Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age (30 page)

Elizabeth and Sidney were far opposed, representatives of contrary tendencies of the age. She was the voice of experience, he the voice of innocence. They became united in the affection of their countrymen who forgave the Queen her faults and remembered Sidney only for his virtues:

            Sidney, as he fought

And as he fell, and as he lived and loved,

Sublimely mild, a spirit without spot.

To live in the national imagination is a fame reserved for few.

1
   Catherine de Medici, the dowager Queen of France, whose compromising policies were generally held to have aggravated the religious troubles of the land.

10

Robert Greene

H
IS NAME WAS
notorious. ‘I know you are not unacquainted with the death of Robert Greene’, his printer wrote to his readers, ‘whose pen in his lifetime pleased you as well on the stage, as in the stationers’ shops.’ His work was prolific, his death sad and edifying; but his origins were obscure, and his conduct a scandalous enigma. In troubled times he came to London, a provincial youth of bright attainments whose feckless and indulgent life challenged the old order of society. Like a little meteor he blazed for a while, and died suddenly.

Greene was born in 1558, in Norwich, where his parents, as he wrote in his
Repentance
, ‘for their gravity and honest life were well known and esteemed amongst their neighbours’. His father was not rich; when Robert went to university he was a poor sizar, a scholar who waited at table in return for his tuition. But the family did their best, as the son admitted: ‘My father had care to have me in my nonage brought up at school, that I might through the study of good letters grow to be a friend to myself, a profitable member to the commonwealth, and a comfort to him in his age.’ Greene became none of these things.

In November 1575 Greene went to St John’s College, Cambridge. The Reformation in England had severely damaged Oxford and Cambridge, since both had been intimately connected with the Church, and when Greene arrived at St John’s his university was in the process of recovering and changing. Oxford, with its Catholic sympathies, had suffered the more, and now Cambridge was rivalling the reputation and achievements of the older institution. The new colleges, Queens’, Christ’s, St John’s, were founts of the New Learning of the Renaissance, being particularly strong on Greek studies. Sir John Cheke, the greatest Greek scholar of the day, Roger Ascham, Elizabeth’s tutor, and William Cecil, her great minister, had all been at St John’s; no
wonder the Queen looked favourably on Cambridge. She visited it first, in 1564, and Cecil—Lord Burghley—was the chancellor of the university. Elizabeth’s government was also pleased that the religion of Cambridge was distinctly Protestant, though later the university fell somewhat from grace when it became the breeding place for Puritans. But in the first days of the reign, when the Queen was anxious to assert her mastery over all aspects of national life, the Reformed faith of Cambridge enabled the university to accept the secular spirit of the new reign. The government could rest easy that the sons of Cambridge were being prepared to become good servants of the State.

Other changes were afoot. The colleges ‘were erected by their founders’, William Harrison wrote in the
Description of England
, ‘at the first only for poor men’s sons, whose parents were not able to bring them up unto learning; but now they have the least benefit of them, by reason the rich do so encroach upon them’. In the Middle Ages the universities had provided the poor, diligent clerics that the vast organization of the Church required; now the university was becoming the place where the gentleman completed his education, perhaps with no thought at all of a life in the Church. There was now some competition for preferment in which the poor student was at a disadvantage: ‘it is in my time’, wrote Harrison, ‘an hard matter for a poor man’s child to come by a fellowship (though he be never so good a scholar and worthy of that room).’ And the new wealthy students brought a new attitude to their studies, a casual approach of those who knew that their prospects in life, because of their birth and connections, did not desperately depend on a university degree. ‘I would I had bestowed’, lamented Sir Andrew Aguecheek in
Twelfth Night
, ‘that time in the tongues that I have in fencing, dancing and bear-baiting. O had I but followed the arts.’

In 1575 there were temptations enough to distract the poor, young student. ‘Such playing at dice,’ Lyly wrote of the Oxford of the time, ‘such quaffing of drink, such daliance with women, such dancing, that in my opinion there is no quaffer in Flanders so given to tippling, no courtier in Italy so given to riot, no creature in the world so misled as a student.’ The student was becoming better known for his style than his study; in the manner of the country gentleman he played when he could, and when he could not play he idled. John Earle, in the elegant portraits of his
Micro-cosmography
(1628), gave him this character: ‘The two marks of his seniority are the bare velvet of his gown and his proficiency at tennis, where when he can once play a set, he is a fresh-man no more. His study has commonly handsome shelves, his books neat silk strings, which he shews to his father’s man, and is loathe to untie or take down, for fear of misplacing.’

