Abstract
This essay focuses on the alleged attack by Robert Greene on Shakespeare as an “upstart crow,” a work reprinted in almost every collection of Shakespeare’s works, and a document that has produced its own body of scholarly assessment. Employing recent textual criticism of the print industry in early modern England —including works by Zachary Lesser, John Jowett, Jeffery Masten, and D. Allen Carroll— we re-read “Green’s Groatsworth of Wit” as a kind of literary criticism that helps to illuminate both its own textual status as well as the material conditions of the late sixteenth-century theatrical world which produced it. Following a review of the basic lines of interpretation of the piece, I examine the nexus of the Henry Chettle, Robert Danter and Greene connection, in an attempt to show that by considering the “collaboration” between these three, we should come to a better understanding of the document itself. Equally important, by re-examining the text, reviewing the printing process, and rethinking the authorial voice of the work, I hope to re-situate the pamphlet’s place in the present debate on Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
Highlights
Base minded men all three of you, if by my miserie you be not warnd,” Robert Greene allegedly proclaimed to his fellow University Wits in 1592
After narrowing his attack toward “those Puppets, (I meane) that speke from our mouths, those Anticks garnisht in our colours,” Greene moves into the most famous lines in the text: “Yes, trust them not: for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tyger’s heart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the only Shake-scene in a countrey.”
After Greene’s death, it fell to Henry Chettle, who prepared a fair copy of the pamphlet for printing
Summary
Base minded men all three of you, if by my miserie you be not warnd,” Robert Greene allegedly proclaimed to his fellow University Wits in 1592 After narrowing his attack toward “those Puppets, (I meane) that speke from our mouths, those Anticks garnisht in our colours,” Greene moves into the most famous lines in the text: “Yes, trust them not: for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tyger’s heart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the only Shake-scene in a countrey.”. By 1) re-examining the text, 2) reviewing the printing process, and, 3) rethinking the authorial voice of the work, I hope 4) to re-situate the pamphlet’s place in the current debate on Shakespeare and his contemporaries
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