Watson’s disturbing combination of impressive learning, literary ambition, duplicity, violence, and rootlessness is a clue to understanding his deep kinship—his blood brotherhood—with Marlowe. It serves as well as an introduction to the group of writers, the so-called university wits, whom the young Shakespeare would have encountered at the outset of his career. Not all of them were quite as sinister as Marlowe and Watson. Thomas Lodge, about six years older than Shakespeare, graduated from Oxford and began to study law. The second son of London’s lord mayor, Lodge had a course of respectable prosperity laid out for him, his dying mother having left a bequest to support his studies and to launch him in his legal career. But the prospect of this career evidently disagreed with him, for he forfeited this bequest and his father’s goodwill by dropping out and plunging into the literary scene. At about the time Shakespeare was writing or collaborating on the Henry VI trilogy, Lodge penned his own play about a country destroyed by factional conflict, The Wounds of Civil War, performed by the Lord Admiral’s Men. Neither this nor the other plays in which Lodge had a hand showed much talent, and he seems in any case not to have staked all his hopes on a career as a playwright, for in 1588 he embarked on an adventurous voyage to the Canary Islands. He returned with a new literary composition to show for himself, a fine prose romance he titled Rosalind: “the fruits of his labors,” he wrote of himself, “that he wrought in the ocean when every line was wet with a surge.” Like Marlowe and Watson, then, Lodge was a bold risk-taker—in 1591 he sailed with Thomas Cavendish to Brazil and the Straits of Magellan and returned to tell the tale. But he was a less turbulent spirit: it would have been easier to have a drink with him without fearing for your purse or your life.
Another member of the circle of writers, George Peele, the son of a London salt merchant and accountant, had already as a student at Oxford begun to earn a reputation for wild pranks and riotous living—a book was published chronicling his supposed adventures—but he was also early noted for his gifts as a poet and a translator of Euripides. He seems to have been a sometime actor as well as an energetic writer of lyric poems, pastorals, pageants, and plays for the popular stage. At the time Shakespeare would have first met him, Peele had published verses in praise of his friend Thomas Watson, scripted the lord mayor’s pageant, and had a play, The Arraignment of Paris, successfully presented to the queen. He was probably at work on The Battle of Alcazar, his own response to the immense popularity of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. None of this feverish activity brought in much money, and Peele was rapidly running through the dowry brought to him by his wife. But he must have been amusing company: his friend Thomas Nashe called him “the chief supporter of pleasance now living.”
Nashe was not normally one to give compliments. Of the university wits, he was the most bitingly satiric, and in the late 1580s, newly arrived in London, he was demonstrating his gift for mockery in a succession of anti-Puritan pamphlets. Three years younger than Shakespeare, the son of the curate of a small Herefordshire parish, Nashe had gone to Cambridge as a “sizar,” a scholarship student, and had continued his studies there for a year or more after he took the B.A. degree that enabled him to write “gentleman” by his name. His first publication, an epistle addressed to “the Gentleman Students of both universities,” was a harsh review of recent literary efforts—the cruel judgments of a brash young man, leavened with some flattering remarks about his best friends.
Nashe praised Peele, Watson, and a few others for their “deep-witted scholarship,” but he had particularly acerbic things to say about upstarts “who (mounted on the stage of arrogance) think to out-brave better pens with the swelling bombast of a bragging blank verse.” Nashe’s florid style delighted in its own obscurity: “Indeed it may be the engrafted overflow of some kill-cow conceit, that overcloyeth their imagination with a more than drunken resolution, being not extemporal in the invention of any other means to vent their manhood, commits the digestion of their choleric encumbrances to the spacious volubility of a drumming decasyllabon.” But through the haze of verbal self-display, the point is sharply clear: certain men with only a grammar school education have had the audacity to write plays in blank verse for the public stage. This type of impudent rustic—a man with little or no Latin, French, or Italian, born to be a servant or small-town lawyer’s clerk—busies himself with “the endeavors of Art,” imitates the poetic style and favorite meter of his university-trained betters, and thinks he can leap into a new occupation: “if you entreat him fair in a frosty morning, he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragical speeches.” These words were written well before Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. Presumably, the specific object of nastiness here was Thomas Kyd, who had no university degree, had served as a lawyer’s clerk and a servingman, and had written a play, now lost, about Hamlet. But the general terms of the withering attack also applied perfectly to Shakespeare, as Shakespeare would have understood.
