A Widely Acknowledged Work of ‘Robert Greene’

Abstract

In ‘An Unacknowledged Work of Robert Greene’ Arthur Freeman argues for including An Oration or Funeral Sermon, an English translation of a sermon delivered at the funeral of Pope Gregory XIII in 1585, in the Greenean canon. Freeman makes in the course of his argument two related claims that are supposed to illustrate what he calls the ‘faulty lines of scholarly communication’. First, he asserts that the ‘pamphlet … has never been included among lists of Greene’s works’; secondly, he avers that the work ‘passed unobserved by the dozens of writers on Greene from [William] Herbert’s time to our own’—that is, from circa 1786 to 1965.1 These claims demand reconsideration and correction because each is factually inaccurate. Furthermore, correcting them complicates Freeman’s argument as a whole. Taking the claims in reverse order, we find that An Oration had been attributed to Greene on several occasions prior and subsequent to Herbert’s republication of Joseph Ames’s Typographical Antiquities. To my knowledge, the earliest of these attributions appeared in William Oldys’s Catalogue of Pamphlets, which he compiled in conjunction with the Harleian Miscellany. Oldys tentatively identified the pamphlet’s translator as ‘Robert Greene … one of the greatest Pamphleteers, and Refiners of our Language in his Time’. Not only did Oldys give a fuller, more accurate transcription of the work’s title page than either Ames or Herbert were to give, but he also correctly identified the pamphlet’s bibliographical format (octavo), something that neither Ames nor Herbert were to do.2 The catalogue, Oldys’s remarks included, appeared again in Thomas Park’s nineteenth-century reprint of the miscellany.3 A similar observation about the accuracy of title-page transcription and bibliographical format can be made regarding the pamphlet’s entry in one of W. Carew Hazlitt’s many bibliographies. Yet, Hazlitt appears to have been more tentative than Oldys regarding its authorship, stating merely that the pamphlet included ‘a preface signed Robert Greene’.4