Some, of course, worked amid temptations; and Greene, a poor scholar, needed his degree. In 1578 he graduated from St John’s and passed on to Clare Hall where he became, in 1583, Master of Arts. He had studied the philosophy of Aristotle and perhaps flirted with the Protestant logic of Ramus fashionable at Cambridge. He had looked into the works of Cardano for arithmetic, Euclid for geometry, and Ptolemy for astronomy. Cicero and Quintilian had taught him rhetoric. He knew the Latin poets well, and the plays of Seneca; he was likely to have some knowledge of Greek and French. His learning was sufficiently solid for Oxford also to grant him a degree. After 1588 he proudly announced himself as
Academiae Utriusque Magister in Artibus
—‘Master of Arts in both Universities’. But his studies did not prevent him from tasting the pleasures of the place. The poor young man plunged happily into the world of the idle wits. ‘At the University of Cambridge’, he wrote in his
Repentance
, ‘I light amongst wags as lewd as myself, with whom I consumed the flower of my youth.’

After university, foreign travel was a usual course for young gentlemen. ‘Travel, in the younger sort,’ said Francis Bacon, ‘is a part of education.’ And Greene was drawn to Italy and Spain by his wealthy friends at Cambridge. For Bacon, the travels of the student were to be a sober and diligent time: he was to keep a diary; observe architecture, harbours, fortifications; attend the courts of justice and church consistories; visit libraries and colleges; listen to disputations and lectures; look at comedies, pageants and fairs; and enquire into the business of governments, armies and merchants. And most of all he was to remain modest and English; ‘let it appear that he doth not change his country manners for those of foreign parts, but only prick in some flowers of that he hath learned abroad into the customs of his own country.’

But many of the young travellers were rich, idle and wilful; and the wonders of their voyages spun their giddy heads. ‘Farewell, Monsieur Traveller,’ says Rosalind to the affected and melancholy Jaques in
As You Like It
: ‘look you lisp, and wear strange suits,
disable all the benefits of your own country, be out of love with your nativity, and almost chide God for making you that countenance you are; or I will scarce think you have swam in a gondola.’ Italy, indeed, the home of notorious Machiavelli where Renaissance princes luxuriated in sin and wealth, was thought particularly dangerous to unsophisticated English lads. ‘Italy now is not that Italy, that it was wont to be’, Ascham wrote in
The Scholemaster
(1570): ‘and therefore now not so fit a place, as some do count it, for young men to fetch either wisdom or honesty from thence.’ Alas, he admitted, the very reputation of the place made the young eager to try its charms; ‘many of our travellers into Italy do not eschew the way to Circe’s court, but go, and ride, and run, and fly thither.’ Greene and his companions were of this kind. In Italy and Spain, he wrote, ‘I saw and practised such villany as is abominable to declare.’

For his friends, the case was perhaps not serious, for they had money to squander and secure places to return to at home. But Greene was from a poor family living beyond his means in spend-thrift company. He became proud and touchy, and the expenses of his life led him into deceit. He sponged on his family, tricking his father and playing on the tender heart of his mother, ‘so that being then conversant with notable braggarts, boon companions and ordinary spend-thrifts, that practised sundry superficial studies, I became a sien grafted into the same stock, whereby I did absolutely participate of their nature and qualities’. Everything joined to divorce him from family and home—his education, his new luxurious habits, his pride, his dishonesty. He could not go back to Norwich and the provincial life. ‘At my return into England, I ruffled out my silks, in the habit of
Malcontent
, and seemed so discontent, that no place would please me to abide in, nor no vocation cause me to stay myself in.’ He had become the displaced man.