Nashe’s epistle was prefixed to a lurid romance, Menaphon, penned by the central figure in this circle of writers, Robert Greene. Though he turned out to play an important role in Shakespeare’s life, Greene was by no means the most accomplished; Marlowe towered above him, and he would never write anything as good as Nashe’s wild picaresque novel, The Unfortunate Traveler; Peele’s charming play The Old Wives’ Tale; or even Lodge’s elegant Ovidian poem, Scylla’s Metamorphosis. But Greene was larger than life, a hugely talented, learned, narcissistic, self-dramatizing, self-promoting, shameless, and undisciplined scoundrel. Four years older than Shakespeare, the son of poor parents from Norwich, he managed, like Marlowe and Nashe, to get a scholarship to Cambridge, where he took his M.A. in 1583. He went on to receive another degree from Oxford. With these impressive qualifications and with a marriage to “a gentleman’s daughter of good account,” Greene seemed set for a prosperous life (he briefly thought he might study medicine), but his desires led him in a different direction. Having squandered his wife’s marriage portion, he abandoned her and their small child and headed off to London, uncertain how he would support himself.
Greene, who constantly fictionalized his life, wrote a story of how he was recruited to write for the stage. Since he was an inveterate liar, there is no reason to believe a word of his account, but it must have struck contemporaries as at least plausible, and it served as a kind of literary initiation myth. “Roberto”—for so he calls himself—was sitting by a hedge at the side of the road, complaining about his lot, when he was approached by a man who recognized that he was a gentleman down on his luck. “I suppose you are a scholar,” the stranger said, “and pity it is men of learning should live in lack.”
Greene then recounted a revelatory moment of social misrecognition. How, he asked the affable stranger, could a scholar possibly be profitably employed? The stranger replied that men of his profession get their whole living by employing scholars.
“What is your profession?” said Roberto.
“Truly sir,” said he, “I am a player.”
“A player!” quoth Roberto. “I took you rather for a gentleman of great living, for if by outward habit men should be censured [i.e., judged], I tell you, you would be taken for a substantial man.”
Here in strikingly pure form is the convincing performance of status, the miming of the “outward habit” of a gentleman, that served to draw Will to the profession of acting. For Greene, however, the performance was a fraud: the actor could pretend to be a substantial man, but in himself he was a thing of nothing.
To succeed in creating his illusion, the actor needed not only expensive costumes but also persuasive words, poetry that he, a mere sham gentleman, could not generate. Hence his need to find a real gentleman like Roberto—educated, cultivated, and in need of cash—whom he could hire. Roberto signs on, in Greene’s account, follows the actor to town, and finds himself lodged in “a house of retail,” that is, a whorehouse. He is no longer in danger of starving—“Roberto now famozed [sic] for an Arch-playmaking poet, his purse l
ike the sea sometime swelled, anon the like the same sea fell to a low ebb; yet seldom he wanted, his labors were so well esteemed”—but he has prostituted his learning and his talent; his ordinary companions become cardsharps, forgers, and pickpockets; his bones are ravaged by syphilis; and his belly is so puffed up by “immeasurable drinking” that he becomes “the perfect image of the dropsy.” He experiences brief bursts of repentance, accompanied by noisy resolutions to change his life, but the resolutions give way at the slightest provocation to renewed dissipation. When the “gentlewoman his wife” begs him to return to her, he ridicules her. With his mistress and their bastard son, he moves from place to place, cheating the innkeepers, running up unpaid tavern scores, eluding his creditors. “So cunning he was in all crafts, as nothing rested in him almost but craftiness.”
