The rewards of authorship through the medium of the press were in those days small indeed; and paltry as was the dramatist's fee, the players were far better paymasters than the stationers. To become a sharer in a theatrical speculation offered a reasonable chance of competence, if not of wealth. If a sharer existed who was excellent" enough in "the quality" he professed to fill the stage creditably, and added to that quality a facetious grace in writing," there is no doubt that with "uprightness of dealing" he would, in such a company as that of the Blackfriars, advance rapidly to distinction, and have the countenance and friendship of " divers of worship."

CHAPTER VIII.

A BELIEF has been long entertained in England, that \ Greene and Peele either wrote in conjunction the Second and Third Parts of Henry VI., originally published as the two parts of the 'Contention,' or that Greene wrote one Part, and Peele the other Part; or that, at any rate, Greene had some share in these dramas. This was a theory propagated by Malone in his 'Dissertation;' and it rests not upon the slightest examination of the works of these writers, but solely on a far-famed passage in Greene's posthumous pamphlet (already referred to), the 'Groat's-worth of Wit,' in which he points out Shakspere as "a crow beautified with our feathers."

The entire pamphlet of Greene's is, perhaps, one of the most extraordinary fragments of autobiography that the vanity or the repentance of a sinful man ever produced. The recital which he makes of his abandoned course of life involves not only a confession of crimes and follies which were common to a very licentious age, but of particular and especial depravities, which even to mention argues as much shamelessness as repentance. The portion, however, which relates to the subject before us stands alone, in conclusion, as a friendly warning out of his own terrible example:-" To those gentlemen, his quondam acquaintance, that spend their wits in making plays, R. G. wisheth a better exercise, and wisdom to prevent his extremities."

To three of his quondam acquaintance the dying man addresses himself. To the first, supposed to be Marlowe― "thou famous gracer of tragedians"-he speaks in words as terrible as came from

"that warning voice, which he who saw Th' Apocalypse heard cry in heaven aloud."

In exhorting his friend to turn from atheism, he ran the risk of consigning him to the stake, for Francis Kett was burnt for his opinions only three years before Greene's death. That Marlowe resented this address to him we have the testimony of Chettle. With his second friend, supposed to be Lodge, his plain speaking is much more tender: “Be advised, and get not many enemies by bitter words." He addresses the third, supposed to be Peele, as one “driven as myself to extreme shifts;" and he adds, “thou art unworthy better hap sith thou dependest on so mean a stay.” What is the stay? "Making plays." The exhortation then proceeds to include the three "gentlemen, his quondam acquaintance, that spend their wits in making plays."— "Base-minded men all three of you, if by my misery ye be not warned: for unto none of you, like me, sought those burs to cleave; those puppets, I mean, that speak from our mouths: those antics garnished in our colours." Up to this point the meaning is perfectly clear. The puppets, the antics, by which names of course are meant the players, whom he held, and justly, to derive their chief importance from the labours of the poet, in the words which they uttered, and the colours with which they were garnished,— had once cleaved to him like burs.

But a change had taken place: "Is it not strange that I, to whom they all have been beholding—is it not like that you, to whom they all have been beholding, shall, were ye in that case that I am now, be, both, of them at once forsaken?" This is a lamentable picture of one whose powers, wasted by dissipation and enfeebled by sickness, were no longer required by those to whom they had once been serviceable. As he was forsaken, so he holds that his friends will be forsaken. And chiefly for what reason? "Yes, trust them not: for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that, with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's

hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blankverse as the best of you: and, being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country." There can be no doubt that Shakspere was here pointed at; that the starving man spoke with exceeding bitterness of the successful author; that he affected to despise him as a player; that, if "beautified with our feathers" had a stronger meaning than "garnished in our colours," it conveyed a vague charge of borrowing from other poets; and that he parodied a line from the 'Contention.' This is literally every word that can be supposed to apply to Shakspere. Greene proceeds to exhort his friends "to be employed in more profitable courses."-" Let these apes imitate your past excellence, and never more acquaint them with your admired inventions."-" Seek you better masters." It is perfectly clear that these words refer only to the players generally; and, possibly, to the particular company of which Shakspere was a member. As such, and such only, must he take his share in the names which Greene applies to them, of " "" rude grooms,"apes," "buckram gentlemen," -" peasants,”—and "painted monsters." It will be well to give the construction that has been put upon these words, in the form in which the "hypothesis" was first propounded by Malone:

