Donald A Beecher and Grant Williams (eds). Henry Chettle, ‘Kind-Heart’s Dream’ and ‘Piers Plainness’: Two Pamphlets from the Elizabethan Book Trade

Abstract

Henry Chettle is probably best known to scholars of early modern literature as the author of a Hamlet-esque revenge drama, The Tragedy of Hoffman; as a co-author of a few other extant plays including Patient Grissel and The Death of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon; and as a bit-part-player in the history of Shakespeare’s early career, thanks to his authorship of Kind-Heart’s Dream. In the prefatory epistle to this 1593 pamphlet, Chettle responds to the charge that he is the real author of the Groatsworth of Wit attributed to the late Robert Greene, in which Greene had warned fellow dramatists about a certain ‘upstart Crow’; Chettle denies being anything more than Greene’s editor and transcriber and apologizes to the (unnamed) injured party, having since ‘seen his demeanour no less civil than he excellent in the quality he professes’ (88). It is fair to say that critical discussion of this text has struggled to escape the shadow of Chettle’s illustrious contemporary. Donald A. Beecher and Grant Williams’ edition brings Kind-Heart’s Dream together with Chettle’s 1595 pamphlet, Piers Plainness’s Seven-Years Prenticeship. Although the editors inevitably make reference to the Groatsworth and its aftermath, their focus is very much on Chettle’s two pamphlets in their own right and particularly on their status as products of—and reflections upon—early modern print culture.