CASE FILE 10

Welcome back to Tracing Shakespearean Mysteries. Throughout the previous Case Files, we have gathered evidence relating to a series of Shakespearean mysteries, approaching them from a variety of perspectives—from the origins of The Tempest in the opening episode to the source books behind Venus and Adonis in the most recent. Along the way, we have explored a wide range of intriguing ideas - historical, geographical, linguistic, artistic, and textual - drawing not only on my own research but also on the work of others to illuminate each mystery from a fresh angle.

Each Case File has added another piece to the greater puzzle, with many of the clues pointing in unexpected directions. Taken together, they have gradually revealed patterns that are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. The time has now come to assemble the evidence and follow those clues to their point of convergence. That journey begins in this final Case File - a pivotal moment that marks the transition from gathering evidence to reconstructing the case, as we pursue an answer to the ultimate mystery.

So, in this episode we will be exploring the mystery surrounding Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, a pamphlet written by Robert Greene and published not long after his death on 3rd September 1592. It is famous for containing the first - albeit cryptic - reference to William Shakespeare. But as literary detectives, we must take nothing at face value, for most likely this work conceals far more than is generally assumed.

But before studying the work, we need to know more about the author, Robert Greene himself. Born in 1558, it is thought he may have been the son of a Norwich innkeeper. It seems that he travelled around Europe for a while before going to study at Cambridge, where, by his own account, he spent his time “among wags as lewd as himself, with whom he consumed the flower of his youth.”

He graduated in 1583 and subsequently continued his studies at Oxford. Thereafter, he liked to sign himself as “Master of Arts in both Universities.” Sometime between 1585 and 1586, he married a woman named Dorothy and they had a son. However, after squandering his wife’s marriage money, he abandoned his family and moved to London, where he became one of the first authors in England to earn his living solely from writing.

Greene was known for his plays, such as Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, James IV, and Orlando Furioso, as well as for prose works like Menaphon and Pandosto - which was later a primary source for A Winter’s Tale. However, he was probably most famous for his numerous pamphlets, mostly satirical, on various subjects, particularly the Coney-catching tracts, which explored the squalid London underworld - full of pick-pockets, thieves and vagabonds - a world with which he was intimately acquainted.

After a life of debauchery, Greene ended his days in poverty, dying at the age of only thirty-four in the home of a humble shoemaker. Shortly before his death, a repentant Greene wrote to his wife, asking her to give £10 to the shoemaker, without whose charity he would have died on the streets.

We should note that in the late Elizabethan period, satirical writing, of which Robert Greene was a leading exponent, reached a particularly harsh and aggressive pitch. To avoid censorship or retaliation, writers rarely made direct attacks on their targets - whether they be institutions, professions, famous people or rivals - instead they concealed their malice behind allegory, myth, or animal fables. Individuals were disguised with nicknames, initials, or descriptive details about their appearance that informed readers could decode. Satirical writing also operated through puns, double meanings, and deliberately cryptic language, often dense with obscure references. Such obscurity was not accidental but strategic, both to evade any reprisal and to appeal to a select, educated readership.

With all that in mind, let’s turn our attention to the pamphlet of interest to us, whose full title is Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance. It was entered into the Stationer’s Register on 20th September 1592, 17 days after the writer’s death. The note in the register states that it was entered ‘Upon the peril of Henry Chettle’, so problems were clearly anticipated. In fact, in December of the same year, Chettle was obliged to issue a public apology for the pamphlet.

Written in Greene’s characteristic satirical style, liberally sprinkled with Latin phrases, Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit is divided roughly into three sections: it begins with a failed love story, which may seem slightly tedious to a modern reader, however we need to listen carefully to the details; the second section is about repentance and the author offers a warning to three fellow writers and to those actors pretending to be writers: the third section is a personal narration of Aesop’s fable - the grasshopper and the ant - ending with a letter of repentance to his wife.

So let’s begin with the first section which opens with the tale of Gorinius, a dying usurer, and his two adult sons. The elder, Roberto, is a scholar married to a gentlewoman; the younger Lucanio, is naive, inexperienced and unmarried.

