Bob Grumman's Last Words - An Essay on Greene and Chettle

[Jim KQKnave]

Of Greene and the Upstart Crow


Bob Grumman


The famous "upstart Crow" passage from Greene's Groats-worth of Wit seems
pretty straight-forwardly to identify
Shakespeare as an actor/playwright just coming into his own in the late 1580's
and early 1590's. All the reputable scholars in
the field seem agreed on that. Arrayed against them, not surprisingly, are
those who believe that some aristocrat, or group of
aristocrats, wrote the plays of Shakespeare, since none of the aristocrats they
are backing is known to have acted on the
public stage, while the Stratford man almost certainly did. It is mainly to
counter the inexhaustible and sometimes amazingly
strained arguments of the latter, but also in friendly disagreement about
details with some of the people on my side of the
authorship controversy that I now offer my own interpretation of the passage.

Before I do that, I want to deal with two side-questions. The first is whether
the letter containing the "upstart Crow" passage
can properly be discussed as an isolated text. Diana Price, following A. D.
Wraight, claims that the Groats-worth is a coherent
whole, and that the writer of the letter should be taken as the character
Roberto, the hero of one story in Greene's pamphlet,
and the Crow as the actor who leads Roberto astray in that story. I disagree.
True, Greene (or his editor, probably Henry
Chettle) provides a transition to his letter from the material in his pamphlet
just before it, saying there that "to my fellowe
Schollers about this Cittie, will I direct these few insuing lines." But while
he narrates "Roberto's Tale" in the third person, the
letter is explicitly from Robert Greene, in the first-person, to three fellow
playwrights. Nor does Greene indicate in any way
that the Greene of the letter is the same man as Roberto.

Furthermore, as Terry Ross pointed out in a communication to the Internet
Shakespeare-discussion newsgroup he and I
participate in, Price fails to support her contention that the Groats-worth is
a unified whole with a "reading of the Lamilia
episode and fable, of 'Roberto's Tale' or indeed of the greater part of the
work." The letter and the rest of the pamphlet's
contents seem quite clearly a collection of miscellaneous texts that Greene,
when he died, left in the possession of a book-seller
(as Chettle says happened with many of Greene's papers). The book-seller
decided to make a book of them to cash in on the
publicity Greene's death no doubt generated, and which the sensationalistic
letter very likely also would. I therefore feel little
guilt in analyzing the letter by itself, without reference to the rest of the
Groats-worth.

The second of the side-questions I want to get out of the way is whether Greene
actually wrote the "upstart Crow" passage.
Against it is one investigator's stylometric study of the Groatsworth as a
whole, and a few lines in the pamphlet that
mis-identify the woman Greene was living with when he died as the mother of his
son, Fortunatus. This latter, however, could
easily have been the mistake of Greene's editor, and it would seem from Henry
Chettle's later words about the Groatsworth,
that it did have an editor in the person of Chettle himself. And the
stylometric study, like all such studies, was far from
conclusive. I believe that most of the Groats-worth was by Greene mainly
because it makes sense: his name was on the
pamphlet; the pamphlet came out within a fortnight of his death, which suggests
that the material was ready at hand (though,
yes, it could easily have been thrown together by someone else, the Grub
Streeters of the time being very facile at that kind of
thing); and Greene himself was renowned for how much he wrote, so it would be
surprising if he'd not left behind quite a heap
for possible publication. In particular, I'm convinced that the letter is all
Greene from its feel of genuineness (yes, subjectivity
does get into it)--it all spurts out of the bitter temperment and in the
caustic style known to have been Greene's, and from a
greater familiarity with his closest contemporaries, and vocational milieu than
Chettle, younger and newer to the scene, would
have been likely to have had.

