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.
[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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