On his deathbed, Gorinius distributes his estate in an unequal manner. To Roberto, the elder son, he leaves only a coin, the old groat with which he first made his fortune. To Lucanio, who has led a more sheltered life, he leaves a new groat along with the entirety of his wealth. Yet this generosity is accompanied by a stern warning: Lucanio must spend wisely, trust no one - least of all women - and study the works of Machiavelli. Shortly thereafter, the father dies.

Dissatisfied with his meagre inheritance, Roberto resolves to ensnare his naïve brother in a scheme involving a courtesan, with the intention of sharing in Lucanio’s fortune. He persuades Lucanio that a man of his standing ought to marry and offers his services as a secretary to arrange the match. Once Lucanio agrees, Roberto leads him to the house of the courtesan, Lamilia.

As they approach her home, Lamilia appears at her window playing a lute and singing a song about the frivolity of love. One verse, seemingly disconnected from the rest, stands out. Modernised it reads:

Ever since he learned how to use a poet’s pen,

he also learned how to lie smoothly,

Deceiving innocent listeners with his truthless words

And wronging faith through falsehood and contempt.

He makes promises - but then reneges them.

Those who test him will see how changeable he is.

Remember this is Greene’s pen at work, and he seems to be a warning against a writer, who with his smooth words distorts the truth, deceives the innocent, holds faith in contempt and makes false promises. Such a subject is unusual for a verse of a song, suggesting that it may have been intended as a message to a particular individual.

So, the scene has been carefully staged, and Lucanio is immediately captivated. Overwhelmed by Lamilia’s beauty, Lucanio at first finds himself unable to speak - but after the evening’s entertainment, during which Lamilia praises him extravagantly, admiring not only his dancing but everything he does, he offers her a diamond ring. A lavish meal is then served, and Lucanio feeds lustily on a woodcock pie - one of Greene’s typical suggestive puns.

By this point, it appears that Lamilia and Lucanio have already fallen in love. Seizing the moment, Roberto intervenes, cautioning them against rushing headlong into passion and proposing to tell an old wives’ tale as a gentle warning. Lamilia, however, insists that she first tell her own fable about a cunning fox who tricks a lonely badger into falling for a wanton ewe - presumably Roberto, Lucanio and Lamilia respectively. The badger takes the ewe back to his home where the fox ‘pulled out her throat to satisfy his greedy thirst’. So, a rather obscure fable.

Roberto then tells a tale about a duped bridegroom, after which the company turns to gambling. Having lost all his money, Lucanio returns home for more. In his absence, Roberto quarrels with Lamilia over the diamond ring, and she throws him out. In the garden, he sings a bitter song against courtesans “the viper’s tooth is not so venomous, / the adder’s tongue not half so dangerous” - and is overheard by a player who offers him work as a playwright. Desperate for money, Roberto accepts but soon falls into vice and bad company.

Two years pass, during which Lucanio is deceived by Lamilia and loses everything. Roberto later seeks him out, but his young brother becomes merely a source of amusement. Realising his ruin too late, Lucanio abandons any hope of an honest life and turns to pimping, a disgraceful trade he pursues until his death.

But Roberto, now a celebrated playwright, squandered money as quickly as he earned it. He treated others poorly, changed lodgings frequently - often driven out by landladies - and kept disreputable company: thieves, perjurers, forgers, and worse. He learned their vices so well that little remained in him but deceit. His wife, a gentlewoman, wrote often, urging him to reform and return home, but he mocked her pleas. Surrounded by drunkards, swindlers, and murderers, he grew only more hardened. At last, reduced to extreme poverty and despised by most, he drew out the groat his father had given him.

At this point, the second section of the pamphlet begins. Robert Greene intervenes and tells the reader that he is the Roberto in the story, and many of the details do, in fact, correspond to what we know of Greene’s dissolute life. He then vows to repent and endeavour to do good to all men. A poem of repentance follows and an explanation of all the bad things that he has done and written in his life, ending with the words: "Black is the remembrance of my black words, blacker than night, blacker than death, blacker than hell." Thereafter follows a list of 10 rules for leading a good life - from following God and honouring your wife to having humility and respect for others. This is the message he sends not only to his old criminal consorts, but also to his fellow-scholars, those gentlemen who spend their wits in making plays.

