[In the following essay, Erne denies claims that Chettle apologized to Shakespeare for Greene's attacks.]

Our image of Shakespeare at the beginning of his dramatic career in London is strongly shaped by the oft-quoted passages from Greene's Groatsworth of Wit (1592, entered in the Stationers' Register on 20 September 1592) and Chettle's ‘Epistle dedicatory’ prefacing his Kind-Harts Dreame (no date, Stationers' Register: 8 December 1592). Their importance can hardly be overstated. The former establishes Shakespeare's presence in London as both actor and playwright of considerable renown. Greene sets two groups of people in opposition to each other, the university-trained playwrights and the actors. Whereas the former are called ‘gentlemen’ according to the rank to which their university degree entitled them, the latter, and among them Shakespeare, are termed ‘rude groomes’, ‘Apes’, ‘Puppets … that spake from our mouths’, and ‘Anticks garnisht in our colours’. As for Greene's attack upon Shakespeare, commentators differ in their interpretation of what exactly constitutes the charge against him, plagiarism or merely pride.¹ Howsoever that be, Greene's attack suggests feelings of jealousy towards Shakespeare. By 1592, Shakespeare had possibly completed or was at least well advanced in the writing of the first tetralogy, the most ambitious of his theatrical projects up to that point. By implication, the impression we get of Shakespeare is one of effortless brilliance. This impression seems confirmed by what we apparently learn from Chettle's apology. Shakespeare's ‘facetious grace in writting’ may precisely be what Greene jealously reacted against. The picture is completed by the fact that Shakespeare appears to be beyond reproach not only as an artist, but also as a man, supported, what's more, by his social superiors.

With some variations in emphasis and detail, this has been the accepted reading for the last two hundred years. I will argue in this article that a substantial part of this portrait of Shakespeare, the portion related to Chettle's alleged apology in Kind-Harts Dreame, is mythographic rather than biographic and lacks any credible textual evidence. Chettle, it will be my aim to show, nowhere refers to Shakespeare, nor was it ever his intention to apologize to him for Greene's attack. In order to substantiate my claims, I first need to go back to the famous attack on Shakespeare in Greene's Groatsworth of Wit.

The thinly disguised portrait of Shakespeare appears in a letter, inserted into the pamphlet, that is addressed to his fellow playwrights:

To those Gentlemen his Quondam acquaintance, that spend their wits in making plaies, R.G. wisheth a better exercise, and wisdome to prevent his extremities.

(lines 880-84)

The three playwrights Greene addresses (‘Base minded men all three of you’ [line 932]) are generally thought to be Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, and George Peele. Each playwright is addressed individually in a brief passage. It can hardly be doubted that Marlowe is the ‘famous gracer of Tragedians’ charged with atheism and Machiavellian ‘policy’ (lines 888-96). Critics have found it less easy to identify the second playwright who is only individualized in a very short passage: ‘With thee I joyne yong Juvenall, that byting Satyrist, that lastly with mee together writ a Comedie’ (lines 917-18). Thomas Lodge has been suggested as possible target, chiefly because the comedy A Looking Glass for London and England, entered 1594, is known to be by Greene and Lodge. However, Lodge was abroad around the time Greene wrote his pamphlet, which considerably weakens his case.² Most scholars now agree that the second playwright is Nashe despite the fact that no extant play is known to have been written in co-authorship by Greene and Nashe. Judging by their extant writings, ‘byting Satyrist’ seems a fitter title for Nashe than Lodge. Moreover, Francis Meres, in Palladis Tamia (1598), refers to Nashe as ‘young Iuuenall’, and the epithet suits him better than Lodge who was probably by ten years his elder.³ Also, Moth in Love's Labour's Lost, called ‘tender juvenal’ (I.ii.8) and ‘acute juvenal’ (III.i.64) has long been thought by some to represent Thomas Nashe, although this form of topical interpretation has somewhat receded in recent years.⁴ As for the third playwright addressed by Greene, no serious alternative to Peele has ever been suggested: ‘And thou no lesse deseruing than the other two, in some things rarer, in nothing inferior; driuen (as my selfe) to extreme shifts, a litle haue I to say to thee: and were it not an idolatrous oath, I would sweare by sweet S. George, thou art vnworthy better hap, sith thou dependest on so meane a stay’ (lines 927-31). As illustrated below, the tribulations Greene hints at appear to fit Peele's biography and the oath ‘by sweet S. George’ is likely to be an allusion to Peele's first name. A passage in Dekker's pamphlet A Knight's Conjuring (1607) further supports these identifications: Greene, Marlowe, Nashe, and Peele are depicted as a group assembled in a bay-tree grove in Hades, where none consort but poets and musicians.