Of course, the identity of the writer of the letter is not crucially important
to its content, which I will now finally attempt to pin
down--after quoting the most relevant part of it (and providing the background
information that the three unnamed
playwright-acquaintances Greene addresses are believed by scholars to have been
Christopher Marlowe, George Peele and
Thomas Nashe):

. . . Base minded men al three of you, if by my miserie ye be not warned : for
unto none of you (like me) sought those burres to
cleave : those Puppits (I meane) that speake from our mouths, those Anticks
garnisht in our colours. Is it not strange that I, to
whom they al have beene beholding : is it not like that you, to whome they all
have beene beholding, shall (were ye in that case
that I am now) be both at once of them forsaken?Yes trust them not : for there
is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers,
that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide, supposes he is as well able
to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of
you : and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the
onely Shake-scene in a countrie.O that I might
intreate your rare wits to be imployed in more profitable courses: & let those
Apes imitate your past excellence, and never
more acquaint them with your admired inventions.I know the best husband of you
all will never prove an Usurer, and the
kindest of them / all will never proove a kinde nurse : yet whilst you may,
seeke you better Maisters; for it is pittie men of such
rare wits, should be subject to the pleasures of such rude groomes.

My object is to establish, once and for all, just who--and what--the "upstart
Crow" was (at least in Greene's mind). The first
item to take care of, as I see it, is the phrase, "Tygers heart wrapt in a
Players hide." It's hard to understand how anyone could
claim that this is not a parody of the line, "O Tiger's heart wrapped in a
woman's hide," from Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 3,
but many Shakespeare Authorship revisionists do.

Mark Alexander, in summarizing their arguments at his Oxfordian website, notes
that "The Tygers hart line was not seen in
published form until 1595 in the quarto of The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of
Yorke [which most scholars deem a "bad
quarto" version of 3 Henry VI], and the quarto lists no author on the title
page. In fact, the first indication we have that the play
containing this line was Shakespeare's is in the First Folio of 1623, which
first attached the Shakespeare name to 3 Henry VI.
So a reference to that line would not necessarily and automatically trigger
thoughts of William Shakespeare."

Alexander next claims that the passage from 3 Henry VI containing the "Tyger's
heart" line "conveys dignity, beauty, and
power. It shows a command of language and imagery. Greene could not have been
ignorant of these facts. This understanding
supports the possibility that Greene used the tiger's heart allusion to
characterize rather than to identify the upstart crow."

Reaching maximal silliness, Alexander goes on to quote W. Ron Hess's discovery
that "comparing a woman to a tiger or
pointing to a tigrish heart has a history prior to Shakespeare," citing--among
other instances--L. Loyd's 1573 "Her cruel and
Tigrish heart," Gascoigne's 1576 "(Tygrelike) she toke The little boy," and G.
Pettie Guazzo’s 1581 "So monstrous a creature .
. . that it was doubtfull whether she were a woman or a tigar," and so on.
"From this," says Alexander, "we can see that the
phrase 'tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide' could possibly have a history
as well, and that Greene and Shakespeare could
be either drawing from a common source or simply conveying a known metaphor. In
1600, Samual Nicholson in his Acolasus
wrote: 'O woolvish heart wrapt in a womans hyde.' Shall we automatically assume
that Nicholson was alluding to Shakespeare
or Greene?" In other words, to Alexander, it's possible that Greene originated
the phrase!

He even brings in Richard, the Lion-hearted, to show that "the idea of 'animal
hearted'" has a long history. Then Alexander
reaches the peak of his Oxfordian practice of muddying everything he can into
his argument by noting "that an outdoor boy
servant was traditionally called a 'tiger.'" He doesn't know if this term was
ever applied to a boy playing a female role on the
Elizabethan stage but, says he, if it had been, then such a boy would have been
a "tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide."

Alexander concludes that "it is reasonable to think that Greene's audience (the
three playwrights) would understand the Tygers
hart allusion to simply characterize the upstart actor as ruthless. There is no
compelling reason to believe that the allusion is an
attempt to indirectly identify the upstart actor as the author of the passage."

Of course, the allusion does not "attempt to indirectly identify the upstart
actor as the author of the passage," it directly
establishes that by (1) being in italics to announce that it is a quotation
(albeit one slightly modified for satirical reasons), and
(2) being termed "his." Even if the line were not in italics, how can anyone
imagine Greene would have taken so cumbersome a
way of calling the Crow ruthless?