His first warning is for Christopher Marlowe who, though not named, is referred to as "thou famous gracer of tragedians". In fact, by the time Greene was writing these words in 1592, Marlowe’s fame was definitely on the rise with works such as the Tamburlaine plays, Doctor Faustus and the Jew of Malta. A repentant Greene says that this tragedian who, like himself, has declared that God does not exist, should instead give glory to the Lord’s greatness: "Why should thy excellent wit, His gift, be so blinded that thou shouldst give no glory to the Giver? Is it pestilent Machiavellian policy that thou hast studied?"

Here Machiavellian policy is a reference to the declaration of Machiavel, the speaker of the prologue in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, who states: "I count religion but a childish toy /And hold there is no sin but ignorance". A variation of this phrase appears in Lamilia's song which I quoted earlier: rather than "to count religion as a toy", in the refrain she sings "to count love a toy". Greene then urges Marlowe not to wait any longer before repenting, "for little knowest thou how in the end thou shalt be visited". Prescient words indeed.

Turning away from Marlowe, Greene then addresses “young Juvenal,” the sharp-tongued satirist. This was likely his friend Thomas Nashe, known chiefly as a pamphleteer and writer of satirical prose, though he also wrote occasionally for the stage. Greene urges him to make fewer enemies. Turning to a third writer, probably the impoverished George Peele, a playwright and poet, Greene warns that, despite his talent, the disreputable company he keeps will bring him no better fortune.

Following these personal rebukes to his fellow writers, Greene launches into a broader complaint against actors, mere “puppets” who dress themselves in the work of writers and speak the words written by them. Such parasites, he insists, are not to be trusted, and refers to "an upstart crow " who is "an absolute Johannes factotum" and "is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country." This reference, “the only Shake-scene in a country”, is generally taken to be the first ever allusion to Shakespeare in literature and has consequently made Greene's Groats-Worth of Wit the writer’s most famous pamphlet.

In the third section, Greene recounts a fable from Aesop, another typical feature of his writing, in this case the story of the grasshopper and the ant, rendered in verse. Here the satirist appears to cast himself as the idle grasshopper, indulging in pleasure while ignoring the fact that winter is coming and he will perish in misery. The pamphlet ends with a letter to Greene’s estranged wife, signed “thy repentant husband,” acknowledging his failures and disloyalty.

On the surface, this work seems like just another of Greene’s stories about lust and greed, but with a passage on repentance, a warning to other writers about how they live their lives, and a complaint about actors. What, then, provoked the mysterious entry in the Stationers’ Register, “upon the peril of Henry Chettle”? Where did the danger lie?

Remember that the work was published shortly after Greene’s death. It remains uncertain how Chettle the printer, playwright, and pamphleteer came into possession of the text; he may well have altered it, though the extent of any intervention is unclear. What is clear is that the publication did give offence. Soon after it appeared, Chettle was confronted in his shop by two aggrieved play-makers, as he calls them. He detailed the unpleasant encounter two months later, in December 1592, when he issued a written apology in his pamphlet Kind-Hart's Dreame. The text is riddled with contradictions, to the point that many scholars now see Chettle’s entire account as a cover-up.

In the epistle Chettle denies responsibility and malicious intent, explains how the manuscript came into his hands, insists that Thomas Nashe had no involvement, and apologises to the two writers who had taken offence: “With neither of them that take offence was I acquainted, and with one of them I care not if I never be.” This episode suggests that at least one of the two behaved in a threatening manner. If the three playwrights Greene alludes to in his pamphlet were indeed Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe and George Peele, Chettle’s exclusion of Nashe leaves Marlowe and Peele. Of the two, Marlowe was the one with a reputation for belligerence.

Then, just a month later, in the preface to the second edition of his Pierce Penniless, Thomas Nashe vehemently denied any connection with Greene’s pamphlet: “God never have care of my soul… if the least word or syllable in it proceeded from my pen.”

