" And he, the man whom Nature selfe had made
To mocke her selfe, and Truth to imitate,
With kindly counter under mimick shade.
Our pleasant Willie, ah! is dead of late;
With whom all joy and jolly merriment
Is also deaded and in dolour drent.
" In stead thereof scoffing Scurrilitie,
And scornful Follie with Contempt is crept,
Rolling in rymes of shameless ribaudrie,
Without regard or due Decorum kept;
Each idle wit at will presumes to make,
And doth the Learneds taske upon him take.
" But that same gentle Spirit, from whose pen
Large streames of honnie and sweete Nectar flowe.
Scorning the boldness of such base-borne men,
Which dare their follies forth so rashlie throwe,
Doth rather choose to sit in idle cell,
Than so himselfe to mockerie to sell."
We are told by Rowe that "Mr. Dryden was always of opinion that these verses were meant for Shakspeare;" and notwithstanding some reasons for thinking otherwise, the prevailing impression now is that they were so. The year following the publication of Spenser's poem affords us an undeniable reference to Shakespeare. In the autumn of that year, in a miserable lodging at the house of a poor shoemaker near Dowgate, died Robert Greene, one of the most facile and popular authors of the time. This unhappy man is said to have spent the last few days of a profligate existence in writing a pamphlet, which he quaintly entitled A Groats worth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentence. In this tract, published shortly after his death by Henry Chettle, the repentant Greene addresses some of his brother dramatists, supposed to have been Marlowe, Lodge, and Peele, in the following strain:—"Wonder not, for with thee [Marlowe] will I first beginne, thou famous gracer of tragedians, that Greene, who hath said with thee (like the fool) in his heart 'There is no God,' should now give glory unto his greatnesse, for penetrating is his power; his hand lies heavy upon me. Why should thy excellent wit, his gift, be so blinded that thou shouldest give no glory to the Giver? . . . With thee I joyne young Juvenal [believed to mean Lodge], that biting satyrist, that lastly with me together writ a comedy. Sweet boy! might I advise thee? be advised, and get not many enemies by bitter words. Inveigh against vaine men, for thou canst doe it, no man better; no man so well; thou hast a liberty to reprove all; and name none; for one being spoken to, all are offended; none being blamed, no man is injured. . . . And thou no lesse deserving than the other two [Peele]; in some things rarer, in nothing inferior; driven (as myselfe) to extreme shifts, a little have I to say to thee: and were it not an idolatrous oath, I would swear by sweet St. George, thou art unworthy better hap, sith thou dependeth on so mean a stay. Base-minded men, all three of you, if by my misery yee bee not warned; for unto none of you (like me) sought those burs to cleave; those puppets (I mean) that speake from our mouths; those anticks, garnisht in our colours. Is it not strange that I, to whom they all have bin beholding; is it not like that you, to whom they all have bin beholding, shall (were yee in that case that I am now) be both of them at once forsaken? Yes, trust them not; for there is an upstart crow beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygre's heart wrapt in a player's hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his owne conceyte, the onelie Shakescene in a country. O! that I might entreat 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. . . . Delight not (as I have done) in irreligious oaths; despise drunkenness; flie lusts; abhor those epicures whose loose life hath made religion loathsome to your eares; and when they soothe you with terms of mastership, remember Robert Greene (whom they have often flattered) perishes for want of comfort." The passage we have emphasized was obviously levelled at Shakespeare; and the charge against him is, that he had remodelled plays originally written by Greene and his companions, and produced them as his own. This is apparent as well from the play on his name as by the words "his Tygre's heart wrapped in a player's hide," which parody a line, probably Greene's—"Oh, tygre's heart wrapt in a woman's hide," which Shakespeare has introduced in the third part of "King Henry the Sixth," from The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke.
Greene's pamphlet was published shortly after his death by Chettle, an acqaintance and fellow dramatist; and the advice to "those gentlemen who spend their wits in making plays" was very ill received by the parties to whom it was directed. They denied indeed the authenticity of the work, and insisted that it was the production of a living writer. With the view apparently of allaying the storm, Chettle, in a tract called Kind-Harts Dreame, which he printed a month or two later, put forth the following explanation and apology—"About three moneths since died M. Robert Greene, leaving many papers in sundry booksellers' hands: among others, his Groats worth of Wit, in which a letter written to divers play-makers is offensively by one or two of them taken; and because on the dead they cannot be avenged, they wilfully forge in their conceites a living author; and after tossing it to and fro, no remedy but it must light on me. How I have, all the time of my conversing in printing, hindered the bitter inveying against schollers, it hath been very well knowne, and how in that I dealt I can sufficiently proove. With neither of them that take offence was I acquainted, and with one of them I care not if I never be: the other whome at that time I did not so much spare as since I wish I had, for that as I have moderated the heate of living writers, and might have usde my owne discretion (especially in such a case, the author being dead) that I did not, I am as sorry as if the originall fault had beene my fault, because my selfe have seene his demeanor no lesse civill than he exclent in the qualitie he professes: besides, divers of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writting that approves his art. For the first, whose learning I reverence, and at the perusing of Greenes book stroke out what then in conscience I thought he in some displeasure writ, or, had it beene true, yet to publish it was intollerable, him I would wish to use me no worse than I deserve."
We may fairly presume that the first person here spoken of as having taken offence at Greene's admonition, and with whom Chettle expresses unwillingness to be acquainted, was Marlowe. The other, strange to say, is assumed by all his modern editors to be Shakespeare, though a very little attention to Chettle's statement shows plainly he could not be meant. We are distinctly told that the letter in A Groats worth of Wit was written to divers play-makers, and by one or two of them offensively taken. Was Shakespeare one of the play-makers to whom Greene's epistle was directed? So far from it, his pretensions to authorship are in this very letter held up to the derision of those dramatists. How then could he possibly be referred to as "one of them" who felt aggrieved by it? The second play-maker who took Greene's exhortations in anger must have been Lodge or Peele. More probably the former; since the words, "sweet St. George," almost prove the third to have been George Peele. Lodge at the period was a man of considerable distinction. He had written many successful works. "He was esteemed the best for satyr," Wood says, "among Englishmen." He was, we know, "excellent in the quality he professed," which was that of a physician; and he might reasonably feel indignant at being pilloried in print as the boon companion of men like Marlowe and Greene, who, notwithstanding their splendid abilities, were looked upon by many as hopelessly abandoned, God-denying reprobates.
A year after Greene's melancholy exit, our author's "Venus and Adonis" appeared; and in 1594 his "Lucrece," each being dedicated to the earl of Southampton. The bearing which these poems have upon the much-vexed question of Shakespeare's classical acquirements has never, perhaps, been sufficiently appreciated. It is incredible that a writer should make choice of two purely classical subjects, that he should invest them with classical allusions and expressions, and treat them in a manner not to be surpassed for accuracy of detail, unless his mind had been richly stored with the treasures of ancient fiction and history. About this period, too, Spenser's pastoral, entitled Colin Clouts Come Again, was issued from the press. The dedication to Sir Walter Raleigh is dated December 27, 1591; but that date is now known to be an error of the printer. In this poem, after enumerating under fanciful appellations several contemporary characters of note, the author writer—
" And there, though last not least, is Ætion;
A gentler shepheard may no where be found;
Whose muse, full of high thoughts invention,
Doth, like himselfe, heroically sound."
A passage which it is scarcely possible to doubt applied to Shake-