That Greene would have recognized the passage in 3 Henry VI (and that play as a
whole) as too magnificent to refer
sarcastically to is absolute nonsense, and shows an almost complete ignorance
of human nature. In the first place, the play as a
whole is clearly apprenticework. It is a very stilted collection of set pieces.
But even if it weren't, would Greene, well-known
for his dislikes, be emotionally capable of recognizing its excellence?
Certainly he never seems to have recognized the signal
achievement of Marlowe in blank verse. Why would he be different with the work
of Shakespeare, especially if Shakespeare
were indeed without the university degrees that Greene set so much store by,
and were a suddenly consequential rival?

As for all the instances of "tiger" and "woman" and "heart" that in various
combinations pre-dated Greene's use of them, they
would mean next to nothing even if Greene's "tiger" line hadn't been
italicized. The First Folio tells us that Shakespeare wrote 3
Henry VI, The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke tells us that the line was
undoubtedly always in the play, and would
almost certainly have been available for quotation in 1592 when Greene wrote
the "upstart Crow" letter, since Nashe had by
then referred in print to 1 Henry VI, and the way things worked then, all three
plays about Henry VI would most likely have
been on the boards.

This not to say that Shakespeare would not have been influenced by the many
such figures of speech in circulation when he
wrote 3 Henry VI. As David Kathman pointed out to me in a private
communication, "A couple of his plays written soon
afterward have similar metaphors: 'thou bear'st a woman's face,.../ When did
the tiger's young ones teach the dam' (Titus
Andronicus II.iii.136-42) and 'O serpent heart, hid with a flowering face!'
(Romeo & Juliet III.ii.73)." This only suggests that
Shakespeare, as everyone knows, was world-class at absorbing and re-working the
images and ideas of his times. It doesn't
come close to meaning that he must have picked up his whole "tyger's heart"
line from elsewhere. Or that Greene, influenced
by the same figures of speech, would have been even slightly as likely to have
invented the "tyger's heart" line as to have
parodied the line as Shakespeare had it.

Nicholson also clearly re-used Shakespeare's line, ever-so-slightly modified--
most likely having taken it directly from 3 Henry
VI (which Don Foster's computer investigations indicate might well have been
revived in the 1599-1600 season, just before
Nicholson's use of the line). On the other hand, he might have gotten it from
Greene, although that would have meant his having
to change two instead of just one word--and it would still mean that he got it
from Shakespeare, albeit via Greene.

The bottom line is that "tyger's heart wrapped in a player's hide" is
italicized in the Groats-wroth, so it had to be from some
other author's work. This means that 3 Henry VI, with the "tyger's heart"
material, was being performed by 1592 or that some
other as-yet-unknown work with the "tyger's heart" line in it existed, which
seems extremely unlikely. In short, it is not
reasonable to believe that Greene's "tyger's heart" line was not taken from 3
Henry VI, nor that it was not considered by
Greene to be something belonging to the upstart Crow--as something that was, in
fact, his. This is not to say that Greene could
not also have meant to claim that the upstart Crow had a cruel heart; the
opportunity for a double meaning was there and
Greene very likely took it.

We are now ready to tackle the phrase "bumbast out a blanke verse." To set up
my analysis of this, I need to emphasize one
obvious attribute of Greene's letter invariably ignored by the anti-
Stratfordians: its expressing his deathbed bitterness against
actors in general for having forsaken him in his hour of need. That's why he
wonders, "Is it not strange that I, to whom they
[actors in general] have beene beholding : is it not like that you [the
playwrights he is addressing], to whome they all have been
beholding, shall (were ye in that case that I am now) be both at once
forsaken?" This comes between parts of his diatribe I did
not quote in which Greene had spoken of being at his "last end" and left
"desolate," and about to perish "for want of comfort."

Now then, orthodoxy interprets "bumbast out a blanke verse" as something along
the lines of, simply, "bat out a line of blank
verse." It is a rather scornful phrase, for Greene had long opposed the use of
blank verse in plays, and in his letter he is against
the whole London theatre world, which he asks his three acquaintances to get
out of. However minor part of plays bumbasted
lines might be, though, it still strikes Greene as ridiculous that the Crow
could think he could make them as well as "the best" of
his three acquaintances.