And again, four years later, in 1596, in Have with You to Saffron Walden, Nashe reiterated, 'I never abused Marlowe, Greene, Chettle in my life’. Such forceful, repeated denials, even for years afterwards, would suggest that there had been very serious consequences to the publication of the pamphlet.

Notably, although Nashe appears to be alluded to in the text and firmly rejects any role in its composition, he does not claim to have been offended by its contents; after all, Greene’s rebuke amounts to little more than a warning to make fewer enemies. Peele would probably not have been unduly offended by a dying man’s words telling him to clean up his life-style otherwise his fortunes would not improve, which leaves us with Christopher Marlowe. Was he angry because Greene had suggested he was an atheist? Or was there something more?

Let’s look again at the story in the pamphlet. You may have wondered why I spent so much time summarising it, well that was because I believe it holds the key to the mystery. As Greene himself tells us, he is Roberto, the older brother - a scholar married to a gentlewoman. The identities of the other two characters would have easily been decoded by Greene’s readership: Marlowe had translated into English the epic poem Pharsalia by Lucan - hence the name Lucanio; and the name of the courtesan Lamilia, is so similar to the name Aemilia, the courtesan of the Lord Chamberlain, that it cannot be ignored.

Let's turn our attention to the lady for a moment. Aemelia Bassano - who has often been considered a possible candidate for the ‘dark lady’ of the sonnets - was born in 1568/69. She was the daughter of an Italian musician, Baptista Bassano, who had arrived from Venice at the court of Henry VIII, with four of his brothers, to form the royal recorder consort. The family took their name from the town where they had settled - as Jews - probably some time in the fifteenth century. Bassano, as you may remember, was the town we discussed in Case File 8 regarding the Othello mystery and the large fresco in the town which may have inspired Iago’s speech about jealousy. Is this mere coincidence? Ahha -our investigation has taken one of those unexpected turns. We'll have to set this aside for now but we'll come back to it in a later episode.

Aemilia Bassano herself became an excellent musician, playing both the lute and harpsichord. Her father died when she was just seven years old, leaving her English mother with little money, so arrangements were made for her to live with Susan Bertie, the young widowed daughter of the fiercely Protestant Duchess of Suffolk. Bertie provided the gifted young girl with an excellent education at the royal court, where she lived during her widowhood, and where the Lord Chamberlain, Henry Carey, would have first seen her. Seven years later, in 1581, when Bertie remarried and left London, Aemilia, then aged thirteen, was moved into Somerset House, of which Henry Carey was the Queen's Keeper, to become the 54-year-old’s courtesan. It seems unlikely that Aemilia would have had any say in the matter.

In 1592, when the pamphlet was published, Aemilia would have been 23 years old. Several details of her life can be traced in Greene’s story about the courtesan Lamilia. Let’s take a closer look.

We are told that Lucanio and Roberto went to Lamilia’s house "in the suburbs" - in the 16th century, Somerset House on the Strand was in fact outside the city walls. "It was pleasantly seated, and made more delectable by a pleasant garden", which, of course, Somerset House possessed. Lamilia sat at her window "taking a lute in her hand that she might be the more alluring", Bassano played both the lute and the harpsichord extremely well. "She sung this sonnet with a delicious voice" Aemilia Bassano was in fact a poet, and in 1611 became one of the first women in England to publish a work in her own, married, name.

The story continues with Lucanio trying to attract Lamilia’s attention by taking out a handkerchief full of gold coins and wiping his chin - "for his beard was not yet grown" - Marlowe was often the target of ridicule, especially by Greene, for his sparse facial hair. As we have already heard, mocking physical characteristics was typical of satirical writing of the time. Lamilia invited them into her parlour which was "garnished with goodly portraitures of amiable personages" - Somerset House would have been full of impressive portrait paintings, as it was the property of the Crown. As the two brothers entered the parlour, "an excellent consort of music" began to play - Aemilia Bassano’s cousins were the musicians of the royal recorder consort.

So, what is your view? Could the courtesan Lamilia, be a caricature of the courtesan Aemilia Bassano? Do you think the similarities between their lives are substantial enough to make this interpretation plausible? And if her lover Lucanio is indeed a caricature of Christopher Marlowe, what might the writer be trying to tell us through these parallels?