In a letter ‘To the Gentlemen Readers’ prefacing his Kind-Harts Dreame printed the same year, Henry Chettle, a printer and pamphleteer who later turned playwright, makes his famous apology:

About three moneths since died M. Robert Greene, leauing many papers in sundry Booke sellers hands, among other his Groats-worth of wit, in which a letter written to diuers play-makers, is offensiuely by one or two of them taken, and because on the dead they cannot be auenged, they wilfully forge in their conceites a liuing Author: and after tossing it two and fro, no remedy, but it must light on me. How I haue all the time of my conuersing in printing hindred the bitter inueying against schollers, it hath been very well knowne, and how in that I dealt, I can sufficiently prooue. With neither of them that take offence was I acquainted, and with one of them I care not if I neuer be: The other, whome at that time I did not so much spare, as since I wish I had, for that as I haue moderated the heate of liuing writers, and might haue vsde my owne discretion (especially in such a case) the Author beeing dead, that I did not, I am as sory as if the originall fault had beene my fault, because my selfe haue seene his demeanor no lesse ciuill than he exelent in the qualitie he professes: Besides, diuers of worship haue reported, his vprightnes of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing, that aprooues his Art.⁵

Greene opposed two rival groups, the gentlemen playwrights and the actors. Shakespeare is counted among the latter, whereas the pamphlet is addressed to the former. Greene, Chettle says, wrote a letter to several playwrights and one or two of them took offence. This, taken literally, excludes Shakespeare as a possible candidate. As we have seen, Shakespeare is clearly not among Greene's ‘Base minded men all three of you’.

It could be objected that this reading relies too narrowly on Chettle's use of the word ‘to’. If we allow for some looseness in Chettle's language—the reasoning would go—and understand ‘a letter written about diuers play-makers’ for ‘to diuers play-makers’, everything falls into place as Shakespeare is one of the objects albeit not addressees of Greene's letter.⁶ After all, pamphlets were written at great speed and Chettle may not have carefully weighed every word or possibly did not remember Greene's text in every detail.

This argument, it seems to me, needs to be mistrusted. It implies that Chettle silently does away with the opposition upon which Greene's invective hinges by confounding Shakespeare, probably educated at Stratford grammar school, and the Cambridge graduate Marlowe who could call himself ‘gentleman’. The distinction in rank is crucial to Greene's passage. More importantly, the word ‘schollers’ makes it difficult to believe that Shakespeare is referred to. Two playwrights, Chettle says, have taken offence at the attack upon them in the letter prefacing Greene's Groatsworth of Wit. Published anonymously, the authorship of that letter was subject to speculation.⁷ Chettle came under suspicion, but denied all responsibility except that of an editor. As in the past, he argues, he has hindered, not furthered, invectives against ‘schollers’. The last word is bracketed by references to the two offended playwrights. If Shakespeare was one of them, Chettle would unmistakably be referring to him as a scholar. Even though Jonson's remark according to which Shakespeare had ‘small Latine, and lesse Greeke’ has been relativized by Baldwin's monumental study, Shakespeare's contemporaries, for all we know, did not think of him as a man of great learning.