Those of the revisionists who believe the Crow was the man from Stratford
obviously cannot allow him credit for having
written the "Tyger's heart" line; hence, they contend that the phrase has to do
with an actor's improvising a line, or padding his
part. It is true that the original meaning of "bumbast" as a verb, according to
the Oxford Unabridged, was "To stuff, pad, or
fill out with cotton-wool, or the like, and that it came to mean, figuratively,
to inflate or stuff, or--most pertinently here--to
"render grandiose (a speech or literary composition) with bombastic language."
All these meanings were current in
Shakespeare's day.

>From this it follows that to "bumbast out blank verse" could be to insert
syllables into a line to get it to ten syllables. This would
suggest not improvision but something done by an author. While an actor, given
a line that needed stretching to make it blank
verse, could conceivably add syllables to it, it would seem highly unlikely in
this case because: (1) the line as a whole is
characterized by Greene as the Crow's, not just some additional words padded
into it; (2) it is hard to figure out what the line
would have been before it had been bumbasted if it had indeed been bumbasted:
"Tyger's heart in a woman?"--that is, the line
sounds unpadded (though quite bombastically and colorfully grand); and (3) how
would some actor's adding syllables to a line
of his (or anybody else's) make Greene feel so cruelly forsaken in his hour of
need (to get back to my set-up paragraph for this
section)?

As for the anti-Stratfordian notion that the whole line was improvised by an
actor (which, it seems to me, would have made
him a much better a poet than whoever it was whose play he was adding to--and
at least a co-author of that play since his line
was incorporated into it), there are several arguments against it. One, brought
to my attention by Tad Davis at the Shakespeare
Newsgroup on the Internet, is that Thomas Nashe used "bumbast" earlier than the
Groats-worth to mean, specifically, a piece
of writing. Indeed, the place Nashe used it was in his preface to a work by
Greene (!)--his Menaphon (1589). There Nashe
spoke of certain under-educated writers for the stage "who (mounted on the
stage of arrogance) think to out-brave better
pennes with the swelling bumbast of a bragging blanke verse." In competing with
"better pennes" (than they), they are clearly
acting as writers, not actors. This is a strong precedent for Greene's use of
the term as something written.

Second, I again ask if he makes any sense that, on his deathbed and miserable,
Greene would feel "forsaken" because some
actor has padded his part, either by adding words to a line or full lines to a
play? However conceited that actor might be?
Moreover, why would Greene suggest that the three playwrights' lines would be
similarly abused were they in similarly dire
straits? Would actors be expected to pad their parts at some playwright's
expense only when the playwright is on his
deathbed?

Clearly, Greene's main point is that actors as a class have no loyalty to
professional playwrights like he and his friends, and will
forsake them at the drop of a hat, no matter how in need, like Greene, they
are. Indeed, in one case a mere actor has decided
he can write plays as good as Greene's and his three play-writing
acquaintances, thus taking Greene's bread and butter away
from him, and a threat to do the same with the other playwrights' bread and
butter. That is the "forsaking" Greene is talking
about, not irresponsible ad-libbing. He is thus identifying the Crow with the
author of 3 Henry VI, whom we otherwise know
to have been William Shakespeare.

To solidify this identification--indeed, almost to prove it by itself--is
Greene's use of the term, "Shake-scene," an obvious pun
on "Shakespeare." The revisionists can only protest that this term was used by
chance, and had nothing to do with
Shakespeare, but there is no evidence that it was a term in general use in
Greene's time and therefore likely to have been used
by chance--or, in fact, that anyone ever used it but Greene, this once.
Furthermore, puns on people's names were common
then. Greene himself referred in an earlier pamphlet to Marlowe as "Merlin."

In short, Greene's use of "Shake-scene" coupled with his reference to "his"
line from 3 Henry VI, puts the upstart Crow's being
the author of the works beyond reasonable doubt. Since the man from Stratford
was the only possible author of the
Shakespearean plays who had both the right name and profession--and an age
appropriate to an upstart, to boot--Greene's
testimony pretty conclusively establishes him as the real Shakespeare.

