Shakespeare may have sensed a snobbish assumption of superiority on the part of the university wits; it would be surprising if they did not look down upon him and surprising if he did not perceive it. He did not contribute commendatory verses to any of the books that they published in the late 1580s and early’90s. No doubt he was not asked to do so. He, in turn, did not likely solicit for himself any commendations of the kind they routinely wrote for one another. None in any case appeared. He did not enter into their literary controversies, just as he seems to have been kept—or kept himself—outside their raucous social circle. This is, after all, a man who soon went on to manage the affairs of his playing company, to write steadily (not to mention brilliantly) for more than two decades, to accumulate and keep a great deal of money, to stay out of prison and to avoid ruinous lawsuits, to invest in agricultural land and in London property, to purchase one of the finest houses in the town where he was born, and to retire to that town in his late forties. This pattern of behavior did not suddenly and belatedly emerge; it established itself early, probably quite soon after the turbulent, confused, painful years that led up to his escape from Stratford and his arrival in London.
Shakespeare looked around at the gentleman poets who were supplying the playing companies with plays. He took in what was exciting about their writing. He made their acquaintance and savored what was startling or amusing about their reckless lives. In the light of his subsequent career, it is possible to imagine his response more fully. He saw that they were proud of their university degrees, their fine Latin and Greek, their scoffing and mockery and carelessness. He saw that they drank for days and nights at a time and then, still half-drunk, threw something together for the printer or the players. He grasped, in all likelihood, that no matter what he wrote, he would remain in their eyes a player, not a poet. Though they may occasionally have exhibited signs of nervousness about the young man from Stratford—they were impressed and troubled, after all, by the success of the Henry VI plays—they probably thought that he was rather naive and guileless and that they could easily take advantage of him. Greene in particular, making everyone laugh with his zany stories of coney catching, was confident, in all likelihood, that Shakespeare was a coney to be caught.
One part of this at least is indubitably true: Shakespeare wrote for the theater not as a poet, in the sense that Greene and company understood themselves, but as a player. He was not alone in writing for the stage on which he also performed, but he was the one who was best at it, and the players were quick to recognize how valuable he was. He must also have seemed exceptionally canny and trustworthy about money—the very opposite of the university wits—for a treasury document that mentions him in December 1594, in the company of Burbage and Kempe, suggests that he was already one of those fiscally responsible for the troupe. He knew how to put money in his purse and to keep it there.
Greene’s purse, by contrast, was evidently empty when, in August 1592, he fell ill after a dinner, at which Nashe was present, of pickled herring and Rhenish wine. Abandoned by all of his friends, he would have died like a homeless beggar had a poor shoemaker named Isam and his kindly wife not taken him in and cared for him through his final days. Digging for dirt, Greene’s inveterate enemy, Gabriel Harvey, went in person to talk with Mrs. Isam. Much of the scene Harvey depicts—the shameless scoundrel, “attended by lice” and begging for a “penny-pot of malmsey,” seized by the grip of a terrible fear—may be discounted as the expression of bilious hatred, but some of the melancholy details ring true. The woman told me, Harvey writes, how the dying man “was fain, poor soul, to borrow her husband’s shirt, whiles his own was a-washing: and how his doublet and hose and sword were sold for three shillings: and beside the charges of his winding sheet, which was four shillings; and the charges of his burial yesterday, in the New-churchyard near Bedlam, which was six shillings, and four pence, how deeply he was indebted to her poor husband, as appeared by his own bond of ten pounds, which the good woman kindly showed me.” She showed him as well a letter Greene left for the wife he had abandoned: “Doll, I charge thee by the love of our youth, and by my soul’s rest, that thou wilt see this man paid: for if he and his wife had not succored me, I had died in the streets.”
