[In the following essay, Jowett examines the evidence for the claim that Chettle authored Greene's Groatsworth of Wit before establishing a context for his authorship and confronting those critics who reject the idea that he forged the work.]

Greene's Groatsworth of Wit and The Repentance of Robert Greene, both published shortly after Robert Greene's death in 1592, are two of the most important autobiographical and literary records of the period.¹ The Groatsworth's letter to the playwrights, with its repudiation of the players, its comments on the dramatists, and its open hostility towards Marlowe and Shakespeare, make it a crucial and justifiably well-known document in literary and theatrical history. The Repentance is significant not only as a source of information on Greene's life, but also in its own right as a narrative of self by a literary writer, perhaps the first of its kind in English. Either of these documents will be read and interpreted differently if, as has been alleged, an impersonator's heart lurks beneath its tiger's hide. Issues of authorship attribution can rarely be more vital to the text, its reading, its place in history.

I

The Groatsworth's accusation that Shakespeare was a plagiarist and an upstart Johannes factotum can be turned upon its editor, Henry Chettle. If the Groatsworth is (in modern terms) a forgery, it must have been perpetrated by Chettle, who, by his own account, edited and transcribed Greene's papers. According to Chettle in Kind-Heart's Dream, published about three months after the Groatsworth, it was his contemporaries who first cast doubts on the genuineness of the Groatsworth, accusing him or Nashe of fabricating it.² There is no real case for Nashe to answer; it is Chettle whose hands prepared the manuscript of the Groatsworth, and Nashe was at this time dwelling out of London in Croydon. In the present century the case against Chettle has been most influentially rebuffed by Harold Jenkins. Responding to an admittedly often tendentious article by Chauncey Elwood Sanders, Jenkins dismisses the suggestion that Chettle not only transcribed the Groatsworth but forged it.³ The mainstream of opinion amongst literary historians has continued to flow with Greene.⁴ However, the ascription to Greene depends on Chettle alone: on his transcript, on his entry in the Stationers' Register, and on his denial of authorship in Kind-Heart's Dream. The best internal evidence points strongly away from Greene and towards Chettle. Warren Austin's computer-aided study of the authorship of the Groatsworth provided an array of statistical data in support of Chettle's authorship.⁵ As we shall see, Austin's findings have been judged to fall short of clear proof that Chettle wrote the Groatsworth. However, Greene's authorship is severely put in question. It becomes necessary to ask what further internal and contextual considerations might be adduced to clarify the nature of Chettle's part in putting the pamphlet together. The conclusions Austin reaches mesh convincingly with all that can be discerned about the circumstances under which the Groatsworth came into being. Here may be included Chettle's relations with the stationer John Danter, for whom he was working in 1592 and thereafter, and Danter's involvement with the Groatsworth, The Repentance of Robert Greene, and the unpublished The Cony-Catcher's Repentance.

Chettle's role must have been to all intents and purposes that of author, and Chettle's ascription of the pamphlet to Greene cannot be credited. To demonstrate this I will take Austin's study of authorship attribution as primary evidence; after evaluating and following through some implications of this work (Section II), I will establish a context for Chettle's authorship of the Groatsworth (Section III) and briefly confront some aspects of critical resistance to assigning the pamphlet to him (Section IV). The authorship of The Repentance of Robert Greene can then be addressed, for this work too has sometimes, I will argue, been wrongly attributed to Chettle (Section V). Returning to the Groatsworth, I will finally explore some implications of the authorship question for the way we read the text.

II

A critical evaluation of Austin's findings must be central to any discussion of the Groatsworth's authorship. Austin's investigation has received insufficient attention partly because it was not widely published. Critics have tended to rely on the cautious reviews of Austin's work, especially those in the major Shakespeare periodicals. These reviews need putting in perspective. They make a snap judgement of “not proven,” but they all find value in Austin's work, and they all implicitly recognise that the case for Greene's hand is similarly not proven. What is now required is to take on board what is valid in their criticism and see what remains of Austin's thesis. I will indeed add my own notes of caution, but it seems to me finally that Austin's study outrides the objections that can be levelled against it.

R. L. Widmann and T. R. Waldo, both writing as specialists in computer applications to literary study, raise similar objections.⁶ They are primarily that (a) the Greene texts concorded by Austin represent too small a sample of his work, (b) the Chettle texts are generically diverse,⁷ and (c) Austin imputes Greene text from the not wholly reliable Grosart edition. These criticisms have some force, but it is rather by way of defining limitations to Austin's study rather than invalidating it.⁸ The sample of Greene text is in fact several times larger than the Chettle corpus, which includes all works accepted as of his sole authorship but only a tiny fraction of his overall literary output, most of which is lost. Waldo points out examples of Chettle-favoured features in Greene works outside Austin's Greene corpus, but individual examples prove nothing. Two of the three categories of Waldo's examples (the spelling of “O(h)” and parentheses) are potentially subject to scribal and compositorial manipulation, and, as will be seen, must be treated with extreme caution on other grounds. The fact that Austin selects Greene texts close to the Groatsworth in genre, if it distorts the results at all, would almost certainly distort them in Greene's favour. As for Austin's use of Grosart, this will provide only slightly unreliable results, and only for the very tests that are least able to distinguish between Chettle as scribe and as author. Grosart's text is not so unreliable as to distort significantly the findings based on substantive readings.

On the positive side, Widmann finds the section on morphological variables relatively convincing, and Waldo praises Austin's “precise weighing of the evidence available to him within the limits of his study.” Their hesitance is partly in response to Austin's claim to absolute certainty and to his presentation of the Groatsworth study as a generalisable model for stylistic discrimination. Any such model must be methodologically impeccable. It remains valid to distrust some of the tests whilst recognising that others offer a convincing demonstration. A discounted test does not weigh against the hypothesis; it merely narrows the basis on which it is upheld.

In the spirit of these remarks, my own reservations may be added to those of Widmann and Waldo. Austin's is an early example of the new generation of authorship studies based on computer-generated concordances and statistical analysis. Today he would have had a greater range of models available to him; for instance, it may have been productive to test “high-frequency” or “function” words in combination with each other. There are some points at which Austin's methodology could possibly be improved that were not noted by reviewers. For instance, he makes no use of any control sample by a third author. One investigation, the analysis of high-frequency words (though only a small part of his overall findings), is weakened both by a low minimum differential ratio between the frequencies in Greene and Chettle of just 1.25, and by some flattening of discrepancies in individual words by aggregating them together. Perhaps most crucially, some of Austin's results need to be discounted or at least treated with caution because they fail to allow for the kind of intervention Chettle might innocently make as the text's scribe. I include here the incidence of parentheses, the spelling of “o(h),” and the distribution of “semi-indifferent” variables such as “ye”/“you” and “-ever”/“-soever.”⁹

There remains a hard core of substantial and impressive evidence for the pervasive presence of Chettle's hand in the Groatsworth. A brief summary cannot do these findings adequate justice, but some indication of their scope can be given. Austin begins with lexical variables. Comparing a corpus of text by each author, he identifies a list of words favoured by each writer in relation to the preferences of the other. It transpires that the Greene-favoured words are thinly represented in the Groatsworth, whereas the most distinctly Chettle-favoured words are in most cases found more frequently in the Groatsworth than in a Greene corpus that is nine times its length. Table 1 presents the most striking elements in Austin's Table 8. The differential ratio between Greene and Chettle for these words is on average 27.5; their average incidence in the Groatsworth is slightly higher than for the Chettle corpus itself. There are no comparable results in the opposite direction, as can be seen in Table 2. This shows the accumulated results of the test. The six Chettle “markers” are Chettle-favoured words with a differential ratio of over twenty-five; that is, words found over twenty-five times as commonly in Chettle's writing as in Greene's.¹⁰ The results show a close correlation between the vocabulary most distinct to Chettle in his acknowledged writings and that in the Groatsworth. There is no such correlation between distinctive Greene vocabulary and the Groatsworth.

These findings in themselves give a strong indication of Chettle's hand, but they emerge from only the first of a number of tests. If the analysis of “high-frequency” words can, as suggested above, be no more than suggestive, Austin is more persuasive when he identifies thirty-three objectively defined uncommon words in the Groatsworth, and shows that five of them appear in his Chettle corpus but none in that for Greene. There is bound to be something arbitrary in establishing “objective” criteria for defining uncommon words, but there is no reason to suppose that Austin's procedures lead to a bias in favour of one author or the other. Proceeding to “morphological variables,” Austin establishes that there is a whole range of features whose occurrence in the Groatsworth matches that in Chettle but not Greene; these include prefixes, suffixes, reflexive pronouns, gerund plurals, and compound words. This section of Austin's study consistently convinces.¹¹ Under the heading “morphological variables” Austin conducts a complex analysis of word-order inversion that yields some very high differential ratios between Chettle's habits and Greene's, Chettle being the addicted inverter; there is a close correspondence between Chettle and the habits found in the Groatsworth. It is this part of the study that Widmann singled out for praise.