Such was Greene’s self-portrait—“Hereafter suppose me the said Roberto,” he wrote halfway through his account, throwing away the thin fictional mask—and for such a notorious liar, it seems surprisingly accurate. He was famous for a life that combined drunken idleness and gluttony with energetic bursts of writing, famous too for his impecuniousness, his duplicity, his intimate knowledge of the underworld, his fleeting attempts at moral reform, and his inevitable backsliding. Back in Norwich once, he wrote, he heard a sermon that moved him to a firm resolution to amend his life, but his profligate friends all laughed at him, and his resolution collapsed. His mistress, Em Ball—with whom he had a short-lived son whom he named Fortunatus—was the sister of the leader of a gang of thieves, one Cutting Ball, who was eventually hanged at Tyburn. Aided no doubt by this accomplished native informant, Greene, setting himself up as a kind of ethnographer, made money turning out pamphlets introducing respectable English readers to London’s dense society of cheats, swindlers, and pickpockets: “cozeners,” “nips,” “foists,” “cross-biters,” “shifters.” Despite his university degrees and his snobbery, he himself had the morals and the manners of a thief: he was particularly proud of the fact that he had sold the same play, Orlando Furioso, to two different companies of players, the Queen’s Men and the Admiral’s Men. His friend Nashe called him “the Monarch of Crossbiters and the very Emperor of shifters.” Evidently, Greene regarded actors—by whom he saw himself and other gentleman poets exploited—as particularly appropriate targets for his chicanery. Where the actor’s dream was to pass himself off as a gentleman, Greene’s dream, realized with perfect success, was to transform himself into a cynical, swaggering London bully.
“Who in London hath not heard of his dissolute and licentious living?” asked one of Greene’s bitter enemies, the Cambridge pedagogue Gabriel Harvey. This is a master of arts, Harvey wrote, an educated man, who has chosen to deck himself out “with ruffianly hair, unseemly apparel, and more unseemly company.” He has become notorious for his vainglorious boasting, his vulgar clowning, and his trashy imitating of every new fashion. But it is important not to underestimate him: he is sly enough to cheat professional gamesters at their own dirty tricks. An oath breaker and a foulmouthed blasphemer, Greene is a man with no moral compass, and his life is a shambles. Harvey rehearsed as many of the scabrous details as he could muster: Greene’s monstrous overeating, his constant shifting of his lodgings, his feasting his friends and then skipping out before paying the bill, his abandonment of his virtuous wife, his pawning of his sword and cloak, his prostitute-mistress and their bastard son Infortunatus, his employment of the mistress’s thuggish brother-in-law as a bodyguard, the brother-in-law’s execution, his insolence to his superiors, and, when money is short, “his impudent pamphleting, phantastical interluding, and desperate libeling.” “Phantastical interluding,” Harvey’s term for Greene’s playwriting, is linked to yet another item in the litany of scandals: “his infamous resorting to the Bankside, Shoreditch, Southwark, and other filthy haunts.” Greene could always be found in his true element: the neighborhood of the theaters.
This was the neighborhood to which Shakespeare came in the late 1580s, and this was the figure at the center of the group of playwrights, all in their twenties or very early thirties, whom he encountered. Shakespeare would have had no difficulty recognizing that Marlowe was the great talent, but it was the flamboyant Greene, with his two M.A. degrees, sharp peak of red hair, enormous appetites, and volcanic energy, who was the most striking figure in the fraternity of restless, hungry writers.
Shakespeare’s relations to Greene and company might at first have been cordial. The newcomer clearly found much to interest, even fascinate, him in this grotesque figure and his remarkable friends; indeed, he might have sensed immediately what would turn out in fact to be the case: these were people with whom he could get his start as a writer and whom he would remember and imaginatively exploit for the rest of his life. The electrifying effect of Tamburlaine upon him was only one facet of this fascination. Shakespeare studied Watson’s sonnets and Lodge’s Scylla’s Metamorphosis (whose stanza he borrowed for Venus and Adonis); he probably collaborated with Peele in the bloody revenge tragedy Titus Andronicus; he repeatedly mined Nashe’s satiric wit and probably used him as the model for Mote in Love’s Labour’s Lost; at the height of his powers he took Lodge’s prose romance Rosalind and turned it into As You Like It; and near the end of his career, when he wanted to stage an old-fashioned piece, a “winter’s tale,” he dramatized Greene’s by-now-forgotten story of irrational jealousy, Pandosto. In Shakespeare’s work there are relatively few signs of the influence of Spenser, Donne, Bacon, or Ralegh, to name a few of his great contemporaries; the living writers who meant the most to him were those he encountered in the seedy inns near the theaters soon after he arrived in London.
