Marlowe’s enemies were just as adamant about his vices. Michael Drayton, another poet, proclaimed that Marlowe ‘Had in him those brave translunary things, / That the first Poets have’. William Shakespeare hailed the author of the magical verse, ‘Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?’ Ben Jonson praised the inventor of ‘Marlowe’s mighty line’. The poet George Peele called the dead playwright ‘the Muses’ darling’. ‘Pity it is that wit so ill should dwell’, wrote a student playwright at Cambridge, ‘Wit lent from heaven, but vices sent from hell.’ Other living witnesses lined up on either side of this divide. Greene never accused Shakespeare of plagiarism.Ĭhristopher Marlowe’s contemporaries recalled a conflicted figure. This essay examines all the writings of Greene in which he criticizes the actors, showing that he repeats over and again, in very similar terms, the same basic accusation that they depend on the playwrights yet unjustly enjoy more prestige and financial reward. Despite their work, John Dover Wilson revived Malone’s theory in 1951, and it continues to produce claims that Shakespeare was a plagiarist. Malone had no evidence for this theory, and it was comprehensively demolished by Peter Alexander in 1929 and by H. In his deathbed pamphlet Greenes Groatsworth of Wit, bought with a Million of Repentance (1592), Robert Greene warned his fellow playwrights to beware of the actors, ‘those Puppets (I meane) that spake from our mouths, those Anticks garnisht in our colours’, and especially ‘an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers’ who ‘is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a countrey.’ In 1787 Edmond Malone took this to be an accusation of plagiarism, and used it to justify his theory that Greene had written the unauthorized Quartos, The First Part of the Contention (1594) and The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of York (1595), and that Shakespeare ‘new-modelled and amplified these two pieces’ to create what the 1623 Folio calls The Second and Third Part of King Henry VI, without acknowledging his debt, thus arousing Greene’s anger.

Feathers by Rose Mannering