The best of Austin's results, in aggregate, provide ample substantiation for Chettle's hand. Furthermore, and crucially, they leave little scope for Greene's. Chettle's contribution cannot be confined to scribal sophistication, nor even editorial overlay. In every category of diction and syntax that Austin was able to test, it emerges that Chettle is the favoured originator. Nor can Chettle's presence be confined to certain sections of the pamphlet; it is ubiquitous. The letter to the playwrights is of special interest here, and Austin gives it separate consideration. Though the passage is short, it contains an unexpected hoard of features that point to Chettle's authorship. Here least of all could one argue that Chettle is incorporating a Greene fragment.

Such, then, is the answer to the criticism made in a review by Richard Proudfoot. Proudfoot observed that “[t]he linguistic facts revealed by Austin's study are open to more than one construction: Chettle's revision may virtually have constituted authorship (or at least co-authorship) without carrying the implications of fraud or imposture alleged by Austin.”¹² Proudfoot does indeed accept Chettle as no less than co-author, and perhaps indeed forger as Austin suggests. But the case for co-authorship by way of revision lacks any positive substantiation; in no linguistic realm does any Greene stratum of writing manifest itself. As Austin suggests in his study of the letter to the playwrights, and as will be seen further below, close examination of individual sections of the text serves only to diminish the basis for the kind of co-authorship Proudfoot envisages. The grounds for accepting that the Groatsworth is a dressing-up of writing by Greene are slender indeed.

This is not to say that in compiling an imitation of Greene Chettle ignored Greene's writings. He must have had access to the manuscript of The Repentance of Robert Greene, which was entered in the Stationers' Register to Danter on 6 October 1592, and evidently he made use of it. Here he would have learned of Greene's pitiable state of mind. Here too he would have found models for the confessional outburst that follows the interruption of Roberto's Tale, for the list of caveats that comes after that, and for the letter to Greene's wife that concludes the Groatsworth. In each case there is a parallel passage in the Repentance (and indeed these parallels—too much duplicated but different material, too evenly spread between the pamphlets—are another small reason for suspecting the integrity of the Groatsworth). Greene himself, as is well established, recycled his own (and others') writings, but closer examination of the Greene influence on the pamphlet only serves to strengthen the impression that Chettle was working directly from material other than an ur-Groatsworth by Greene.

Austin observed that Chettle based some details of the Lucanio-Lamilia episode (14-24) on part of Greene's Never Too Late, and details of Roberto's encounter with a rich player (33-34) on a similar encounter in Francesco's Fortunes.¹³ Here a minor discrepancy between Austin's frequencies for Greene-favoured vocabulary in the Greene corpus and in the Groatsworth itself, and so a small but significant exception to my assertion that there is no linguistic basis for a Greene stratum in the writing, can be explained in terms of Chettle's imitation of Greene. Commenting on the results summarised in Table 2, Austin notes that “[t]he group of Greene-favoured words had indeed appeared in the Groatsworth at only one-fourth of the rate characteristic of Greene's prose; but they had aggregated twenty-two occurrences, or twice the typical frequency for these words in Chettle's prose.” Seven words that appear nowhere in the Chettle corpus (aim, dump(s), fancy, feign, glance, insomuch, and wax in the sense “become”), together with the Greenean grow in the sense “become,” appear collectively seventeen times in the Groatsworth. The pamphlet's vocabulary therefore has a minor but very distinct Greenean colouring which, if Chettle is author, might be due either to fragments of Greene's writing or to studied imitation of Greene's style by Chettle. Austin's explanation is the latter. The words in question are noticeably repeated in the passage from Never Too Late that Chettle consulted, aggregating thirty-three occurrences; they accordingly influenced Chettle's diction. This is not to say that Chettle borrowed sentences or phrases containing these words; he did not. Instead he consciously or unconsciously assimilated them as part of his “Greene” repertoire.

If this sounds like special pleading, further analysis will confirm the nature of the Greene influence as a borrowing, and affirm that the basic fabric of the text remains Chettle's even where these words occur. They conspicuously cluster in a passage of the Groatsworth of some five quarto pages (C1^v-3^v) concerned with the story of Lucanio and Lamilia. As noted above, Austin established a narrative link between this story and a section of Never Too Late, and established a link in diction between the Greene-favoured words in the Groatsworth as a whole and the same Greene passage. Within the Lucanio and Lamilia story, the passage most closely associated with the Greene passage is also where the Greene-favoured words cluster. And there are some significant parallels of phrasing. Where Never Too Late relates how the courtesan Infada, “dying her face with a Vermillion blush … saluted him with a lowe courtesie,”¹⁴ the courtesan Lamilia in the Groatsworth “tainted her cheekes with a vermilion blush” (20) and soon after accepted a gift “with a lowe conge” (21); Greene uses “conge” a few pages later in Never Too Late.¹⁵ This confirms the influence of the Greene passage on the passage in the Groatsworth, though it offers no account in itself of the shared Greene-favoured diction. For the Greene-favoured words are not transplanted to equivalent contexts or transplanted in entire phrases; it simply happens that to the narrative parallels and phrasing parallels may be added parallels of diction.

I have charted the occurrence of the Greene-favoured vocabulary in relation to the Chettle-favoured vocabulary over eight quarto pages (pages 15-22 in the Bodley Head edition) centring on the passage influenced by Never Too Late; that is to say, from soon after the beginning of the story of Lamilia to the beginning of the new section headed “Lamilias Fable.” It constitutes about one-fifth of the pamphlet as a whole. I adopt a minimum differential ratio of five; thus on the basis of Austin's corpora, any word listed in the following table occurs at least five times as often in one writer as the other. The numbers in parentheses show the frequency of the word in Greene and Chettle (adjusted to a notional base of one hundred thousand words for each writer, and taking no account of whether Austin uses the root word and its variants or the given form only). An asterisk indicates a differential ratio between Greene's and Chettle's usage of a word of at least ten, and so highlights the strongest pointers to the writer in question.

This passage largely accounts for the unexpected incidence of Greene-favoured vocabulary. It contains ten of the twenty-two occurrences of these words in the whole of the Groatsworth;¹⁶ in other words, all but one of the eleven occurrences that make the Groatsworth out of line with the predicted frequency of Greene vocabulary in Chettle's work. Nine of them meet my requirement for inclusion in Table 3 of having a differential ratio of over five; eight belong to the seventeen instances of words that appear nowhere in the Chettle corpus. Relative to the rest of the text, these pages are therefore intensely Greenean, and some explanation is indeed required. Nevertheless, there is a higher incidence of Chettle vocabulary than Greene vocabulary, especially if one takes account of the fact that the emphatically Greene-favoured word fancy recurs only because it is repeated in the refrain to Lamilia's song. If the evidence for Greene is more intensive, that for Chettle is more extensive.

The Greene vocabulary is not evenly or randomly spread. It can be isolated to three short blocks within the overall episode: Lamilia's song on C1^v, a passage that may be no more than twenty-five lines on C2-2^v, and a passage of fifteen lines on C3^v. The Greene influence on the diction, where it does show through, is very localized, even in an episode that is otherwise influenced by Greene's writings. I have not noted any distinct counter-indicators to Greene's authorship of any of the three small blocks, but the case against his authorship of the rest of the eight pages could be considerably strengthened by reference to Austin's other tests; for instance, the distinctive compound amber-coloured (C3) occurs elsewhere in Chettle but not in Greene, and the even more distinctive wainscot-proof (C2), used to describe a face, has a close parallel in Chettle's wainscot-faced.

There is therefore data that by one interpretation could point to Greene's hand contributing about forty lines and a song. These fragments occur in a surround that is Chettelian; if they are in themselves pure Greene, they must show that Chettle implanted the three fragments from a lost Greene work. The alternative account would be Austin's: that Chettle borrowed the Greene vocabulary from the comparable episode in Never Too Late and perhaps also the rich player passage of Francesco's Fortunes. The clustering pattern of the Greene vocabulary perhaps hints at the first explanation. Chettle may have grafted Greene cuttings of short passages from a Greene manuscript rather than, or as well as, single words from a printed text, or adapted such passages whilst retaining some of their diction. One thing is sure: even in the pamphlet's most Greenean moments, the incidence of Greene-favoured vocabulary does nothing to undermine the hypothesis that the work as a whole is essentially by another writer.

