Abstract
The earliest documented allusion to Shakespeare’s career as a dramatist is a notorious passage in Robert Greene’s autobiographical tract, A Groatsworth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance (1592). This sorry tale of his own degradation was no doubt fictionalised, but had a strain of desperate truth about it, since Greene was living in debt and squalour when he wrote it, and death was imminent. The tract ends with an address to three of Greene’s ‘fellow scholars about this city’ — Marlowe and (probably) Thomas Nashe and George Peele:
Base minded men all three of you, if by my misery you be not warned: for unto none of you (like me) sought those burrs to cleave: those puppets (I mean) that spake from our mouths, those antics garnished in our colours. 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 as 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 Tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and, being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.1
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Notes
This is to assume that Shakespeare was sole author of the Henry VI plays, or at least of the third part. This is the consensus of recent scholarship, though the issue was once much disputed. E. K. Chambers assumed thoughout The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford, 1923) — hereinafter referred to by ES — that at least parts 2 and 3 of Henry VI are Shakespeare’s reworkings of the anonymous Contention of York and Lancaster, as first mentioned in the Stationers’ Register in March 1594. He changed his mind, however, by the time of his William Shakespeare (1930), see Vol. I, pp 281–9. The modern opinion is that The Contention is actually a bad reconstruction of Shakespeare’s own plays.
Extracts from the relevant statutes are given in Chambers, ES, Vol. IV. pp. 269–71, 324–5. See A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560–1640 (London, 1985).
Timber, or Discoveries, lines 811–15. The tradition of envious rivalry between Jonson and Shakespeare (envious on Jonson’s part) is an invention of later generations; see R. Dutton, Ben Jonson: To the First Folio (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 23–4. Even Thomas Fuller’s delightful description (History of the Worthies of England, 1662) of their witcombats, Jonson like a solid but slow Spanish galleon, Shakespeare like a lighter English man-of-war, all quickness of wit and invention, is too late to be trustworthy. See Schoenbaum, A Compact Documentary Life, pp. 257–8.
See Honigmann’s Shakespeare’s Impact on His Contemporaries (London, 1982), pp. 53ff, and Shakespeare: The ‘Lost Years’, pp. 60–3.
Compare the dating of these plays proposed by Professor Honigmann in Shakespeare: The ‘Lost Years’ (pp. 128–9) with those in, for example Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean stage, 1574–1642, pp. 225–6 or J. L. Barroll, A. Leggatt, R. Hosley and A. Kernan, The Revels History of Drama in English, III: 1576–1613 (London, 1975) pp. xix–xxi.
See K. Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680 (London, 1982) p. 128.
See Levi Fox, ‘The Early History of King Edward VI School Stratfordupon-Avon’, Dugdale Society Occasional Papers, No. 29 (1984) p. 8.
See G. E. Bentley, The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time 1590–1642 (Princeton, 1971) pp. 88–110.
See J. L. Hotson, The Death of Christopher Marlowe (London, 1925).
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© 1989 Richard Dutton
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Dutton, R. (1989). Beginnings. In: William Shakespeare. Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14143-2_2
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