The anonymous Parnassus plays, composed and acted in Cambridge around the turn of the century, can shed additional light upon Chettle's apology. In The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus, Kempe and Burbage, fictionalized versions of the members of the Chamberlain's Men, discuss the contemporary playwrights as follows:

KEMPE:
Few of the vniuersity [men] pen plaies well, they smell too much of that writer Ouid, and that writer Metamorphoses, and talke too much of Proserpina & Iuppiter. Why heres our fellow Shakespeare puts them all downe, I and Ben Ionson too. …
BURBAGE:
Its a shrewd fellow indeed. I wonder these schollers stay so long, they appointed to be here presently that we might try them: oh here they come. [Enter Philomusus, Studioso.](8)

Burbage, even though he praises Shakespeare, calls him ‘a shrewd fellow’ rather than ‘scholar’, the latter word being reserved for the students Philomusus and Studioso. The play ends with what looks like a curious echo of the attack Greene made upon Shakespeare nearly ten years earlier. The gentlemen poets have decided to refuse to write plays for the Chamberlain's Men:

Better it is mongst fidlers to be chiefe,
Then at a plaiers trencher beg reliefe.
But ist not strange these mimick apes should prize
Vnhappy schollers at a hirling rate.
Vile world, that lifts them vp to hye degree,
And treades vs downe in groueling misery. …
With mouthing words that better wits haue framed,
They purchase lands, and now esquiers are namde.

(lines 1916-28)

The author is probably thinking of Shakespeare or Alleyn, or of both. In any case, the word ‘schollers’ is again used for the gentlemen playwrights and precisely not for Shakespeare.

Contrary to Greene, Nashe, Peele, Lyly, Lodge, and Marlowe, Shakespeare did not have a university education and could not, in 1592, call himself a gentleman. We need to remember how careful the Elizabethans were in the social distinctions they made. As C. T. Prouty puts it, ‘scholars were highly respected, and an Oxford or Cambridge graduate, even though destitute, demanded the esteem to which his rank entitled him’.⁹ All things considered, ‘scholar’ seems a highly implausible word for Chettle to apply to Shakespeare.

Shakespeare's biographers, however, have not felt the need to examine the identity of Chettle's target as a survey of some of the most substantial biographies shall attest. Long after Edmond Malone first linked the passage with Shakespeare more than two centuries ago,¹⁰ it has been established beyond doubt, it is implied, that Shakespeare is alluded to. Samuel Schoenbaum, in William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (Oxford, 1975), simply states: ‘In “To the Gentlemen Readers” prefacing his own Kind-Harts Dreame … Chettle makes his famous apology to Shakespeare’ (p. 117). Similarly, F. E. Halliday, in The Life of Shakespeare (London, 1961), claims that the ‘grieved parties were, the context makes clear. Marlowe and Shakespeare’ (p. 25). Once biographers take for granted that the portrait Chettle sketched is indeed Shakespeare's, the inferences they draw have far-reaching implications. According to J. Q. Adams, ‘Chettle … was deeply impressed by [Shakespeare's] courteous demeanour’¹¹ while Sir Sidney Lee held that ‘it is obvious that Shakespeare at the date of Chettle's apology was winning a high reputation alike as actor, man, and writer’.¹² Shakespeare ‘had supporters in high places’ (p. 25), Halliday points out and A. L. Rowse adds that ‘the company Shakespeare preferred, the acquaintance he already had, was of good class and breeding, rather than the literary riff-raff of London’.¹³ J. Dover Wilson gathered from Chettle's apology that ‘Shakespeare in 1592 was a very charming person’.¹⁴ This is Shakespeare mythography at its best, a fine (albeit belated) example of what has nicely been termed ‘the Victorian propensity to assume that poetic genius of [Shakespeare's] order must be matched by a high nobility of character’.¹⁵