The attack on Shakespeare provides another example of a parallel in phrasing with Never Too Late, this time from the second part entitled Francesco's Fortunes. Austin noted the general resemblance between the Groatsworth passage and the description of a rich player in Francesco's Fortunes, but shortly before the latter it is demanded of the Roman actor Roscius: “why Roscius, art thou proud with Esops Crow, being pranct with the glorie of others feathers?” This anticipates the description of Shakespeare as “an vpstart Crow, beautified with our feathers.” But the account of Roberto's encounter with the player and the denigration of Shakespeare and the players in the epistle to the playwrights (45-46) are influenced also by a passage not by Greene, though one associated with him: Nashe's epistle to the students of both universities prefixed to Greene's Menaphon (1589). The passage reads:

Sundry other sweete Gentlemen I doe know, that haue vaunted their pennes in priuate deuices, and tricked vp a company of taffaty fooles with their feathers, whose beauty if our Poets had not peecte with the supply of their periwigs, they might haue antickt it vntill this time vp and downe the Countrey with the King of Fairies, and dined euery day at the pease porredge ordinary with Delfrigus.¹⁷

The mysterious jibe about the King of Fairies and Delfrigus is repeated in the Groatsworth, where the player claims to be “famous for Delphrigus, & the King of Fairies.”¹⁸ The influence of Nashe is therefore indisputable. It undermines any particular significance of the parallel in Greene, and illustrates clearly the technique whereby the writer of the Groatsworth himself borrowed a few feathers.

Chettle might have similarly used and reshaped material in another Greene repentance pamphlet that, like The Repentance of Robert Greene, was certainly in Danter's hands at the time Chettle was writing. On 21 August 1592, in the last days of Greene's life, a book was entered to Danter in the Stationers' Register “intituled The Repentance of a Coneycatcher. with the life and death of [blank] Mourton and Ned Browne, two notable conycatchers The one latelie executed at Tyborne the other at Aix in Ffraunce.” The account of Ned Browne was subsequently published as The Black Book's Messenger; it was printed by Danter but issued by Thomas Nelson. The account of Mourton remained unpublished. It is this story that is referred to in the Stationers' Register as “The Repentance of a Coneycatcher,” for Greene's preface to the reader in The Black Book's Messenger calls the companion piece “the Conny-catchers repentance.”¹⁹ If Chettle exploited this material, it can be appreciated why The Cony-Catcher's Repentance evidently did not reach print if Chettle plagiarized it: the game would have been given away entirely. Conjecturally, it would have contributed to the main fictional part of the pamphlet, the story of Roberto. This would explain why this story is so melodramatically abandoned unfinished:

Heere (Gentlemen) breake I off Robertoes speach; whose life in most parts agreeing with mine, found one selfe punishment as I haue doone. Heereafter suppose me the saide Roberto, and I will goe on with that hee promised: Greene will send you now his groats-worth of wit, that neuer shewed a mitesworth in his life: & though no man now bee by to doo mee good: yet ere I die I will by my repentaunce indeuour to doo all men good.

(39)

Roberto's Tale is not in fact close to Greene's life, at least as it is told in The Repentance of Robert Greene. Any pretence that elements of the story of Mourton, adapted as Roberto's Tale, could be taken as an allegory for Robert Greene's life would collapse as the narrative worked towards Mourton's execution. The claim of convergence could mask the moment of inescapable divergence.

However, the influence of the Mourton story could possibly overspill Roberto's interrupted tale. The later and more overtly autobiographical passages dealing with Greene's repentance conform to Greene's plan for The Cony-Catcher's Repentance. In the epistle prefixed to The Black Book's Messenger Greene describes it as containing “a passion of great importance. First how he was giuen ouer from all grace and Godlines, and seemed to haue no sparke of the feare of God in him: yet neuerthelesse, through the woonderfull working of Gods spirite, euen in the dungeon at Newgate the night before he died, he so repented him from the bottome of his hart …” (in contrast with Ned Brown who declares in his opening sentence, “If you thinke (Gentlemen) to heare a repentant man speake, or to tel a large tale of the penitent sorrowes, ye are deceiued”). The hero of the unpublished pamphlet must have been close in spirit to Greene himself, and, despite the narrative lacuna, the confessional parts of the Groatsworth may have been informed by it.

These comments on The Cony-Catcher's Repentance are inevitably speculative, and any Greene material in the Groatsworth must lie deeply buried beneath Chettle's writing. On the basis of internal evidence, and taking into account the materials available to Chettle and the absence of any independent testimony to Greene's authorship, the Groatsworth must, to all intents and purposes, have been written by him. From the above paragraphs one can begin to see, with varying degrees of certainty, what materials were available to Chettle to assist him in this task, and what sort of use he could have made of them. The parallels between the Groatsworth and passages in Greene and Nashe suggest that he picked little fragments and altered them as he incorporated them. In the case of The Cony-Catcher's Repentance, the fact that the work is not available for verification may in itself be a result of a more blatant act of plunder.

III

I now turn from internal and intertextual issues to Chettle's working relations with Danter, and to certain of Danter's working practices that are illuminating in their own right. In 1591 Chettle, himself a stationer, went into business with William Hoskins and Danter. The partnership, housed in Fetter Lane, dissolved within a few months, for by early 1592 Danter had set up independently of Hoskins in Duck Lane. In early 1593 the Stationers' Company arbitrated on a dispute between Chettle and Danter, but Chettle continued to work for Danter for a number of years, until 1596 at least. Chettle, writing the letter to Nashe that Nashe quoted in his Have With You at Saffron Walden (1596), signed himself “Your old Compositor, Henry Chettle.” In his biography of Chettle, Harold Jenkins quotes this letter and comments:

The signature ‘Your old Compositor’ in the letter to Nashe points to his having at some time printed some of Nashe's writings. It seems more than coincidence that two of Nashe's works—Strange News, which was first issued in 1592, and The Terrors of the Night, which appeared in 1594—came from the press of Chettle's former partner, John Danter. Have With You at Saffron Walden, the book which Chettle in his letter offers to assist through the printing-house, was likewise printed by Danter. Still more conclusive is that Primaleon of Greece [Part 2] (Munday's translation, 1596), the publication of which Chettle says he did all in his power to speed up,²⁰ bears Danter's name on the title page.

(18)

Some details may be added. Chettle publicized Strange News in his Kind-Heart's Dream. In the guise of Greene's ghost he calls on Nashe, addressed as Pierce Penniless, to revenge himself on Gabriel Harvey for Harvey's assault on Greene and Nashe in his recently issued Four Letters. Even as Chettle wrote, parts of Nashe's work were going through Danter's press.²¹ Danter was later to print Chettle's own Pierce Plainness. Thanks to the work of H. R. Hoppe, C. T. Wright, J. A. Lavin, and Sidney Thomas, we now know more about Danter's printing activities than was established when Jenkins wrote, and can identify his part in a number of books whose imprints do not bear his name.²² The printing of the Groatsworth was shared between Danter and John Wolfe, with Danter taking the second half of the book, sheets D-F. A similar arrangement was reached with Chettle's own Kind-Heart's Dream, where Danter took on sheets E-H. Though Cuthbert Burby issued The Repentance of Robert Greene, Danter printed it. There is a common origin for the Groatsworth and the Repentance not in the publisher but, unobtrusively, in the unnamed printer, and his involvement was neither casual nor temporary. It can be seen from the Stationers' Register that Chettle had an interest in one copy and Danter in the other. After preparing the Groatsworth, Chettle entered it in the Stationers' Register to William Wright; the Repentance was entered to Danter himself. Finally, it seems that Chettle worked a memorially based text of Romeo and Juliet into something like coherence, supplying the passages that have been identified as “non-Shakespearian”; the outcome was Danter's 1597 First Quarto of the play.²³

There are therefore definite connections between Chettle and books, particularly literary works, printed wholly or in part by Danter. Their authors include Greene, Nashe, Munday, Shakespeare, and Chettle himself. If Danter's shop had been unable to support a full-time reader, Chettle might have operated as a freelance or journeyman whose responsibilities included those of reader.²⁴ He was evidently an intermediary between Danter and the authors, as well as working as compositor, patcher of texts, publicist, and epistle-writer.