The social changes of the sixteenth century made it the century of the dispossessed. Agrarian reform, enclosures, the advent of capitalism, wide-spread inflation, the Reformation and the dissolution of the monasteries—all shook the social fabric. Vagrancy and lawlessness were the preoccupation of Tudor government. Numberless measures for their control were passed, but the country still seemed overburdened with turbulent men, thrown out of their accustomed order and living on their wits. All observers remarked
on the extraordinary dislocation of everyday life. ‘There is no country in the world’, an Italian visitor wrote around 1500, ‘where there are so many thieves and robbers as in England; insomuch that few venture to go alone in the country, excepting in the middle of the day, and fewer still in the towns at night, and least of all in London.’ Harrison, writing in about 1577, dated the increase in vagabondage from the first decade of the century. ‘It is not yet full threescore years since this trade began,’ said his
Description of England
: ‘but how it has prospered since that time it is easy to judge, for they are now supposed, of one sex and another, to amount unto above 10,000 persons.’ In 1594 Sir John Spenser, Lord Mayor of London, estimated the number of begging poor in London alone at 12,000. In England, three to four hundred vagrant rogues were hanged each year; according to Strype’s
Annals
, the searches of 1569 caught some 13,000 master-less men.

The ranks of the vagabonds included all sorts of men and women. Very many were peasants turned off the land by enclosures. Others, particularly at the beginning of the century, were disbanded retainers from the feudal armies. Later, soldiers discharged at Plymouth, Dover or Southampton after a foreign expedition were reluctant to go home; used to a riotous, brutal life of arms, they took their pay and formed robber gangs. In 1589 the remnants of an unsuccessful expedition to Portugal, which had been led by Drake and Norris, drifted up to London and threatened the city so that martial law was proclaimed and 2,000 militiamen called out. Other vagabonds were servants of aristocrats, perhaps dismissed for bad service, or perhaps let go because inflation caused the lord to cut back his expenses. And yet others were churchmen and monastic servitors cast adrift by the Reformation—former monks and friars, pardoners and proctors, monastic butlers, valets, cellarmen, gardeners, etc. And last of all there were the gypsies, known to the Elizabethans as ‘Egyptians’. The gypsies had first come to England in the middle of the fifteenth century, and their strange appearance and wandering ways were immediately suspicious. ‘They be swart and do go disguised in their apparel contrary to other nations’, Andrew Borde wrote in 1547. ‘They be light-fingered and use picking; they have little manner and evil lodging, and yet they be pleasant dancers.’ As early as 1530 Parliament began to legislate against them; in 1562 it was
enacted that anyone consorting with Egyptians and counterfeiting their speech and behaviour would be apprehended as a felon.

The placeless man, especially if he had some skill or education, would make for London. There, in the huts, hovels and brothels of the liberties on the edge of the city, he could escape detection, avoiding the expulsion, branding or execution that Tudor justice had in store for him. In London he found a flourishing underworld, the despair of the city fathers, which derided the good order beloved of the Tudor governments. The cheat found his mark, the libertine his women, the gambler his dice, the drunkard his taverns, the idler his scraps of charity; all who wished to pit their wits against fortune found a great public to be gulled. A young man such as Greene, by turns angry, discontented, proud and ashamed, was inevitably drawn to the capital city. He returned from Italy and completed his studies for the M.A. degree at Clare Hall. But academic life was not for one who had tasted sweeter joys; ‘being new come from Italy (where I learned all the villanies under the heavens) I was drowned in pride, whoredom was my daily exercise, and gluttony with drunkenness was my only delight’. He was also a budding author, his romance
Mamillia
having been written in 1580. He wandered like a distracted dog between Cambridge, London and Norwich. He married a gentleman’s daughter, had a child by her, and left her. That event seemed to have decided him; his wife left for Lincolnshire and he for London, there to win his bread as a hack author.

In London, Greene became ‘a penner of Love Pamphlets, so that I soon grew famous in that quality’. When he began to write fiction, the art was under the influence of Lyly’s
Euphues
(1578). That famous work was ornate, rhetorical, didactic, and Greene deliberately incorporated these qualities into his own work. The rambling, digressive, unlikely stories he told were tales of the European romances set in Italy, Spain, Arcadia—anywhere but England. And to these accounts of broken hearts, true love, lovers’ sacrifice, lust, fortitude, he added the little moral lesson. He would speak of wifely obedience, he wrote in
Penelopes Web
, ‘that both we may beguile the night with prattle, and profit our minds with some good and virtuous precepts’. He had stories to illustrate chastity, to show the evil influence of love, to praise silence in women, to condemn adultery, to glorify country life, and many others of a similar kind. His high-flown prattle and his virtuous sentiments
pleased the ladies; his friend Thomas Nashe called him ‘the Homer of women’.