"Shakspeare having therefore, probably not long before the year 1592, when Greene wrote his dying exhortation to his friend, new-modelled and amplified these two pieces (the two parts of the 'Contention'), and produced on the stage what in the folio edition of his works are called the Second and Third Parts of King Henry VI., and having acquired considerable reputation by them, Greene could not conceal the mortification that he felt at his own fame, and that of his associate, both of them old and admired playwrights, being eclipsed by a new upstart writer (for so he calls our great poet) who had then first perhaps attracted the notice of the public by exhibiting two plays, formed upon old dramas written by them, considerably enlarged and improved. He therefore in direct terms charges him with having acted like the crow in the fable, beautified himself with their feathers; in other words, with having acquired fame

furtivis coloribus, by new-modelling a work originally produced by them: and wishing to depreciate our author, he very naturally quotes a line from one of the pieces which Shakspere had thus rewritten, a proceeding which the authors of the original plays considered as an invasion both of their literary property and character. This line, with many others, Shakspere adopted without any alteration. The very term that Greene uses,—' to bombast out a blank verse,’– exactly corresponds with what has been now suggested. This new poet, says he, knows as well as any man how to amplify and swell out a blank verse. Bumbast was a soft stuff of a loose texture, by which garments were rendered more swelling and protuberant."

Thus, then, the starving and forsaken man-rejected by those who had been "beholding" to him; wanting the very bread of which he had been robbed, in the appropriation of his property by one of those who had rejected him; a man, too, prone to revenge, full of irascibility and selflove contents himself with calling his plunderer “an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers"-"a Johannes factotum". -"the only Shake-scene in the country." "He. could not conceal his mortification!" It would have been miraculous if he could. And how does he exhibit it? He parodies a line from one of the productions of which he had been so plundered, to carry the point home—to leave no doubt as to the sting of his allusion. But, as has been most justly observed, the epigram would have wanted its sting, if the line parodied had not been that of the very writer attackeda. Be this as it may, the dying man, for some cause or other, chose to veil his deep wrongs in a sarcastic allusion. He left the manuscript containing this allusion to be published by a friend; and it was so published. It was 66 Ia perilous shot out of an elder gun." But the matter did not stop here. The editor of the posthumous work actually apologised to the "upstart crow.' This apology was not written by Chettle at some distant period; it came out in the same year with the pamphlet which contained the insult. The terms which he uses"uprightness of dealing," and "facetious grace in writing"

• 'Edin. Review' July, 1840.

-seem as if meant distinctly to refute the vague accusation of “beautified with our feathers." It is perfectly clear that Chettle could not have used these terms if Shakspere had been the wholesale plunderer, either of Greene or of any other writer, that it is assumed he was by those who deprive him of the authorship of the two Parts of the 'Contention.'

It appears to us that Greene, in his attack on the reputation of our great poet, has rendered to his memory the most essential service. He has fixed the date of the 'Second Part of the 'Contention.' However plausible may be the conjectures as to the early production of two or three of Shakspere's comedies, the 'Romeo and Juliet,' and even the first 'Hamlet,' there is no positive landmark on them for our direction. But in the case of the First Part of Henry VI.,' and the two Parts of the 'Contention,' we have the most unquestionable proof, in Greene's parody of a line from the Second Part (the third of the series), that they were popularly known in 1592. The three Parts are so dependent each upon the other, that the order of their production must have been the order of the historical events. They either belonged, therefore, to the first half of the decad between 1585 and 1595, or they touched very closely upon it.

It is highly probable that, when the First Part of 'Henry VI.' was originally produced, the stage had possession of a complete series of chronicle histories, rudely put together, aspiring to little poetical elevation, and managed pretty generally after the fashion described by Gosson, in a pamphlet against the stage printed about 1581:— "If a true history be taken in hand, it is made like our shadows, longest at the rising and falling of the sun, shortest of all at high noon; for the poets drive it most commonly into such points as may best show the majesty of their pen in tragical speeches, or set the hearers agog with discourses of love, or paint a few antics to fit their own humours with scoffs and taunts, or bring in a show to furnish the stage when it is bare : when the matter of itself comes short of this, they follow the practice of a cobbler, and set their teeth to the leather to pull it out." The truth is, that up to the period when Shakspere reached the age of manhood, there were no artists in existence competent to produce an historical play superior