Greene had another dying wish. He asked Mrs. Isam to place “a garland of bayes”—a laurel wreath—on his head: he would go to the grave a poet laureate, even if he had to be crowned by a shoemaker’s wife. Harvey takes a predictably sour view of this leave-taking—“vermin to vermin must repair at last”—but he also provides a fuller epithaph:
Lo, a wild head, full of mad brain and a thousand crotchets: A Scholar, a Discourser, a Courtier, a Ruffian, a Gamester, a Lover, a Soldier, a Traveler, a Merchant, a Broker, an Artificer, a Botcher, a Pettifogger, a Player, a Cozener, a Railer, a Beggar, an Omnigatherum [i.e., miscellaneous assemblage], a Gay Nothing: a Storehouse of bald and baggage stuff, unworth the answering or reading: a trivial and triobular [i.e., worthless] Author for knaves and fools: an Image of Idleness; an Epitome of Fantasticality; a Mirror of Vanity.
Though this catalog suggests a remarkably full life of vice, and though Greene himself often adopted the melancholy voice of an old man looking back upon his prodigal youth, at his death he was only thirty-two years old.
The others in the group quickly followed their leader to the grave. In the same month, September 1592, Thomas Watson, aged about thirty-five, was buried, cause of death unknown—or perhaps in that terrible year of plague, it was not necessary to specify it. Two volumes of his poems were printed posthumously—his friends had no doubt read them already in manuscript—and his name remained for some time in circulation for a less honorable reason: he was invoked in the courts as a scoundrel in two particularly nasty swindles. The following May, Watson’s friend Marlowe, who had not yet reached his thirtieth birthday, was killed in a tavern fight, allegedly over the “reckoning,” that is, the bill.
George Peele, the great reveler, published a moving verse tribute to his dead friends Watson and Marlowe. Then a few years later, probably in 1596, Peele too was gone. Not quite forty years old, he died, it was said, of a “loathsome disease,” possibly syphilis. And in 1601, at thirty-three, the youngest of the original group, Thomas Nashe, died, leaving his grieving father, the minister, to bury him in the country churchyard.
Of the six young university-trained playwrights whom Shakespeare encountered in the late 1580s, only one, Thomas Lodge, managed to survive his thirties and to live what the age would have considered a long life. But not a literary life: abandoning poetry and fiction, Lodge took a degree in medicine and became one of the leading physicians of his day. He died in 1625, at the ripe age of sixty-seven.
After 1593, with Greene, Watson, and Marlowe all dead, Shakespeare, not yet thirty years old, had no serious rivals. He followed up on his major success with the Henry VI plays by writing the brilliant Richard III. He had experimented, crudely but energetically, with tragedy in the bloody Titus Andronicus, and had demonstrated his great strengths as a comic playwright, with The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Comedy of Errors. He had triumphed. But there was a bitter aftertaste. Greene kept scribbling, or so it was said, even on his deathbed. The claim is not implausible: he was the kind of writer who turned his entire existence into a lurid penny pamphlet. He had left behind him enough material to enable a hack printer and sometime playwright, Henry Chettle, to bring out a posthumous book. Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, Bought with a Million of Repentance, rushed into print before the corpse was fully cold, was probably mostly written by Chettle or by someone collaborating with Chettle—perhaps, as some rumors had it, Nashe. But it carried the marks of Greene’s own seething resentments. He noisily berated himself. He dangerously accused Marlowe—“thou famous gracer of Tragedians”—of atheism. And then he turned his anger on Shakespeare.
Rehearsing the old rivalry between poets and players, Greene warned his gentlemen friends Marlowe, Nashe, and Peele not to trust
those “puppets,” the actors, that “speak from our mouths.” Actors were mere burrs that cleave to the garments of writers. They would be virtually invisible were they not “garnished in our colors,” and yet the ingrates have forsaken him, in his hour of need. Thus far Greene’s words might apply to actors like Burbage or Alleyn, but they could hardly fit a player who had also proved himself a successful playwright. To make them fit, Greene (or his ghostwriter) famously shifted ground: “Yes trust them not: for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger’s heart wrapped in a Player’s hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shakescene in a country.” “O tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide!” York cries in the third part of Henry VI, to describe the ghastly, ruthless woman who waves in his face a handkerchief that she has steeped in the blood of his murdered child.
