Staring Intently into Robert Greene: Feminine Endings, etc.

In this Series:

·       Staring Intently into Robert Greene: Feminine Endings, etc.

·        Robert Greene and the Construction Shakespeare Never Used.

·       Oxfraud, Robert Greene and Authorship S&M.

Of late it seems that Oxfordian scholars might dipping their toes in the essential waters of textual analysis. I’ve yet to see any detail analysis, though. Perhaps I have just not been looking in the right places.

The name of Robert Greene has been coming up regularly as part of the new fashion of declaring Edward de Vere to have written pretty much all of the better Tudor works of the 1560s through 1604 (and, in certain circles, beyond, he being offered as the post-mortem translator of the King James Bible). I have not yet heard of textual analysis (whatever it may have involved) failing to prove Vere wrote any particular oeuvre. The analysis (such as it may be) of the work of Greene has not provided an exception to the rule. The Earl, it would seem, was an astonishingly busy man.

The fact is that close textual analysis has been sorely lacking in the world of the Authorship Question. It is difficult to see how there is much new to be offered as evidence of one or another author by any other means.

Taking Greene-as-Vere, for example, the importance of the following poem under the former name may not be immediately obvious.

SONG.

 

Fair fields, proud Flora's vaunt, why is't you smile

Whenas I languish?

You golden meads, why strive you to beguile

My weeping anguish?

I live to sorrow, you to pleasure spring:

Why do you spring thus?

What, will not Boreas, tempest's wrathful king.

Take some pity on us,

And send forth winter in her rusty weed,

To wail my bemoanings,

Whiles I distress'd do tune my country-reed

Unto my groanings

But heaven, and earth, time, place, and every power

Have with her conspir'd

To turn my blissful sweets to baleful sour,

Since fond I desir'd

The heaven whereto my thoughts may not aspire.

Ay me, unhappy!

It was my fault t' embrace my bane, the fire

That forceth me die.

Mine be the pain, but her's the cruel cause

Of this strange torment;

Wherefore no time my banning prayers shall pause

Till proud she repent.[1]

Now, the first thing we may realize by staring very intently into the screen on which these words appear is that it is incredibly boring to stare intently at text on a screen. Equally so, on a piece of paper. At best it is a kind of purgatory.

Should we wish to improve the experience we must bring to our staring an amount of the knowledge we have accumulated by staring intently into other texts in the past. The more boredom the better, as it were.

In the above instance, however, we need mainly notice that more than half of the line endings are feminine. By this we mean that they end in an unstressed syllable: smile, languish, beguile, anguish, spring thus, on us, bemoanings, groanings. Even ironic endings such as conspir'd and desir'd, that are contracted in order to lop off the early English –ed, often shedding a syllable in the process, turn out in this instance to be feminine.

Greene (be he man or allonym) did not write nearly as many poems as Vere/Shakespeare. That, too,  can be determined by staring into the texts.

We can find them all gathered together in Alexander Dyce’s The Dramatic and Poetical Works of Robert Greene & George Peele (1861). Perhaps we can even allow ourselves to scan, rather than stress our eyes with more intent staring, for a moment, and count how many feminine endings we find. As for myself, I find four such endings in all the rest of his poems together.

It’s almost as if Greene wrote this one song filled with feminine rhymes as a kind of lyrical showpiece. In order to prove to himself and others that he could do it if he chose. It was just that he didn’t choose.

If we’ve read any of the many utterly boring books that perverse Shakespeare text-starers are in the habit of writing to gather dust on university library shelves — thus redeeming ourselves from some amount of direct text-staring purgatory — we might know that a defining trait of the poetry of Shakespeare (including the iambic pentameter of the plays) is that it features an unusually high number of feminine line endings. (Earlier studies likely refer to them as “double endings”.) The later in his career the higher the percentage of feminine endings. Yet scanning reveals that even Shakespeare’s earlier plays contain many more than are found anywhere in Greene.

We may be thankful that scanning Greene’s poems may have brought to our attention that (whoever he might have been) he often wrote his poetry in more ornate forms such as seem never to have interested Shakespeare.  Moreover, the poems of Greene feature identical rhyme — an identical end-word forming a rhyme pair  — surprisingly often. Identical rhyme has historically been considered a feature of a poor craftsman and Shakespeare accordingly avoided it.

This is not in the least to say that the two share no traits. They seem, however, to have been entirely basic traits that were common to all the playwrights and poets of the time. Three syllable words at the end of lines, in both, are pronounced as cretics as opposed to dactyls, in order to maintain the overall iambic pentameter of the line. Etc. But still more text-staring will be necessary in order to confirm these appearances discovered through sampling — even sampling repeated over years.

This is only the beginning of observations to come from staring intently into the texts of Robert Greene. I can only wonder if those who have announced that Shakespeare actually wrote the work under Greene’s name have done the text-staring absolutely essential to such a claim themselves. It might be interesting in an excruciatingly boring way to compare notes.

 

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[1] Dyce, Alexander. The Dramatic and Poetical Works of Robert Greene & George Peele (1861). 288-9.

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• Edward de Vere and Marlowe’s Dido of Carthage. July 5, 2022. “It was an historical effort and an historical two years for Elizabethan theater.”
• The Character Montano, in Hamlet, and Polonius’ Famous Advice. May 25, 2022. “The reader may recall that Polonius calls upon Reynaldo to suggest to Laertes’ friends that he is privy to minor misbehaviors, at which he winks,…”
• The Death of Sir Edward Vere, son of the 17th Earl of Oxford and Anne Vavasour. May 8, 2022. “Mr. Sedgwick wrote to me for a prayer for Sir Edward Vere.”
• How Shakespeare gave Ben Jonson the Infamous Purge. November 7, 2021. “Of course, De Vere could not openly accuse Jonson of having outed him as Shakespeare.”
• Enter John Lyly.  October 18, 2016.  "From time to time, Shakespeare Authorship aficionados query after the name “John Lyly”.  This happens surprisingly little given the outsized role the place-seeker, novelist and playwright played in the lives of the playwright William Shakespeare and Edward de Vere."
• Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
• Be sure to check out the Browser's Guide to the Library of Babel.
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