Fairness behooves me to add that against this, Oxfordian Stephanie Hughes
follows Marlovian A. D. Wraight in proposing
actor Edward Alleyn as the crow. There is no evidence that Alleyn wrote the
"tyger's heart" line, however, nor would the
"Shake-scene" pun apply to him. There is no evidence that Alleyn ever wrote
plays, and might consequently have endangered
Greene's livelihood, either.

That the Crow was Oxford, as some anti-Stratfordians contend, seems to me even
less likely. First of all, would Greene
address him so contemptuously if he were? More to the point, how could Greene
view a man near 40, with a fair amount of
lyric poetry and, presumably, some plays behind him, as an "upstart" of any
kind? And this doesn't take into account the
absurdity of a noble's acting on the public stage without anyone's ever finding
out and noting it somewhere. Nor does it make
any sense for Oxford to have hidden his literary productions under a pseudonym,
and then used that same pseudonym as an
actor! There is also the problem of references to the actor Shakespeare after
Oxford died. According to Volker Multhopp,
one proponent of this hypothesis, at that point some other actor carried on as
"Shakespeare." How lucky, again, that no one
found out, or that those who did find out, never left anything in the records
of the time about their discovery, not even gossip.
And how could a conspiracy with so many participants have been effective?
Indeed, all sorts of other questions arise, like who
was the second actor calling himself Shakespeare, where'd he come from and what
happened to him? To be unscholarly about
it, the Oxford-as-Crow hypothesis just seems too tangledly nuts to be taken
seriously.

Another argument used by a number of anti-Stratfordians takes the position that
while Greene was referring to the Stratford
man in his Groats-worth, and considered him an actor, but was specifically
charging him with plagiarism. This isn't the most
effective argument they could use since a plagiarist i>is, after all, a writer. In any event, these Anti-Stratfordians quote the
passage from Greene I've given only from "Yes trust them not . . . " But the
two skipped sentences tell us that Greene has been
belittling actors as mere puppets who would be nothing without the words
furnished to them by Greene and his play-writing
friends, which strongly suggests that when Greene speaks of "the upstart Crow,
beautified in our feathers," he is simply
applying to Shakespeare, the actor, a variation on his metaphor of actors as
puppets (puppets, moreover, without color, like
crows) dependent on the words with which playwrights supply them.

More important, in the second skipped sentence, Greene asks, "Is it not strange
that I, to whom they (actors) al have beene
beholding : is it not like that you, to whome they all have beene beholding,
shall (were ye in that case that I am now) be both at
once of them forsaken?" The "case" that Greene was in, Greene elsewhere states,
was nearness to death (due to "want of
comfort)." Clearly, Greene's main point was that actors as a class had no
loyalty to professional playwrights like he and his
friends, and would turn against them at the drop of a hat, no matter how in
need, like Greene, they were. Especially now that,
in one case, a mere actor has decided he can write plays as good as Greene's,
thus rendering out-of-house playwrights
superfluous. That Greene is not concerned with plagiary is proved by his saying
that his three play-writing friends would also
likely be forsaken--were they in Greene's near-death situation. If he
considered the Crow a plagiarist--a stealer of "our
feathers"--he would not say that the Crow would forsake his friends later, when
they were about to die, for the Crow was
already beautified by their feathers (i.e., he would already have plagiarized
them); nor is it likely that he would he say that the
Crow would only plagiarize those who were near death, plagiarists generally not
being that picky about when they plagiarize.

Later in the passage, Greene begs his friends to boycott the actors, "and let
those Apes imitate your past excellence, and never
more acquaint them with your admired inventions." This sounds like possible
confirmation of the Crow-as-plagiarist thesis but
isn't. The word "imitate" here almost certainly means simply "make a
representation of, reproduce," not plagiarize; imitating is
admittedly close to plagiarizing, but it isn't plagiarizing. More important, if
Greene wanted to accuse the Crow of plagiarizing,
why would he not have done so directly; and why would he not have accused him
alone, rather than "those Apes," not all of
whom could have been plagiarizing him?

