Abstract
Positively revelling in the demeaning circumstances of Greene’s death ‘of a surfeit of pickled herring and Rhenish wine’ in 1592, Gabriel Harvey seized the opportunity to ridicule the work of a man who could no longer retaliate. Punning on the name of his dead adversary in Four Letters (1592), Harvey mocked Greene’s ‘greene head’ and ‘greene wits’, which he observed had been ‘greene in experience, and as the manner is, somewhat overweening in conceit’ and ‘wedded to the wantonness of’ his ‘own fancy’.1 As Lesel Dawson explains in her work on early modern poetry, the ‘green sickness is invoked in dedicatory verse as a means of disparaging bad poetry for its immaturity, or to criticize the reading public’s desire to consume the “trash” such poets produce’.2 Gabriel Harvey’s pronouncement is clear: Greene’s work is immature, raw and unsophisticated.3
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Notes
Lesel Dawson, Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 53.
J. Churton Collins (ed.), The Plays and Poems of Robert Greene, vol. I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), p. 57.
John Clark Jordan, Robert Greene (New York: Octagon Books, 1965), pp. 201–2.
Tetsumaro Hayashi (ed.), A Textual Study of Robert Greene’s Orlando Furioso, with an Elizabethan Text (Muncie, IN: Ball State University Press, 1973), p. 11.
Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: Jonathan Cape, 2004), p. 203.
Kenneth Muir, ‘Robert Greene as Dramatist’, in Richard Hosley (ed.), Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), pp. 45–7.
Alexander Leggatt, ‘Bohan and Oberon: The Internal Debate of Greene’s James IV’, in A. L. Magnusson and C. E. McGee (eds.), The Elizabethan Theatre XI (Port Credit, Ont.: P. N. Meany, 1990), p. 115.
Norman Sanders (ed.), The Scottish History of James the Fourth (London: Methuen, 1970), p. xxi.
Glynne Wickham, Herbert Berry and William Ingram (eds.), English Professional Theatre, 1530–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 415–16.
James J. Marino, ‘Adult Playing Companies, 1613–1625’, in Richard Dutton (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 90–1.
R. A. Foakes (ed.), Henslowe’s Diary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 207.
Sarah Werner, ‘Introduction’, in Sarah Werner (ed.), New Directions in Renaissance Drama and Performance Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 8.
Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes, ‘Introduction: Presenting Presentism’, in Hugh Grady and Terence Hawkes (eds.), Presentist Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 5.
Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 3rd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 166.
Ruth Lunney, Marlowe and the Popular Tradition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 5.
Bruce R. Smith, The Key of Green: Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 37.
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© 2013 Jenny Sager
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Sager, J. (2013). Conclusion. In: The Aesthetics of Spectacle in Early Modern Drama and Modern Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137332400_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137332400_8
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