When he read the line twisted to describe him, Shakespeare might have thought that Greene was accusing him of ruthlessness. Alternatively, he was being charged with poetic excess, the bombastic exaggeration of the style of his betters. The insult is ambiguous, but it would have been clear to Shakespeare that there was an issue of status: an “upstart” is someone who pushes himself in where he does not belong, who dresses himself up as a nightingale though he caws like a crow, who imagines that he is a Johannes Factotum—a “Johnny-do-everything”—when in fact he is merely a second-rate drudge, a “rude groom,” who thinks he is an accomplished poet when he is only an “ape” imitating the inventions of others.
These were painful words, particularly in the mouth—as they were said to be—of a dying man; they had something of the finality of a curse, in a world that took such curses with deadly seriousness. And Greene’s Groatsworth ended with a coda, a retelling of Aesop’s fable of the grasshopper and the ant, in which at least one modern interpreter, Ernst Honigmann, detects a further insult. Greene was, of course, himself the wanton grasshopper, carelessly skipping through the meadows in pursuit of pleasure. If Honigmann is right, the miserly ant, a “waspish little worm” who refused to help his “foodless, helpless, and strengthless” acquaintance, was Shakespeare. Greene, in this account, must have asked Shakespeare—who may at this point have already been handling some of the players’ finances—for assistance and been refused. The refusal would help to explain the bitterness of the satiric portrait: upstart crow, rude groom, ape, worm.
How Shakespeare responded to the attack tells us a great deal about him. He did not directly answer the charges or, like Harvey, launch a polemical counteroffensive. But he must have quietly done something unusually effective. For, less than three months after publication of the pamphlet, Henry Chettle flatly denied in print having any hand in it: it “was all Greene’s.” As for himself, Chettle averred, it is well known that he always “in printing hindered the bitter inveighing against scholars.” “Scholars”—so Shakespeare was now being treated as if he had, after all, attended university.
There was more: he was not, Chettle wrote, personally acquainted with either of the two playwrights who took offense at Greene’s words, “and with one of them I care not if I never be.” This playwright, unnamed, was unquestionably Marlowe, who in December 1592 was evidently not a person whom the hack, his ear to the ground, thought it safe to know. But the other was a different matter. Chettle now understood, as he explained in a twisted and unctuous apology, that he should have blocked the printing of Greene’s unwarranted remarks about this second playwright: “That I did not, I am as sorry as if the original fault had been my fault, because myself have seen his demeanor no less civil than he excellent in the quality he professes.” This offended figure was also unnamed, but the likeliest candidate is the “upstart Crow.” At some point in the past three months, then, Chettle had a “civil” conversation with Shakespeare, or at the very least he had the occasion to observe him in person. He had also, it seems, suddenly acquainted himself with Shakespeare’s excellence “in the quality he professes”—an oily periphrasis for writing and acting in plays. And then comes a further motive for this recantation: “Besides, diverse of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing, that approves his art.” “Diverse of worship,” that is, socially prominent people, people who have it in their power to make my life miserable, have spoken to me both about the honorableness of Shakespeare’s character and about the “facetious grace,” the facility and polish, of his writing.
From Shakespeare himself, not a word about Chettle, in the immediate wake of Greene’s attack or subsequently, but he got an apology of the kind that poor, impotently sputtering Gabriel Harvey could only dream. Indeed, in the years that followed, relations between Shakespeare and Chettle may well have been cordial. They collaborated, with several other playwrights, on a play, apparently never performed, about Sir Thomas More.
The account was almost settled, but not quite. Greene’s phrase “beautified with our feathers” must have stung. For in 1601, when the Groatsworth of Wit and the fat scoundrel who penned it had long vanished from view, Shakespeare allowed himself an unusual self-indulgence. Polonius—whose literary pretensions go back to the time when he was “accounted a good actor” “i’th’ university” (Hamlet, 3.2.91, 90) where, as he tells us, he played Julius Caesar—has put his hands on one of the love letters that Hamlet has sent to his daughter. “Now gather and surmise,” he says to Claudius and Gertrude, starting to read: “‘To the celestial and my soul’s idol, the most beautified Ophelia.’” Then abruptly the old councillor comes to a halt for a piece of literary criticism: “that’s an ill phrase, a vile phrase, ‘beautified’ is a vile phrase” (2.2.109–12).