Danter does not enjoy a good reputation. Greg described his short career as “a record of piracy and secret printing.”²⁵ This is something of an exaggeration, excessively coloured by Danter's responsibility for bringing out the ‘bad’ quartos of Orlando Furioso and Romeo and Juliet. It would be more accurate to say that he scratched a poor living by printing works that were cheap to produce and which, by inclining to the sensational, promised a good sale. There is little definite evidence for piracy—even the play quartos were not, as far as we know, stolen from another stationer—though Danter was far from averse to sharp practice.²⁶

The Groatsworth and the Repentance both raise questions as to the ownership of copy, and are not unique in this. Danter can be associated with about eighty books that he printed and/or issued, or that were entered to him, during his activity as a stationer between 1591 when the Hoskins-Danter-Chettle partnership was set up and 1597 when Danter's two presses were seized and subsequently destroyed.²⁷ He was involved in printing nearly all of these works; a number of them were entered to him, and a small proportion were actually issued by him. In the usual course of things the printer was commissioned by the copyholding stationer, but Danter, despite his inability to issue the printed book, must have regularly played an active role in procuring manuscripts himself. Indeed, he was famed for it, for in The Return from Parnassus there is a short scene in which “Danter the Printer” (not “Danter the Stationer”) is shown eagerly negotiating to purchase a script. When Danter bought texts he could not publish, an irregularity in the imprint could result. I have noted a number of books for which the imprint or the Stationers' Register entry is anomalous; that is to say, where a discrepancy arises between the holder of the title as stipulated in the Stationers' Register and the issuing stationer identified on the imprint:²⁸

Thomas Lodge's Catharos, or Diogenes, (STC 16654), entered to Chettle on 17 September 1591 (Arber, 2: 595); issued as “Printed by William Hoskins & Iohn Danter, for Iohn Busbie,” 1591;

Greene's The Black Book's Messenger (STC 12223), entered to Danter on 21 August 1592 (Arber, 2: 619); issued as “Printed at London by Iohn Danter, for Thomas Nelson,” 1592;

Greene's Groatsworth of Wit (STC 12245), entered to Wright upon the peril of Chettle on 20 September 1592 (Arber, 2: 620); part printed (sheets D-F) by Danter but issued as “Imprinted for William Wright” without naming Danter, 1592;

The Repentance of Robert Greene (STC 12306), entered to Danter on 6 October 1592 (Arber, 2: 621); printed by Danter, but issued as “Printed for Cutbert Burbie” without naming Danter, 1592;

Nashe's Strange News (STC 18377), entered to Danter on 12 January 1593 (Arber, 2: 624); printed by Danter; issued first as “Printed 1592” without any stationer named on the imprint (1592 A), then with Danter named as printer but without specifying him or anyone else as publisher or seller (1592 B and 1593 A-C), and finally as printed by Danter for William Barley (1593 D);²⁹

T. W.'s Tears of Fancy (STC 25122), entered to Danter on 11 August 1593 (Arber, 2: 635); printed by Danter, but issued as “Printed at London for William Barley” without naming Danter, 1593;

Nashe's The Terrors of the Night (STC 18379), entered to Danter on 30 June 1593 (Arber, 2: 633) and again on 25 October 1594 (Arber, 2: 663); issued as “Printed by Iohn Danter for William Iones,” 1594;

George Peele's The Old Wives' Tale (STC 19545), entered to Ralph Hancock on 16 April 1595 (Arber, 2: 296); issued as “Printed by Iohn Danter, and are to be sold by Ralph Hancocke, and Iohn Hardie,” 1595;

T. Johnson's Cornucopiae (STC 14707), entered to Danter on 30 October 1594 (Arber, 2: 663); printed by Danter, but issued as “Printed for William Barley” without naming Danter, 1596;

Christopher Middleton's Chinon of England (STC 17866), entered to Gosson and Danter on 20 January 1596 (Arber, 3: 57); issued as “Printed by Iohn Danter, for Cuthbert Burbie,” 1597.

Even discounting the Groatsworth, where there is no discrepancy between copyholder and issuing stationer, this is a long list in relation to the total number of anomalous imprints identified by Greg. Greg found about 150 such imprints in the entire output of London publishers in the hundred years between 1550 and 1650. Yet here is a minor stationer pursuing a small business over seven years who alone contributes a significant fraction of those imprints. All the listed books except Old Wives' Tale involve Danter holding the title to a work issued by another stationer.³⁰ Thus Danter is responsible for eight out of about one hundred examples in this category over the entire century, which is at least as many as would be expected from the entire London publishing industry in a seven-year period. The impression is given of an impecunious printer who every now and again kept his press going by securing the title to a work and then informally allowing another stationer to put up the capital and sell the copies. What Greg calls the “exceptional” circumstances became with Danter usual, in that the unformalized transfer was commoner than a formal transfer, and, despite his interest in acquiring titles, commoner than Danter issuing and selling a book himself.

All the works in question are what we would now call literary, and most of them were written by Lodge, Greene, and Nashe. Greene's Orlando Furioso (1594) was also originally entered to Danter, but in this case the book was reassigned in the Stationers' Register to the issuing stationer Burby. The concentration of works by the “university wits” in Danter's output is itself noteworthy, but their concentration in the anomalous imprints of 1591-94 and especially 1591-92 is much more remarkable. Chettle himself is explicitly associated with Catharos, as copyholder, the Groatsworth, as editor and alleged author, Strange News, as publicist, and probably also The Repentance of Robert Greene, as editor (see Section V). The inference must be that Chettle was fielding literary manuscripts to Danter, but that Danter was not able fully to capitalise on the opportunities Chettle provided. In particular, the Harvey-Nashe quarrel (to which Catharos contributed) and Greene's death provided a sudden rush of exploitable literary scandal in 1591-92. Chettle secured more than a fair share of it for Danter. Danter's four misleading imprints of 1591-92 reflect a culture of literary opportunism. They coexist with cases of fraud by both Chettle and his friend Munday. Munday rather than Spenser probably prepared the translation of Axiochus that Burby issued in 1592; Danter shared with Charlewood in the printing.³¹ For his part, Chettle falsely signed his epistle to Munday's II Gerileon, also issued by Burby in 1592, with Nashe's initials, “T. N.” In Kind-Heart's Dream he confessed the deceit, blaming it, implausibly, on the printers.

If there was no formal irregularity over the publication of the Groatsworth, the Wardens of the Stationers' Company seem to have foreseen some kind of difficulty. Chettle himself presented the book for entry in the Stationers' Register on 21 September 1592, less than three weeks after Greene's death. The title was assigned to William Wright, but “vppon the perill of Henrye Chettle.” The phrase “upon the peril” protected the Wardens from liability in the case of future trouble over the book, and so suggests that trouble was anticipated.³² It cannot be accepted that the Wardens foresaw and were concerned about the objections raised by Marlowe and Shakespeare. One possible explanation is that the Groatsworth was entered without a license. In Kind-Heart's Dream Chettle claims that his transcript was prepared for the licensers as well as the printers: “licensd it must be, ere it could bee printed which could neuer be if it might not be read.” This is far from conclusive testimony that the book was indeed licensed, but Chettle would be exposing himself to refutation if the book had not been duly entered. We should be warned against assuming too hastily that this was the problem that concerned the Wardens. In any case we are plainly presented with one irregularity without needing to conjecture others. Chettle was associated with Danter, who as part-printer had some interest in the book, but he was entering the title to another party. In these circumstances the Wardens would have had every reason to be uncertain as to the validity of Wright's entitlement. Further explanation for the unusual entry is not required.

Wright's publication of the Groatsworth offers itself as a prime cause for the Chettle-Danter dispute, especially if indeed Chettle had forged the Groatsworth. On the one hand, his own stake would have been higher. On the other hand, though Danter had no formal claim over the book, he could have been aggrieved at Chettle's exploitation of manuscripts in his possession, especially if the controversy over the authorship of the Groatsworth had rendered The Cony-Catcher's Repentance unpublishable. By accepting that the Groatsworth was a forgery, we can attribute both Chettle and Danter with stronger and more readily conflicting interests in it.

The quarrel between Chettle and Danter and another quarrel between Danter and Burby were laid before the court of the Stationers' Company on the same day, 5 March 1593.³³ Connections between these intrinsically linked disputes are not hard to find. The Axiochus Munday evidently translated and misattributed to Spenser and the Repentance of Robert Greene are the only two works on which the two stationers had cooperated. There are resemblances between this and another disguised translation by Munday that certainly did lead to a dispute between stationers. This is the dispute in 1595 between Edward Allde and Adam Islip over entitlement to Amadis de Gaul. On this occasion Munday passed himself off as the fictitious “Lazarus Pyott,” with help from Chettle who lent substantiation in his epistle and poem prefixed to II Gerileon.³⁴

But at least Axiochus had been transferred in the Stationer's Register from Danter to Burby. The Repentance of Robert Greene is a clear-cut example of an anomalous imprint. Though Danter entered the Repentance in the Stationers' Register and printed it, the book was issued by another stationer. The imprint implies that Burby owns a copy to which, according to the Register, Danter actually held the title. The Repentance is only a short work, and one might question whether in this case Danter's presumed shortage of funds can explain the irregularity. And one must be struck by the analogy with the possible confusion over ownership of copy for the Groatsworth. The informal understanding reached over the Repentance, or the lack of it, left even more ample ground for dispute. A later entry in the Stationers' Register corroborates the view that the disagreement between Danter and Burby did indeed centre on an informal transfer of title. When Orlando Furioso, another text secured by Danter in dubious circumstances, was transferred from Danter to Burby on 28 May 1594, the entry was uniquely precise in making a provision for Danter to print all editions. Opposite the name “Cuthbert Burbye” the entry reads: “Entred for his copie by consent by Iohn Danter. and by warraunt from M^r warden Cawood vnder his hande. A booke entytuled. The historie of Orlando furioso. &c Prouided alwaies, and yt is agreed that soe often as the same booke shallbe printed. the saide Iohn Danter to haue thimpryntinge thereof.”³⁵ The emphasis on formalised mutual consent and agreement would be a logical outcome of the settlement reached a year earlier, if the original argument had indeed concerned the Repentance.