My conclusion: Greene was warning his acquaintances to beware of being dumped
by the actors--one of whom was even now
competing, flashily but clumsily, with them. Plagiarism was not the issue.

One last point, though there are dozens of fine details that the Anti-
Stratfordians contest for the sake of sowing confusion that I
lack the time to consider: it is the idea, forwarded by Diana Price and others,
that Greene's central concern in the upstart Crow
passage was usury, and that he was somehow accusing the Crow of forsaking him
as a usurer--refusing to give him a loan, I
take it. But there is nothing whatever in the one line concerned with the Crow
to indicate that usury was on Greene's mind at
that point. And the subject comes up only once in the letter, when Greene
writes "I know the best husband of you all will never
prove an Usurer, and the kindest of them / all will never poove a kinde nurse."
Needless to say, as an Anti-Stratfordian in
good standing, Price quotes this passage only to the word, "Usurer," thus
preventing her readers from realizing that Greene is
obviously merely making a comparison--unless she can say why a passage she
claims identifies the actors as usurers does not
by the same reasoning identify Marlowe, Peele and Nashe as nurses.

To sum up: the orthodox interpretation of Greene's passage is almost certainly
the correct interpretation: Greene warned his
three acquaintances to beware of the disloyalty and downright lack of human
decency of actors in general. He singled out
Shakespeare as one actor who had even taken to writing plays, to make actors
independent of playwrights like Greene.
Greene was clearly bitterly resentful and jealous of this actor's success as a
playwright. The only rational response to this left
for the Anti-Stratfordians is the claim that Greene was simply in the dark
about who really wrote 3 Henry VI. A weak position
since Greene seems to have known as much about what was going on in London
theatrical circles as anyone. It would also
sabotage one of the revisionists' principal dogmas, that everyone knew that
Shakespeare wasn't the man from Stratford, which
is why, among other things, no one (allegedly) immediately mourned him in print
when he died. Better a weak position, though,
than an entirely unsupportable one.




=============================================
In fact, there is so much evidence concerning Shakespeare's
authorship of Titus 1.1 that it is a major problem trying to
condense it all into a paper of reasonable length.

Search HLAS for: "bloopers part" for mistakes
in "Shakespeare, Co-Author"

Despite the many candidates proposed as the "true" author
of Shakespeare's works by the tin foil hats on this newsgroup,
William Shakespeare of Stratford remains the only candidate
supported by the historical evidence.

http://tinyurl.com/cojgwl

see also

http://ShakespeareAuthorship.com

The Droeshout portrait isn't unusual at all!
http://shakesandbacon.yolasite.com

Agent Jim
Fighting Pseudoscholarship One Day At A Time

[marco]

.The Shake-speare group authors had the means, motive & opportunity to embed their names (and/or the names of their dedicatees) into Ciphers & Codes.

Besides, my REVElations continue to improve in both quantity & quality
and I find satisfaction in that alone.

Art N.


Seeing an intelligent post addressed to Art Neuendorffer (from Sabrina)
I took Art out of my kill-file -- the first time in Ten years or more.
But then -- in the space of a couple of hours-- FIVE long posts of unreadable garbage landed in my in-box.

>> I heard the real key was in the Ciphers & Codes...
Whoever told you that is an idiot.
There is no need for codes or ciphers -- just plain common sense
is enough to tell you who the poet isn't, and who he must be.

.....if it's full of Neuendorffer crap (as most are) you may have
a problem finding anything.

So Neuendorffer goes back where he belongs--the kill-file, as a [boring] Troll.

.Paul Crowley

[Arthur Neuendorffer]

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle

<<In sociology of scientific knowledge, Planck's principle is the view that scientific change does not occur because individual scientists change their mind, but rather that successive generations of scientists have different views.

The reason for the name is the statements by Max Planck:

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it"

--Max Planck, Scientific autobiography, 1950, p. 33

"An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth."

--Max Planck, Scientific autobiography, 1950, p. 97

Planck's quote has been used by Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend and others to argue that scientific revolutions are arational, rather than spreading through "mere force of truth and fact". It has been described as Darwinian rather than Lamarckian conceptual evolution.>>
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[ArtNea...@germanymail.com]

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