Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age (32 page)

These social pamphlets of Greene are among the first examples of the now universal popular journalism. They have too much imagination to be quite ‘news’ reports in the modern sense, but they gave the appreciative public an entertaining prose picture, based on fact, of the London world, and this had hardly been attempted before in England. But for all their original virtues they were not great art. Greene wrote too fast and, as the popularity of his subject overtook him, too carelessly. ‘In a night and a day’, said Thomas Nashe, ‘would he have yarkt up a pamphlet as well as in seven years, and glad was that printer that he might be so blest to pay him dear for the very dregs of his wit.’ Also he had but a year to live. The riot of his life was catching up with him and his name was on every censorious tongue as an example of bad living. Gabriel Harvey, the Cambridge scholar who attacked him violently after his death, though he did not know Greene personally, had heard all about his ways: the debts he left at every lodgings; the meetings with criminals at Bankside, Shoreditch and Southwark; the libelling and the cheating; the desertion of his wife and the seduction of the sister of a rogue called ‘Cutting’ Ball by whom he had an illegitimate son; and the ‘contemning of superiors, deriding of others, and defying of all good order’.

As Greene’s body was undermined by excess, so his art was undermined by success. In 1592, in the last year of his life, he tried to marry the good qualities of the conny-catching pamphlets to a better sense of form. The results are three wistful works of varying success. The
Quip for an Upstart Courtier
showed what might be done. It is subtitled ‘a quaint dispute between velvet breeches and cloth breeches’ and is a lament for a lost age of simplicity, written in a lively controlled style that owed something to the early graces of his novels, and something to the direct plainness of his pamphlets.
The note of regret is what one might expect from a sick and disappointed man, but it seems that his despair was too much for him. In
Greene’s Vision
he declares that his work was in vain and worthless, and in his
Repentance
, the last confession of a sinful man, he damns his life entirely.

Greene’s sad end was related in picturesque detail by his enemy Harvey. After a ‘fatal banquet of pickle herring’ he lay amid his lice and begged for a penny-pot of malmsey. His friends and fellow writers deserted him, and his only companions were his mistress, his landlady and her husband. He was down to one shirt, his doublet, hose and sword being sold for three shillings; he owed his landlord £10. Here Greene’s printer took up the story. On the last night he heard that his deserted wife was well and sent him good wishes; he was glad, confessed that he had wronged her, and, knowing that his time was short, wrote her a letter: ‘Sweet wife, as ever there was any good will or friendship between thee and me see this bearer (my Host) satisfied of his debt: I owe him ten pound, and but for him I had perished in the streets. Forget and forgive my wrongs done unto thee, and Almight God have mercy on my soul. Farewell till we meet in heaven, for on earth thou shalt never see me more.’ He died on 3rd September 1592. His kind hostess crowned him with a garland of bay leaves and buried him in New Churchyard, near Bedlam.

‘He inherited more virtues than vices’, Nashe wrote in defence of his friend against the sour criticisms of Harvey. ‘Debt and deadly sin, who is not subject to? With any notorious crime I never knew him tainted.’ Unlucky, weak and wilful rather than bad, Greene might have passed unnoticed in a more forgiving time. Nor was he a rebel against society and country. To him, ‘fair England’ was the ‘flower of Europe’; London, with its vigorous trade, was equal to the ‘strongest city in the world’; and even English courtesans, he wrote in his
Never Too Late
, ‘are far superior in artificial allurement to them of all the world’—their looks ‘contain modesty, mirth, chastity, wantonness and what not’. Indeed, so far as he had political views, he regarded England as ‘this glorious Island’ corrupted from ideal simplicity by foreign, especially Italian, ways. Like many wild, indulgent men, he was a natural conservative and moralist. The pastoral sentiments of one of his gentle, conventional poems expressed well enough the world he could not find:

Sweet are the thoughts that savour of content,

    The quiet mind is richer than a crown,

Sweet are the nights in careless slumber spent,

    The poor estate scorn fortune’s angry frown,

Such sweet content, such mind, such sleep, such bliss

    Beggars enjoy when princes oft do miss.