Thus, on the basis of the available ground for dispute and the apparent upshot of the Danter-Burby dispute in their agreement over Orlando Furioso, it is possible to piece together the likely causes underlying the two hearings before the Court of the Stationers' Company. They involve perhaps the activities of Munday as ghost-translator, and more certainly the activities of Chettle as editor and fabricator. As for the Groatsworth, the inferrable cause of the Chettle-Danter quarrel, no matter whether Wright was in collusion with Chettle or simply accepted the manuscript at face value, he offers no testimony of the pamphlet's authorship that is independent of Chettle himself. The issues of the integrity and the ownership of the manuscript may not have been distinct when the book was entered in the Stationers' Register, and Chettle's fellow writers smelt a rat. Admittedly Gabriel Harvey seems to have accepted that Greene wrote the work, as did “B. R.” in his tract Greene's News both from Heaven and Hell (1593), where another fictional ghost of Greene refers to “one other of my bookes, called Greenes groats worth of wit.”³⁶But these writers simply take the title-page at face value. Amongst the doubters may be included not only the accusers whom Chettle answered in Kind-Heart's Dream, but also Nashe. In his epistle to the printer prefixed to the second 1592 edition of Pierce Penniless he proposes an epistle “to the Ghost of Robert Greene, telling him, what a coyle there is with pamphleting on him after his death.” This “coyle” might include Chettle's Kind-Heart's Dream, where the ghost of Greene is figured; but it more particularly refers to accusations that Nashe himself had co-authored the Groatsworth; he goes on to say: “God neuer haue a care of my soule, but vtterly renoūce me, if the least word or sillable of it proceeded from my pen, or if I were in any way priuie to the writing or printing of it.”³⁷ He describes the Groatsworth as a “scald triuial lying pamphlet.” Whereas Chettle exculpates Nashe, these turns of phrase do nothing to exculpate Chettle. Indeed, without specifically blaming Chettle, Nashe would seem to be implying that the pamphlet is not what it purports to be, and that the writing of it was uncomfortably close to the printing house. Similarly, Thomas Newman, publisher of Greene's posthumous Greene's Vision, issued in the same year as the Groatsworth, asserted in his attached epistle that “Manie haue published repentaunces vnder his name.”³⁸ This was stated before the appearance of the recognised pseudo-Greene pamphlets, none of which in any case claimed to be a repentance. The evidence that is truly independent of Chettle's own assertions all runs against him.

As we have seen, despite the other examples of anomalous imprints of books entered to Danter, the irregularities surrounding both the Groatsworth and the Repentance (and The Black Book's Messenger) still smack of a diversion. Chettle's own claim in Kind-Heart's Dream that Greene left “many papers in sundry Booke sellers hands” is consistent with this picture.³⁹ Apart from Greene's Vision, the only papers of which we have any knowledge are those left in the hands of Danter. The Black Book's Messenger was with him before Greene's death, but The Repentance of Robert Greene contains a letter written just hours before Greene expired; this part of the pamphlet at least must have been acquired by Danter posthumously. Chettle's statement upholds the impression that the Groatsworth and the Repentance existed in their published forms before Greene's death, and that Greene sent them to the two different stationers who issued them. It should be discounted as testimony as to what actually happened.

IV

To summarise my discussion to this point:

a) Austin's authorship test on the Groatsworth is more than suggestive in indicating Chettle's authorship and counter-indicating Greene's authorship;

b) the materials available to Chettle that would help him construct his forgery confirm its viability, and investigation of the relation between passages in Greene and in the Groatsworth shows that the latter are better explained as Chettle's imitation of, or highly localised borrowing from, Greene rather than as Greene's own work;

c) Chettle's position as Danter's editor, his participation in and association with various kinds of literary fraud both in 1591-92 and later, and the specific circumstances of the editing and publication of the Groatsworth add to a compelling set of circumstances under which such a fabrication could take place. By way of corollary, the assumption that the Groatsworth was indeed forged helps to explain some otherwise puzzling aspects of Danter's and Chettle's affairs.

Scholars are not justified in passing by Austin's findings with a footnoted shrug, nor in persisting to attribute the pamphlet to Greene. Admittedly, the reattribution detracts from the certainties of literary history and from our knowledge of Greene in particular, and if it adds to the Chettle canon it does so on terms that are most unfavourable to him. Those relying on Jenkins's relatively benign portrayal of Chettle will justifiably doubt whether such a well-willing figure would be guilty of such a gross deception. As we have seen, however, there are plenty of other reasons for suspecting that Chettle was capable of literary fraud. Chettle was no innocent.

In mitigation it might be remembered that the notion of intellectual property had weak foundations in Chettle's time. Property rights were invested with the stationer, not the author. This scarcely excuses Chettle of all guilt, for the Groatsworth itself provides excellent firsthand testimony that the concept of plagiarism did exist, that it could be extended even to plays that had not reached print, and even located between the dramatist and the actors who realised the text in performance. A historical corrective does, however, need to be exerted upon the sense of outrage that might result from exposure of a similar literary fraud today. And Chettle might have excused himself with casuistic arguments, such as that he was speaking not only as Greene but on behalf of Greene, or that any deception was justified by the morally instructive nature of the resulting work.

Another line of objection to accepting Chettle's authorship might focus on the style of the Groatsworth and its relation to other work by Greene and Chettle. The pamphlet sounds reasonably like Greene. But such an assertion needs qualifying. It sounds at least like Greene in his Nashean manner, and not at his best (and indeed to some readers it sounds hardly like Greene at all). As for Chettle's accomplishments, there is nothing that he had written previously that compares with this work either in style or in substance. Yet if we turn to Chettle's acknowledged pamphlet written just two or three months later, Kind-Heart's Dream, we find that here too Chettle engages in what has been accounted stylistic imitation. Walter Davis, perhaps the best critic of this work, describes it as a showpiece of “diverse juxtaposed styles.”⁴⁰ Amongst these, as might be expected, is the style of Greene, for Greene is one of the ghosts that appears to Kind-Heart. Davis sees in the apparition's prose an imitation of the style specifically of the Groatsworth. This would only be expected if the Groatsworth itself were Chettle's imitation of Greene.

Chettle returns to the scene in Kind-Heart's Dream by inventing the figure of Greene's ghost; he could be seen to be attempting to purge his own guilt by displacing all blame onto Harvey. Such acts have a psychological basis as well as a public one. The title of his last known work, written over a decade after Greene's death, echoes a repentance pamphlet by Greene. Lamenting his own spiritual demise, Greene wrote Greene's Mourning Garment. Chettle, speaking for England after Queen Elizabeth's death, called his verse tract England's Mourning Garment. This, his last known literary work, confesses his own failure by calling on other and more able writers, including Shakespeare, to lament the death of Queen Elizabeth in a way he himself is unable. There is a dismal confession in the title's echo of Greene's Mourning Garment. Greene's ghost was still, it seems, haunting Chettle.

V

Once it is accepted that the Groatsworth was probably written by Chettle, Danter's association with The Repentance of Robert Greene raises doubts as to the origin of this pamphlet too.⁴¹ There is an intrinsic likelihood that it was Chettle who acquired the manuscript for Danter. Moreover, Greene's papers clearly required editorial attention. The section describing “The manner of the death and last end of Robert Greene Maister of Artes” (31-32) contains a record of penitential “sentences” Greene uttered on his deathbed and reproduces a letter to Greene's wife; it is otherwise a record by another person, an observer turned editor. Following it is “Greenes Prayer in the time of his sicknesse” (33-34); how this verbal supplication, if authentic, was transmitted to print—whether through Greene's writing or through an editorial report—is unclear. These pages are all strictly supplementary to the repentance and autobiography, the main continuous prose sections of the pamphlet. They have been added so that the autobiographical section can encompass “The life and death of Robert Greene Maister of Artes.” As the material is extraneous to the autobiography, and as Greene is unlikely to have supplied a heading that encompassed his own death, it follows that this heading too is probably editorial.