It is undeniable that Greene had some kind of issue with Marlowe, for as we have heard, in the first two parts of the pamphlet, he references the writer several times: in the love tale he appears as Lucanio whose beard had not yet grown; in Lamilia’s song he is most likely the writer indicated as having wronged faith through falsehood and contempt. In the address to fellow writers, Marlowe is most probably the "famous gracer of tragedians", who has "an excellent gift and should therefore give glory to the Giver", rather than denying the existence of God, as he does in the prologue to The Jew of Malta, with Machiavel’s phrase, "I count religion but a childish toy", which is echoed by Greene in Lamilia’s song.

While on the one hand a dying Greene urges his fellow writers to repent and mend their ways, on the other he appears intent on bringing Marlowe to ruin by exposing his secret love affair with the courtesan of the Lord Chamberlain, one of the most powerful men in England. This would certainly explain the note in the Stationer’s Register ‘Upon the peril of Henry Chettle,’ the confrontation in his shop and the threats which ultimately forced the printer to publish an apology.

However, this is not all, as we have yet to consider the third section of the pamphlet, allegedly the first literary record of William Shakespeare. I’ll just read Greene’s cryptic comment in its entirety:

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 Shake-scene in a country.

Let us try to decode this comment. The player William Shakespeare - here dubbed “Shake-scene,” in keeping with the nicknaming conventions of satire - is accused of being an “upstart crow, beautified with our feathers,” that is, of adorning himself with the work of established playwrights. The image derives from an Aesopian fable, about a crow that dresses up in peacock plumage. As we have seen, such fables were a common vehicle for satirical attack. This is followed by another device typical of the cryptic satirical prose of the period: the adaptation of a familiar quotation, with a key word substituted, as well as the use of puns. Greene’s quote comes from Henry VI, part 3. Who actually wrote this play is still up for discussion, but the scholar Donna Murphy in her stylistic study of the work in The Marlowe-Shakespeare Continuum, suggests that the principal author was actually Christopher Marlowe, which would probably explain why Greene used this line as a quote.

First, let’s look at the context in which it appears in the play. The situation in Act 1, scene 4 is such that when Henry VI names Richard, Duke of York his heir, rather than his own son, Edward, the boy’s mother, Queen Margaret of Anjou, is so furious that she raises an army against York, captures him, mocks him, and has him killed. Before dying, he denounces her as possessing a “tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide.”

This is the line which Greene transforms into "a tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide". We should remember that quotations were usually chosen carefully and for a particular reason, so we can perhaps assume that Greene had a message to deliver. His word ‘player’ substitutes, covers, conceals, indeed, hides the word woman. Decoded, it might mean that a player is hiding a woman, most likely an ambitious woman.

The satire continues, stating that the player, Shake-scene, believes himself well able to bombast out a blank-verse as the best of you. This might be a general statement or it might refer to the best blank-verse writer at that time - Marlowe.

A similar sentiment ridiculing overambitious newcomers bombasting out blank-verse had been written three years earlier by Thomas Nashe in the preface to Greene’s pamphlet, Menaphon, printed in 1589. Nashe says:

...idiot art-masters, that intrude themselves to our ears as the alchemists of eloquence, who (mounted on the stage of arrogance) think to outbrave better pens with the swelling bombast of bragging blank verse.

This might suggest that by 1592, Shake-scene had been around for three years at least. Perhaps a fact worth remembering for our investigation.

Finally, Shakespeare is accused of being "an absolute Johannes factotum" and "is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country". In other words, he’s just a jack-of-all trades - a player-cum-writer, who is too full of himself.

So, if we have decoded correctly, this passage seems to suggest a triangular relationship linking an ambitious woman (i.e. Aemilia), the best of the blank-verse writers (i.e. Marlowe and probable author of the quotation) and a jack-of-all-trades (i.e. Shakespeare).

But to discover exactly what that relationship might be, we will have to wait until the next episode - one in which Greene will continue to play a predominant role.