When Greene came to manhood, there was no room already prepared for him in the English scheme of things. The universities, in their new secular life after the Reformation, were turning out young scholars at a great rate. By the middle of Elizabeth’s reign there were already too many of them, as the famous schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster pointed out. Living high at university, and having a good opinion of their abilities, these young men were then put out in the world and found nothing for them to do. They drifted to London looking for patrons and jobs, and they tried their hand at writing, for that was one task they were qualified to do. But the profession of hack writer as yet hardly existed. In former ages the writer had been an amateur, one who combined a love of literature with a place that paid his wages—in the Church, in the government, in trade, or in the nobleman’s household. Or the writer had been a man of independent means himself. Now, in the late sixteenth century, there was at last a growing public in London that would make commercial writing a possibility. But the market was difficult and badly organized, and the young learned wits, haughty and privileged until then, had to grub for their living, they had the difficult task of reconciling their pretensions with their needs. It is no wonder that many went astray.

In the
Quip for an Upstart Courtier
, Greene has left an excellent portrait of the Elizabethan author: ‘I espied far off a certain kind of an overworn gentleman, attired in velvet and satin; but it was somewhat dropped and greasy, and boots on his legs, whose soles waxed thin and seemed to complain of their master, which treading thrift under his feet, had brought them into that consumption. He walked not as other men in the common beaten way, but came compassing
circumcirca
, as if we had been devils and he would draw a circle about us, and at every third step he looked back as if he were afraid of a bailiff or a serjeant.’ Greene himself was such a figure, and he was put to many questionable shifts to keep alive. ‘Poverty is the father of innumerable infirmities’,
he complained. Certainly it made him write too much and too quickly; even Nashe admitted that ‘Greene came oftener in print than men of judgement allowed of’. And the same cause made him resort to a little ‘conny-catching’ on his own. Once he sold the same play to two companies; the Queen’s Players bought
Orlando Furioso
for 20 nobles,
¹
and when they were out of London Greene resold the play to the Lord Admiral’s men for the same amount.

Drinking, whoring, a little cheating, a lot of irresponsibility—it is not a great catalogue of crime. Many of Greene’s literary companions were involved in more desperate scrapes than he was. The poet Thomas Watson and the famous playwright Christopher Marlowe were arrested for homicide in 1589, and so too was Ben Jonson in 1598. The tragic dramatist Thomas Kyd was arrested for atheism in 1593; he was imprisoned and tortured, and tried to shift the blame onto Marlowe. Marlowe was a government agent of some kind, and was killed in an obscure brawl at Deptford. Anthony Munday was a paid informer and delivered up to the government Jesuits and Puritans alike. The attractive Thomas Lodge, being the son of a bankrupt, a prodigal and a Catholic, was forced to become an adventurer; he sailed on a couple of piratical expeditions, and afterwards, driven by need to all kinds of writing, showed as good a knowledge of low life as Greene. The equally attractive and brilliantly versatile Thomas Nashe was more than once in trouble with authority. In 1594 he was prosecuted by city fathers, and in 1597 his lodgings were searched by order of the Privy Council. It is no wonder that Greene, knowing the violence and despair of his colleagues, should have warned them, in one of his reforming moods, to note his bad life and mend theirs. ‘Look unto me’, he said in
Groatsworth of Wit
, addressed especially to Marlowe, ‘and thou shalt find it an infernal bondage. I know the least of my demerits merit this miserable death, but wilful striving against known truth, exceedeth all the terrors of my soul. Defer not (with me) till this last point of extremity; for little knowest thou how in the end thou shalt be visited.’ Less than a year later, Marlowe was dead, stabbed above the right eye at Eleanor Bull’s tavern on Deptford Strand.

