from Stratford was the author of the plays. The senator does not seem aware of the fact that Shakspere of Stratford was a shareholding actor, receiving a share in the theatre, or its profits, in 1599; a partner in one or more of the chief companies; a play broker who purchased and mounted the plays of other men; and that he, like Burbage, Henslowe and Alleyn, speculated in real estate. He was shrewd in money matters and became very wealthy, but not by writing plays. Suppose that William Shakspere of Stratford-on-Avon had authored all the plays associated with his name, that alone would not have made him wealthy. The price of a play varied from four to ten pounds, and all Shakspere’s labors for the public theatre would have brought no more than five hundred pounds. The diary of Philip Henslowe makes it clear that up to the year 1600 the highest price he ever paid was six pounds. The Shakespeare plays were not exceptionally popular in that day, not being then as now, “the talk of the town.” Not one of them equalled in popularity Kyd’s “The Spanish Tragedy,” or Marlowe’s “Dr. Faustus.”

Shakespeare was soon superseded by Fletcher in popular regard. Only one of the Shakespeare tragedies, one historical play, and eight comedies were presented at the Court of James First, who reigned twenty-two years. Plays, written by such hack writers as Dearborn, or Chettle, were quite as acceptable to princes.

Robert Greene’s romances were “a bower of delight,” a kind of writing held in high favor by all classes. Sir Thomas Overbury describes his chambermaid as reading Greene’s works over and over again. It is a pleasure to see in the elder time Greene’s writings in hands so full of household cares, since he labored to make young lives happy. Robert Greene’s works express every variation in the changing conditions of life. The poetry of his pastoral landscapes are vivid word pictures of English sylvan scenes. The western sky on amorous autumn days is mantled with sheets of burnished gold. The soft and gentle zephyr blows over castled crag and fairy glen fragrant with the breath of flowers.

In the manuals of our literature great prominence is given to the fact that Greene led a dissolute, or irregular, life, as if the debauchment of the author was transmitted by his writings. There are no indecencies in his works to attest the passage of a debauchee. Like many persons born to, and nurtured by, religious parents, Greene doubtless exaggerated his own vices. He was bad, but not altogether bad. It may truly be said of him that, in regard to all that pertains to penitence and self abasement, he spares not himself, but like John Bunyan, he was given to selfupbraiding. He (Bunyan) declares that it is true that he let loose the reins on the neck of his lust; that he delighted in all transgressions against the divine law; and that he was the ring leader of the youth of Elstow in all vice. But, when those who wished him ill, accused him of licentious amours, he called God and the angels to attest his purity. No woman, he said, in heaven, earth, or hell, could charge him with having ever made any improper advances to her. Blasphemy and Sabbath-breaking seem to have been Bunyan’s only transgression after all. In Robert Greene’s writings, we have the reverse of “Herrick’s shameful pleading that if his verse was impure, his life was chaste.” Unlike Herrick, Greene did not minister to the unchaste appetite of readers for tainted literature, either in his day, or in the after time. Powerless to condemn Greene’s writings, Shakspere’s votaries would desecrate his ashes.

Deplore as we must his dissolute living, it was of short duration, for he went from earth at the age of two and thirty, and the evil effects have been lost in Time’s abatements. His associates, doubtless were as dissolute as he himself. Nash wrote: “With any notorious crime I never knew him tainted, and he inherited more virtues than vices.” The reader, at any rate, will give but little credence to the accusations of such a hyena-dog as Gabriel Harvey. Robert Greene was not “lip-holy,” nor heart-hollow, for, in regard to his wife and their separation, “he took to himself all blame, breathed never a word against her, and did not squander all of his earnings in dissipation, but sent part of his income to the good woman, the wife of his youth, and addressed to her in loving trust the last letter he wrote.” Gabriel Harvey, drenched in hate, could not rob the “Sweet-wife letter of its pathos.”