For their part, the group of reckless young writers and their leader, Greene, may initially have found Shakespeare an agreeable fellow. He was, by all accounts, pleasant company, affable and witty; and his writing, even at that very early point, doubtless showed that he had real talent. It is possible that he had initially been hired to assist Nashe or Peele in the writing of a play about Henry VI and then displayed his mettle. Alternatively, he undertook to write the history play on his own. In either case, his surprising success as a playwright commanded respect. Not only did Nashe acknowledge in print that something extraordinary had happened—thousands of people wept for the death of an English hero who had been dead for two hundred years—but Marlowe offered the still more impressive tribute of imitation: he sat down to write his own English history play, chronicling the tragic life and death of a king, Edward II, brought down by his consuming love for his handsome favorite. Several of the others also began to mine the chronicles and scribble English history plays, though only Marlowe came close to what Shakespeare had achieved. There are, in any case, enough signs of serious attention to Shakespeare’s early work to suggest that the group of writers may at first have actively wanted to cultivate his acquaintance.
The group would probably have been sorely disappointed. First and foremost, of course, Shakespeare lacked the principal qualification of belonging to their charmed circle; he had not attended either Oxford or Cambridge. The little society of writers was, by Tudor standards, quite democratic. Birth and wealth did not greatly matter: Nashe, whose family, as he put it, boasted “longer pedigrees than patrimonies” rubbed shoulders with Marlowe, the cobbler’s son; Lodge, the son of the former lord mayor of London, drank with Greene, whose parents in Norwich lived sober, modest lives at a far remove from the glittering guildhall. What mattered was attendance at one or the other of the universities. Even the acerbic Nashe found warm words for his Cambridge college, St. John’s, writing years later that he “loved it still, for it ever was and is the sweetest nurse of knowledge in all that university.” And long after he had left the university, Greene signed one of his dedicatory epistles “From my Study in Clare Hall.”
University education carried a significant social cachet, which these writers were only too happy to vaunt. But, to be fair, it was valued as well for the learning that it signified.
Nashe pored over Aretino and Rabelais and gleefully coined words out of Greek, Latin, Spanish, and Italian. Peele joined Nashe in ridiculing an inept hexameter written by Gabriel Harvey. Watson’s youthful translation of Antigone ended with allegorical exercises in different kinds of Latin verse: iambics, sapphics, anapestic dimeters, and choriambic asclepiadean meter. Shakespeare was by no means without learning—The Comedy of Errors, written early in his career, shows how elegantly and lightly he carried his knowledge of Latin comedy—but he was neither capable of nor interested in Watson’s type of academic self-display.
Moreover, Shakespeare was by origin a provincial, and, more to the point, he had not completely left the provinces behind. If he had turned away from his father’s occupation and left his parents, he had not, like Lodge, incurred a parental curse; if he had left his wife and three small children, he had not, like Greene, burned his bridges. He had none of the dark glamour of the prodigal son. Indeed, even his imagination remained bound up with the local details of country living. And if the young bohemian writers recognized with surprise that the man they deemed a country bumpkin had thought hard about many things; if they grasped that his imagination was far less constrained by convention than theirs; if they were startled by the quickness of his intellect, the breadth of his vocabulary, and his astonishing power to absorb everything he encountered and make it his own, perhaps they also were nettled by something morally conservative in him. The conservatism was already visible in the Henvy VI trilogy, with its reaffirmation of the traditional cautionary precepts that Marlowe in Tamburlaine had boldly called into question. But it was visible as well in Shakespeare’s refusal to throw himself fully into a chaotic, disorderly life. Aubrey did not specify what particular social situation he was referring to when he wrote that Shakespeare “wouldn’t be debauched,” but a strong candidate would be any invitation from Robert Greene.