In his penitent mood Greene was hard on his friends and very severe on himself. The picture he gives of himself in
Groatsworth of Wit
, his
Repentance
and his
Vision
is altogether too black and dramatic to be taken as the whole truth. Obviously there were men, and some in high places, far more evil than he was. But the English public, it seems, judged Greene to be as bad as he sometimes thought he was; for both the writer and his countrymen used the same standard of judgment. What worried respectable opinion about Greene and his fellow hacks was their rootlessness, their lack of a place in the scheme of things. The Elizabethans believed in order: the famous passage in Shakespeare’s
Troilus and Cressida
put this belief best:

The heavens themselves, and planets, and this centre

Observe degree, priority, and place,

Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,

Office, and custom, in all line of order:

and the speech goes on:

            How could communities,

Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,

Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,

The primogenitive and due of birth,

Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,

But by degree, stand in authentic place?

Take but degree away, untune that string,

And hark! what discord follows.

But who were these turbulent hacks? Greene was a poor man’s son, Marlowe was the son of a shoemaker, Nashe, Dekker and many another were born poor. They were educated, yet they had no profession (for hack author was not recognized as a proper vocation); they lived as gentlemen and consorted with rabble; they wrote on all topics, even society and government, in a way that authority found suspicious. In a word, they were disorderly themselves, and a force for disorder in others. Gabriel Harvey, himself a ropemaker’s son and a scholar, but acceptably placed as a university tutor, voiced the conventional view when he accused Greene for the ‘contemning of superiors, deriding of others, and defying of all good order’; and in another place he prayed that Greene’s works ‘have not done more harm by corruption of manners, than by quickening of wit’. Greene in his remorse accepted this criticism, for he was at heart a patriotic Englishman. He accused
himself and Marlowe of ‘atheism’, though by this he meant not so much religious unbelief, but bad living, questioning of authority, and acts against the well-being of the State.

Greene no doubt longed for the place that Elizabethan society was not yet ready to accord to the hack writer. Perhaps part of his animosity against the actors and the playwrights attached to the theatrical companies was because they had achieved an acceptance, almost a respectability, that the hack prose writer had not. In Elizabeth’s time, the theatre, like gambling, was a suspicious business; but again like gambling, the royal patents given to the various theatrical companies protected the stage and gave its servants a certain place in society.

But insecurity made Greene the writer he was. Because he had no settled place he sank; and because he needed to live by his pen he wrote about the world he knew. With him and a few others of his kind a note of common reality enters into English literature that had hardly existed before. And though this kind of writing was not always very accomplished, literature gained, for a large part at the bottom end of society that had been hidden before was suddenly illuminated. The conny-catchers, the rogues, the cheats, the cross biters and the bullies were not just types as they sometimes had appeared in the medieval ‘merrie tales’. They were figures taken from close observation who talked and swore and tricked in the pamphlets as they did in life. Greene’s experience in the shadows affected his art. He was one of those who helped to bring English fiction out of the foolish, artificial country of romance and to root it firmly in the ground of ordinary life. He became also, because he was one of them, the chronicler of the dispossessed, the portraitist of a sombre society that lay beneath the glittering successes of Elizabeth’s reign. Injustice and cruelty walked in the world he pictured, where too rapid social changes had left so many wandering, lawless and in despair.

1
   The noble was a gold coin worth 6s. 8d.

11

Tudor Playwrights

W
HEN
T
HOMAS
M
ORE
was a boy serving in the household of Cardinal Morton he took part in the dramatic interludes presented in the winter for the great man and his guests. These entertainments in the hall at Lambeth were at first a kind of morality play, simple allegories bringing home religious and moral lessons. Then, as repetition weakened the moral and wearied the onlookers with the dull formality of the drama, Henry Medwall, the Cardinal’s chaplain and resident playwright, tried to enliven the performance, having in mind pleasure rather than instruction. In
Fulgens and Lucrece
, written around 1497, he suppressed the allegory and told a secular tale of a wooing with plenty of incident and some characterization joined to a sub-plot of coarse rustic humour. The result was not a great play, but the audience found it ‘right honest solace’ for leisurely gentlemen in the contented hour after dinner. Since 1485 the times had been peaceful, and the country was becoming prosperous. Men were ready for whatever ingenious and attractive tales the playwright could devise for them.