An editor there must have been, and Chettle is the one person who evidently at least read the pamphlet. Two internal features point to Chettle being the editor himself, though there is an apparent conflict between them. On the basis of Austin's analysis, it can be seen that the incidence of parentheses is much higher than would be expected in a work by Greene, and accords with Chettle's practices. This might suggest that Chettle prepared a transcript of the entire text, just as he claimed to have done for the Groatsworth. However, the spelling of “o(h)” fluctuates according to whether the material is inferably authorial or editorial. The repentance and the autobiography contain twelve instances of “oh” to one of “o,” which matches Greene's preference. All thirteen instances of the interjection in the description of Greene's death and his prayer are in the form “o,” for which Chettle had a 95 percent preference. There are a number of ways in which the discrepancy between parentheses and “o(h)” spellings might be explained. It would, for instance, be a mere coincidence that the “o” spellings are in potentially editorial sections if a new compositor set sheet D in which these sections appear. But Chettle could himself have originated both the parentheses and the “o” spellings. One need only assume that Chettle perpetuated the copy spelling of “o(h),” but was inclined to impose his own style of parenthesization. Such quirks of scribal behaviour are common enough.

If the printer's copy was an edited transcript of Greene's manuscript, there is no reason to suppose that the main body of the Repentance is a forgery, and indeed there are indicators that it is specifically by Greene. In accordance with Greene's habits, but against Chettle's, the form “-soever” is preferred to “-ever.”⁴² In the repentance and autobiography there is a more than representative scattering of the vocabulary that Greene favours over Chettle; this provides a positive indication not only that Chettle did not write the pamphlet but that Greene did. I have noted from Austin's list of Greene-favoured words the following: straight (=immediately), wax (=become) (4), nor (6), grow (=become) (c. 6), humour, insomuch, prick, discontent. Of these, insomuch, prick, straight, and wax are all used over ten times more frequently by Greene than by Chettle. In the same sections the only Chettle-favoured words (apart from the interjection Oh, which is contextually favoured) are follow, place (3), and while; none of these is used more than three times as frequently by Chettle as by Greene. Editorial tinkering cannot be discounted, but Chettle surely cannot have actually written these sections.

The pattern changes in the account of Greene's death and the prayer. Within these four short pages the Chettle-favoured words (as well as the interjection Oh) are beseech (2) and last. Austin's Greene corpus contains only one instance of beseech, and last is found six times as frequently in Chettle as in Greene. The last is clearly editorial; it occurs in the title “The manner of the death and last end …”; beseech is found twice in what is supposedly Greene's prayer. This is less than proof that Chettle was the editor (especially as the two words may also be said to be contextually favoured), but it is consistent with such an assumption. Tellingly, there is no Greene-favoured vocabulary.

The editorial shaping of the account of Greene's life into “The life and death of Robert Greene Maister of Artes” is based on the model of The Black Book's Messenger. Here the half-title reads “THE LIFE AND Death of Ned Browne, a notable Cutpurse and Conny-catcher,” which is abbreviated in the running-title to “The Life and Death of Ned Browne.” All of the account is written in the first person with Browne as the narrator, except for the final paragraph which gives a third-person account of his death. The Repentance charts a similar course. The two prayers in the Repentance, though they may in some way reflect what Greene said, are unlikely to have been penned by him; but the letter from Greene to his wife is presumably authentic. It seems, then, that the headings, the third-person commentary on Greene, and the reports of verbal prayers were penned by the editor; the rest of the pamphlet is exactly what it purports to be. Even a rough application of some of Austin's tests makes two kinds of distinction possible. First, the editorial overlay in the Repentance can be distinguished from the underlying text. Second, the language of the main parts of the Repentance differs markedly from that of the Groatsworth. The Groatsworth is mostly or wholly by Chettle; the Repentance is mostly by Greene.

There is external evidence too that weighs in favour of the Repentance originating in papers left by Greene. It issues from Greene's enemy Gabriel Harvey. In Four Letters Harvey states that Greene's hostess showed him after Greene's death “a letter to his abandoned wife,” which he records as reading: “Doll, I charge thee by the loue of our youth, & by my soules rest, that thou wilte see this man paide: for if hee, and his wife had not succoured me, I had died in the streetes.”⁴³ This is the letter printed in the Repentance; the equivalent part of it reads: “SWEET Wife, as euer there was any good will or friendship betweene thee and mee, see this bearer (my Host) satisfied of his debt, I owe him tenne pound, and but for him I had perished in the streetes.”⁴⁴ One of these printings is a recollection of, or deliberate variation on, the other. As Four Letters was entered in the Stationers' Register almost two months after the Repentance, on 4 December 1592, Chettle is unlikely to have been influenced by Harvey. It is hard to credit that Greene's hostess showed Harvey a forged letter. So, either Harvey expanded his larger letter in which the hostess's note is cited, which is dated 5 September 1592, after the Groatsworth was published, or a genuine letter that Harvey saw was subsequently obtained or transcribed by Chettle. In other words, if Chettle disingenuously invented the letter, Harvey was taken in, but himself disingenuously invented his visit to Greene's lodgings and falsified the date of this part of the text. It would be safer to assume that the letter existed.

It follows that this part of the Repentance at least is genuine. The main sections that precede it are intimately autobiographical; it is doubtful that Chettle would have known so much about Greene's life before he moved to London, and the risks of inventing biographical details are self-evident. Though Chettle no doubt edited the Repentance, he surely did not fabricate it. This is a reassuring conclusion for those interested in Greene's life or, equally important, Greene's exercise in autobiography as an extension and fictionalization of self. If autobiography alienates the narrative from the writer and indeed metaphorically “kills” the author, that alienation, that death, rests on the supposition that the written “I” signifies the writer; in other words on the basis that the Derridean pun on the author's name, as denoting person and function of the text, is operative. In the Repentance the “I” does signify the writer, and the pun is operative. The Repentance is an extraordinary document, both for its information and its literary construct of self; both as autobiography pure and simple, and as autobiography that has been editorially mediated. It matters to know that it is based on Robert Greene's manuscript.

VI

The case with the Groatsworth is quite otherwise. Here we are faced with the full implications of a forgery. Given that the Repentance was always a more reliable and explicit document as autobiography, reassessment of the Groatsworth is bound to focus on the most famous passage in it, the epistle to Greene's fellow playwrights. What does it mean to say that this epistle is not simply by Greene, nor by Chettle, but, it seems, by Chettle passing himself off as Greene? Suddenly the writer's voice is disembodied, or rather disoriginated. The pun on the author's name falters; the authorial coinage is found base, a coinage of another kind.

The difficulty in reading the text in this situation is most acute of all in the passage about Shakespeare. Certainly Greene himself might have written with more claim to conviction than this “Greene” on Marlowe's atheism and Machiavellian tendencies; but Chettle would have found Greene implying as much elsewhere, and the view of Marlowe is precisely the most usual one. In the attack on Shakespeare we face something different (and here one should probably include also the tale of the ant and the grasshopper [47-50], which E. A. J. Honigmann reads as an allegory of Shakespeare and Greene).⁴⁵ Nothing at all had been heard about this actor-prodigy before, and nothing of its ilk would be heard again. The passage that alludes most specifically to Shakespeare reads:

Is it not strange, that I, to whom they all haue beene beholding: is it not like that you, to whome they all haue beene beholding, shall (were yee in that case as I am now) bee both at once of them forsaken? Yes trust them not: for there is an vpstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Iohannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.

Once Greene's authorship is denied, we find the passage deprived of its correlative in experience. The speaker is not actually the failed and bitter dramatist Greene but an imagined representation of him. A key “fact” of literary history has evaporated. But it has not disappeared; it is replaced with the ambiguous simulcrum of a fact. This, then, is the problem. The delegitimized diatribe against Shakespeare will not quietly go away.

One way of confronting this situation is to refer the terms of the Groatsworth's criticism of Shakespeare back to Chettle himself. Let me begin with a detail, a detail of the text that is suddenly illuminated by the assumption that the author was by trade a printer. One of the accusations against Shakespeare is that he is “an absolute Iohannes fac totum.” By any account one must accept at least two explanations of this phrase. The expression “Jack of all trades” is the usual modern transcription of Johannes factotum, and this is clearly relevant to the Groatsworth's castigation of Shakespeare as a player who has turned his hand to playmaking. However, the context suggests that the phrase is deployed as a term of praise used ironically, in the same way as the “onely Shake-scene in a countrey”; hence OED's alternative gloss “a would-be universal genius” is also appropriate. Shakespeare is therefore a would-be genius who (being an actor) only imitates true genius; in fact he is arrogantly trying his hand at something he has just picked up. The touchstone of Shakespeare's profession as actor informs all the abuse directed against him; here it underpins Johannes factotum as “universal genius” (the quality that is merely acted) and “Jack of all trades” (the reality). The touchstone of Chettle's own profession as printer gives another sense that is entirely consistent with everything that is being said against Shakespeare. A Factotum is and was a printing term for an ornamental surround that will take any capital letter in its middle. Although OED records no instance before the late seventeenth century, it was certainly in use in Chettle's time. An inventory of the Cambridge University printer Thomas Thomas's goods, drawn up on 10 October 1588 (four years before the Groatsworth was written), includes “vj factotumes.”⁴⁶ As applied to Shakespeare, the image of the factotum as a printer's ornament therefore graphically elaborates the already ambivalent use of the expression Johannes factotum and emphasises its connection with other images of seeming and being: the crow beautified with stolen feathers, the player's heart with a tiger's hide. The factotum is impressively ornamental and very versatile, but empty within and incapable of textual signification.