“Thus,” as the clown Feste says in Twelfth Night, “the whirligig of time brings in his revenges” (5.1.364). Shakespeare’s plays from the 1590s are sprinkled with sly parodies of the words of his erstwhile rivals. Falstaff’s overheated sexual excitement in The Merry Wives of Windsor—“Let the sky rain potatoes, let it thunder to the tune of ‘Greensleeves,’ hail kissing-comfits, and snow eringoes” (5.5.16–18)—ridicules Lodge’s Wit’s Misery and the World’s Madness. The Moorish king’s plaintive words to his starving mother in Peele’s Battle of Alcazar—“Hold thee, Calipolis. . . . Feed and be fat that we may meet the foe”—returns as a piece of tavern swaggering in 2 Henry IV: “Then feed and be fat, my fair Calipolis” (2.4.155). And a moment earlier the same drunken swaggerer, Ensign Pistol, has taken Tamburlaine’s famously sadistic taunting of the kings he has yoked to his chariot—“Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia! / What, can ye draw but twenty miles a day?”—and turned it into fustian nonsense:
Shall pack-horses
And hollow pampered jades of Asia,
Which cannot go but thirty mile a day,
Compare with Caesars and with cannibals,
And Trojan Greeks?
(2.4.140–44)
There is much more in the same vein, and if all the plays by the university wits had survived, scholars would no doubt have identified still other instances.
These parodies only suggest that Shakespeare was, after all, a human being, who could take some pleasure in returning literary insults and mocking rivals, even dead ones. But something far more remarkable and unpredictable happened in his work with the grotesque figure of Robert Greene. “Thou whoreson little tidy Bartholomew boar-pig,” Falstaff’s whore, Doll Tearsheet, pouts endearingly, “when wilt thou leave fighting o’days, and foining o’nights, and begin to patch up thine old body for heaven?” To which the fat knight replies, “Peace, good Doll, do not speak like a death’s-head, do not bid me remember mine end” (2 Henry IV, 2.4.206–10). The deeper we plunge into the tavern world of Falstaff—gross, drunken, irresponsible, self-dramatizing, and astonishingly witty Falstaff—the closer we come to the world of Greene; his wife, Doll; his mistress, Em; her thuggish brother, Cutting Ball; and the whole crew.
 
; Falstaff and his friends have the raffish appeal that the wild crowd of London writers must have exercised on the young Shakespeare. In Falstaff’s seedy haunts in Eastcheap, not far from London Bridge, Prince Hal gains access to an urban cast of characters far removed from anything he has known before, and he takes particular delight in having learned their language: “They call drinking deep ‘dyeing scarlet,’ and when you breathe in your watering they cry ‘Hem!’ and bid you ‘Play it off!’ To conclude, I am so good a proficient in one quarter of an hour that I can drink with any tinker in his own language during my life” (1 Henry IV, 2.5.13–17). There is, the play suggests, a politics to this language lesson—“when I am King of England I shall command all the good lads in Eastcheap”—but at the same time it seems a thinly disguised depiction of Shakespeare’s own linguistic apprenticeship in taverns.
So too the relationship between Falstaff and Hal centers on fantastically inventive, aggressive language games of the kind that several of the university wits specialized in:
PRINCE HARRY: . . . This sanguine coward, this bed-presser, this horse-back-breaker, this huge hill of flesh—
FALSTAFF: ’Sblood, you starveling, you elf-skin, you dried neat’s tongue, you bull’s pizzle, you stock-fish—O, for breath to utter what is like thee!—you tailor’s yard, you sheath, you bow-case, you vile standing tuck—