Chettle would not, presumably, have intended this clue to be noted by his readers. My suggestion is rather that he unconsciously left a trace of his own activity as a stationer engaged in passing himself off as the pamphleteer. And well he might do so, for his accusations against Shakespeare are uncomfortably close to Chettle's own situation as their very writer. An upstart crow: Chettle's partnership with Danter and Hoskins had failed, and now he uses the medium of this very piece of writing to thrust himself into the world of letters. Beautified with our feathers: who precisely is stealing Greene's feathers and beautifying himself with them? A tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide: Chettle makes his point about Shakespeare producing a cheap histrionic imitation by mimicking one of Shakespeare's own lines, even as he imitates Greene's writing to his own ends. An absolute Johannes Factotum: so says Henry Chettle, compositor, editor, epistle-writer, scribbler, printer's reader, patcher, playmaker, plagiarist, and would-be man of letters. If Chettle wrote the passage there is not only hypocrisy behind the bravura; there is a pained and embarrassed self-knowledge.

Why should Chettle write in this way? Perhaps indeed Greene and his circle, and Chettle himself, perceived Shakespeare as a figure such as the Groatsworth describes; there must, after all, have been some expectation that the criticisms would find their mark, and there is every reason to suppose that they did so.⁴⁷ Beyond this, however, it would seem that Chettle recognised resemblances between himself and Shakespeare. The attack on Shakespeare read as Greene's attack voices the disappointment of the old generation falling to the new. Read as Chettle's attack, it comes from a contemporary, and feeds off envy. Chettle was about four years older than Shakespeare, but hardly his rival. He probably had his sights on writing for the stage and indeed may have been already an experienced dramatist. Between October and December 1592 he came to know Shakespeare, probably through dealings with Lord Strange's Men; at about this period he supplied a passage to mend a gap in their play John of Bordeaux, and around 1593 he probably worked with his friend Munday on original text of Sir Thomas More.⁴⁸ His contribution does not appear to be the work of a novice. Kind-Heart's Dream refers to Marlowe and addresses Shakespeare; it gives voice to a player, Richard Tarleton, and, through him, the occasional playwright Thomas Nashe, as well as to Greene himself. It also contains both a mock criticism and a sincere defence of the stage, beginning “In plaies it fares as in bookes …” (43). Chettle was steeping himself in theatrical affairs, though any achievements he may have already made as a dramatist were not noteworthy. For the printer looking towards the stage for future sustenance, Marlowe and Shakespeare were the principal objects of emulation.

Chettle must have looked with awe on Shakespeare's spectacular rise to success. There were social similarities between them. Neither was educated at university and neither claimed (at this stage) the rank of gentleman. Shakespeare was son of a glove-maker and Chettle son of a dyer. Both trades are, curiously, connected with alteration of appearance and beautification, and the Shakespearean metaphor of the dyer's hand is not without pertinence to the Groatsworth; but perhaps it is sufficient to note the shared artisanry of origin. “Greene's” our in the phrase “beautified with our feathers” is exclusive in every way: artistically, intellectually, socially. With seamless logic, Chettle is gatecrashing the exclusive group as surely as he accuses Shakespeare of doing so. His criticism of Shakespeare is simultaneously a homage of praise, for, in a desperate fashion perhaps, it offers to imitate him.

My Chettle context for reading the pamphlet is not offered to furnish a psychological projection of Chettle's character as, in itself, a way of vindicating the attribution of the Groatsworth to him. It does seem important, however, that the work can be recontextualized as a forgery by Chettle, and that we as readers are able to make sense, or senses, of the text. The point here is not simply to replace a secure Greene-based reading of the Groatsworth with an equally secure Chettle-based reading. The work will demand a complex response that will take Greene not simply as another writer's representation of Greene, like Chettle's portrayal of Greene's ghost in Kind-Heart's Dream, but as a figure offered to the reader as Greene's representation of himself. It can readily be conceded that, whatever Chettle's own interests, he may also have been reproducing Greene's own views. The fact remains that reassigning the authorship of the Groatsworth cannot avoid opening up new ways of reading it.

The final word on Chettle as a literary figure and dramatist will usually be that he never got very far beyond imitation. His role models, Greene, Shakespeare, even Marlowe, oppressed him. Chettle suffers as a minor figure and as a writer who is only a short step away from anonymity. His own play Hoffman, sole known survivor of his non-collaborative plays, was published almost thirty years after its composition as an anonymous work “without a parent to owne it.” Chettle's authorial selfhood is underdeveloped in his writings; he is a collaborator; he is an imitator. Yet imitation has its own psychology, or rather its own convoluted textuality of authorial self. That self is displaced, disguised, in short, repressed. One would be foolish to suppose that it therefore does not exist.

APPENDIX

FURTHER CONJECTURES ON CHETTLE'S WORK FOR DANTER

Chettle's acquisitions of manuscripts for Danter probably extend to other books he printed or issued. He may, for example, have secured other Greene pamphlets that were assigned to Danter: The Black Book's Messenger, which may itself have been edited or even revised in some degree, and the unpublished The Cony-Catcher's Repentance. The collection of sonnets called Greene's Funerals “By R B. Gent.” that Danter printed and published in 1594 is of uncertain authorship. Its editor R. B. McKerrow pointed out objections to the author being Richard Barnfield, and wondered whether Danter might “not have got hold of one or two unfinished pieces of Barnfield's never intended for publication, and eked them out by the addition of a few fragments of rubbish written by some one whom he had about the place, or even by himself.”⁴⁹ Danter had Chettle about the place, so he is the obvious candidate for such an eker out, especially as the pamphlet's subject is Greene. Some of the poems, like Kind-Heart's Dream, inveigh against those who have denigrated Greene since his death, and one of them (Sonnet IX) acknowledges that “Greene, gaue the ground, to all that wrote vpon him,” and goes on, like the Groatsworth, to accuse “the men, that so Eclipst his fame: ❙ Purloynde his Plumes.” Chettle may also have negotiated copy for Danter's edition of Titus Andronicus (1594). It was he who had contacts with the world of the theatre. More likely still is that he had some involvement in the obtaining or, more particularly, the preparation of the copy for the “bad” quarto of Greene's Orlando Furioso, which Danter issued in the same year. He can plausibly be identified as the printing-house corrector of Latin noted by Greg.⁵⁰ His apparent role in expanding and editing Romeo and Juliet for Danter's edition of 1597 means that he more than anyone else must be suspected of having had something to do with obtaining the memorial text for Danter in the first place. It deserves noting that the only book naming Chettle on the imprint, a sermon preached by Henry Smith, was, according to the title-page, taken by charactery. This may say nothing about the method by which the texts of Danter's “bad” quartos were compiled, but it perhaps testifies further to Chettle's involvement with memorial reconstructions such as Romeo and Orlando.

Notes

1. The two pamphlets are reprinted as a single volume edited by G. B. Harrison (London and New York: Bodley Head, 1923). My page references are to the pagination of this edition.

2. See his epistle to the gentlemen readers prefixed to Kind-Heart's Dream. This work, with William Kemp's Nine Days' Wonder, is reprinted in the Bodley Head Quartos series, edited by G. B. Harrison (London and New York: Bodley Head, 1923).

3. Chauncey Elwood Sanders, “Robert Greene and his ‘Editors,’” PMLA 48 (1935): 392-417; Harold Jenkins, The Life and Work of Henry Chettle (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1934), 10, and “On the Authenticity of Greene's Groatsworth of Wit and The Repentance of Robert Greene,” RES o.s. 41 (1935): 28-41; see also René Provost, Robert Greene et ses romans (1558-1592) (Paris, 1938), 505-25.

4. See especially E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare's Impact on his Contemporaries (London: Methuen, 1982), 134 n. 1, and Charles W. Crupi, Robert Greene (Boston: Twayne, 1986).

5. Warren B. Austin, A Computer-Aided Technique for Stylistic Discrimination: The Authorship of “Greene's Groatsworth of Wit” (Washington, D.C., 1969). I mention here also two further studies that I have not examined except in abstracts and to which I am unable to attach any great significance. Austin's findings were independently confirmed by Barbara Kreifelts, in Eine statistische Stilanalyse zur Klarung von Autorenschaftfragen, durchgefuhrt am Beispiel von Greens Groatsworth of Wit, dissertation, Koln, 1972, abstracted in Shakespeare Newsletter 24 (1974): 49 (see also p. 47), who found ten tests that discriminated in favour of Chettle as against just three in favour of Greene. Further statistical investigation (application of the “Mahalanobis formula”) strengthened the case for Chettle's authorship. The Repentance was subsequently tested by Norbert Bolz, in Ein statistische computerunterstutzte Echtheitsprufung von The Repentance of Robert Greene (Frankfurt, 1978), abstracted in Shakespeare Newsletter 29 (1979): 43. Bolz found some slight indications of Greene's authorship, but his study convinced him that the Repentance was written by neither Greene nor Chettle. Bolz's evidence as abstracted in Shakespeare Newsletter does not adequately support the conclusion that he draws from it.

6. R. L. Widmann, in Shakespeare Quarterly 23 (1972): 214-15; T. R. Waldo, in Computing and the Humanities 7 (1972): 109-10; also R. L. Widmann, “Recent Scholarship in Literary and Linguistic Studies,” Computing and the Humanities 7 (1972): 17.

7. To which they might have added, “and too chronologically separated.”

8. Widmann's conclusion in his Shakespeare Quarterly review that the study is “ultimately unconvincing” needs setting against his much less damaging assessment in Computing and the Humanities that it is “not entirely convincing.”

9. But see n. 42.

10. The “markers” include however, which is contestable as it is semi-indifferent with howsoever, but the results would be similar with this word excluded, as Table 1 suggests.

11. The fact that some forms fail to discriminate (such as, amongst reflexive pronouns, herself) is only to be expected. As the results for such forms are neutral rather than weighted to Greene, they do not undermine the significance of the forms that do successfully discriminate.

12. Richard Proudfoot, in Shakespeare Survey 26 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 182.

13. Austin, “Technique of the Chettle-Greene Forgery: Supplementary Material on the Authorship of the Groatsworth of Wit,” Shakespeare Newsletter 20 (1970): 43.

14. Robert Greene, The Life and Complete Works in Prose and Verse, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 15 vols. (London, 1881-86; repr. New York: Russell, 1964), 8:71-2.

15. Greene, Works, ed. Grosart, 8:77.

16. The table does not list nor, C1, as it has a low relative frequency of 136:67.5, giving a differential ratio of just over 2.

17. Thomas Nashe, Works, ed. R. B. McKerrow, 5 vols. (Oxford: Horace Hart, 1904-10), 3:323-24.

18. Pointed out by Donald J. McGinn, “A Quip from Tom Nashe,” Studies in the English Renaissance Drama, ed. Josephine W. Bennett, Oscar Cargill, and Vernon Hall, Jr. (New York, 1959), 176. McGinn describes the allusions as “so unusual that even Mckerrow is unable to gloss them” (n. 18).

19. J. Charleton Collins, in his edition of The Plays and Poems of Robert Greene, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1905), 1:52-53, conjectures that the pamphlet may have been used in fabricating The Repentance of Robert Greene, which he takes to be a forgery; but he does not identify Chettle as the agent, and was unaware that both manuscripts were with Danter.

20. In a letter to Munday prefixed to the work.

21. Charles Nicholl, A Cup of News: The Life of Thomas Nashe (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 140-41.

22. H. R. Hoppe, The Bad Quarto of “Romeo and Juliet” (New York, 1948); Celeste Turner Wright, “Mundy and Chettle in Grub Street,” Boston University Studies in English 5 (1961): 129-38, especially 134; Sidney Thomas, “The Printing of Greenes Groatsworth of Witte and Kind-Hearts Dreame,” SB 19 (1966): 196-97; J. A. Lavin, “John Danter's Ornamental Stock,” SB 23 (1970): 21-44. On Danter see also Ronald Brunless McKerrow, A Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers in England, Scotland and Ireland, and of English Books, 1557-1630 (London, 1910); Leo Kirschbaum, Shakespeare and the Stationers (Ohio, 1955), 296-99; and STC, vol. 3 (1991), 49.

23. See Sidney Thomas, “Henry Chettle and the First Quarto of Romeo and Juliet,” RES n.s. 1 (1950): 8-16. My acceptance of Thomas's theory is based on an examination of the overall textual problem of Romeo and Juliet conducted whilst editing the play. See Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, with John Jowett and William Montgomery, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford, 1987), 288, and notes to 3.1.92-108/1478-94 and 3.1.165/1557.

24. Nashe's biographer Charles Nicholl suspects that Nashe, who dwelt in Danter's house for some time around 1596, acted in a similar role (Cup of News, 224-25), but no links have been established between Nashe and any Danter printings other than his own works.

25. W. W. Greg, “‘Bad’ Quartos Outside Shakespeare—‘Alcazar’ and ‘Orlando’,” The Library 3, 10 (1919): 197.

26. See Kirschbaum, Shakespeare and the Stationers, 298.

27. On the seizure of Danter's presses, see Lavin, “Danter's Ornamental Stock,” 24.

28. Dates of SR entries are based on the new-style calendar, but dates of some imprints may follow the old-style calendar, as apparently with Strange News, 1592 A and B.

29. For further details see Nashe, Works, ed. McKerrow, 1:247-51.

30. Danter managed to retain the right to supply a dedication to one of the later works, Chinon of England, in which he confesses, “From the time of my first entraunce in Printing till now, it is the first Booke of this kinde I euer had power to dedicate.”

31. See Marshall W. H. Swan, “The Sweet Speech and Spenser's (?) Axiochus,” ELH 11 (1944): 161-81; Celeste Turner Wright, “Anthony Mundy, ‘Edward’ Spenser, and E. K.,” PMLA 76 (1961), 34-39; and, for the printing of Axiochus, Lavin, “Danter's Ornamental Stock.”

32. W. W. Greg, Some Aspects and Problems of London Publishing between 1550 and 1650 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956), 45-46.

33. W. W. Greg and E. Boswell, Records of the Court of the Stationers' Company 1576 to 1602: From Register B (London, 1930), 46.

34. See Celeste Turner Wright, “‘Lazarus Pyott’ and Other Inventions of Anthony Mundy,” Philological Quarterly 42 (1963): 532-41.

35. W. W. Greg, A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration, 4 vols. (London: London Bibliographical Society, 1939-59), 1:11.

36. B2; in McKerrow's edition (see note 49), 11.

37. Nashe, Works, ed. McKerrow, 1:153-54.

38. I provisionally accept Greene's Vision as authentic; Crupi describes it as of uncertain authorship (2). It was probably written not “at the instant of his death” as the title-page declares (Greene, Works, ed. Grosart, 12: 191), but about 1590. It was not entered in the Stationers' Register, and probably was published after the Groatsworth and the Repentance. That it appeared before Kindheart's Dream is likely, for Chettle's use of the dream convention for representing Greene was probably influenced by Greene's own use of the convention in the Vision to represent Chaucer and Gower.

39. Henrie Chettle, Kind-Hartes Dreame, 1592, and William Kemp, Nine Daies Wonder, 1600, ed. G. B. Harrison (London: Bodley Head, 1923), 5.

40. Walter R. Davis, Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 202-03.

41. The case for Chettle's authorship is put most forcefully in Sanders, “Robert Greene and his ‘Editors.’”

42. If Chettle indeed transcribed the form that goes against his preference in the Repentance, Austin's demonstration that the Groatsworth nearly always uses the “-ever” form could not be dismissed as Chettle's sophistication of Greene's text, and so could be reinstated as an indicator of Chettle's authorship of the work. Similarly with the spelling of Oh.

43. Gabriel Harvey, Foure Letters and certaine Sonnets, ed. G. B. Harrison (London: Bodley Head, 1922), 22.

44. Greene, Repentance (see note 1), 32.

45. Honigmann, Shakespeare's Impact, 1-6.

46. George J. Gray and William Mortlock Palmer, Abstracts from the Wills and Testamentary Documents of Printers, Binders, and Stationers of Cambridge, from 1504 to 1699 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1915), 71. I am grateful to Peter Grant for suggesting (half seriously) that Chettle might have had the printer's ornament in mind, and to D. F. McKenzie for pointing out to me this early use of the printing term.

47. See M. C. Bradbrook, “Beasts and Gods: Greene's Groats-worth of witte and the Social Purpose of Venus and Adonis,” in Shakespeare Survey 15 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 62-72.

48. See John Jowett, “Henry Chettle and the Original Text of Sir Thomas Moore,” in Shakespeare and “Sir Thomas More”: Essays on the Play and Its Shakespearean Interest, ed. Trevor Howard-Hill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 131-50.

49. B. R. and R. B., Greenes Newes both from Heauen and Hell, 1593, and Greenes Funeralls, 1594, ed. R. B. McKerrow (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1911), ix-x.

50. W. W. Greg, Two Elizabethan Stage Abridgements: “The Battle of Alcazar” & “Orlando Furioso” (Oxford: Malone Society, 1922), 282-83, 341.