Edgar I. Fripp and Ivor Brown are even more specific in their interpretation of Chettle's apology. The former holds that, following Greene's attack, Shakespeare ‘complained to “divers of worship”, including, no doubt, his influential friend the Earl of Southampton’,¹⁶ and the latter concludes that ‘the great friendship with the Earl of Southampton had begun’.¹⁷ As a matter of fact, Chettle's apology warrants no inference regarding the dedicatee of Shakespeare's narrative poems. The term ‘worship’ designated a gentleman, and ‘of worship’ signified a person of repute and standing. For members of the nobility, the Elizabethans reserved the address ‘of honour’.¹⁸

The consensus among critics of the highest reputation oddly contradicts a straightforward reading of Chettle's ‘Epistle dedicatory’. Surprisingly, none of the biographies quoted above mentions this commonsensical reading, let alone discusses and refutes it. In the margins of Shakespeare criticism, however, there have been, from time to time, critics reading the passage without preconceptions. Nonetheless, hardly any of the widely known Shakespeare biographies refers to them. For reasons that will need to be explored, they have not been able to make themselves understood. As early as 1874, H. Staunton held that Chettle nowhere refers to Shakespeare.¹⁹ Similarly, F. G. Fleay, by no means a negligible scholar, pointed out that ‘Shakespeare was not one of those who took offence; they are expressly stated to have been two of the three authors addressed by Greene’.²⁰ Critics and biographers following Fleay may have failed to lend him an ear because his account errs elsewhere. He argues that Greene addressed Marlowe, Peele, and Lodge. The last not being in England at that time, only the other two plausibly qualify as targets. Chettle apologizes, Fleay pursues, for the offence given to Marlowe, but not to Peele. Fleay's errors seem to have obscured his important hint that Chettle is likely to be referring to someone other than Shakespeare. Gregor Sarrazin improved on Fleay's argument, sensibly suggesting Peele to be the target of Chettle's lines.²¹ Yet he failed to subject Chettle's apology and its reception history to a close investigation. W. H. Chapman and Abraham Feldman have hitherto undertaken the last attempts, to my knowledge, to go against the orthodox reading of Chettle's apology.²²

No less than five critics, some of considerable reputation, have thus come to the conclusion that Shakespeare cannot be reasonably assumed to be referred to and they have expressed their views in important academic journals. Shakespeare's biographers, however, have not been impressed. As shown above, they continue to uphold the implausible reading first suggested by Malone. Is it possible that so many of Shakespeare's biographers were not aware of at least one of the articles mentioned above? Or is it possible, on the other hand, that biographers, aware of the alternative reading, chose to pass over it in silence so as not to compromise their account of Shakespeare's early years in London?

At least two causes must have converged to help establish the doubtful consensus. Firstly, so little is known about Shakespeare's early years in London that biographers have been extremely unwilling to abandon this apparent reference. Had it not existed, it is the kind of document William Henry Ireland would have been likely to forge. If we authenticate it, we have found a crucial milestone on Shakespeare's artistic and social trajectory. If we don't, a biographer writing his chapter on Shakespeare's first years as an actor and dramatist is deprived of one of his most important narrative supports. Secondly, it is tempting to support the traditional reading since a cursory acquaintance with Chettle's apology and its context may give rise to the impression that none of the playwrights addressed except Marlowe may have had a reason to take offence. Called ‘Machiavellian’ and ‘atheist’ by Greene, Marlowe complained on good grounds at a time when overt religious unorthodoxy was heavily punished. But who else had a motive to voice his discontentment? Neither Peele nor Nashe, nor any of the other playwrights addressed is charged in remotely similar terms. Thus, Shakespeare, heavily and, we feel, unfairly attacked in the most thinly veiled of Greene's portraits, qualifies as one of the two offended playwrights for want of an alternative.

This seems plausible at first sight. Nashe, the ‘byting Satyrist’ and writer of many a fierce invective can hardly be said to display much ‘facetious grace in writting’. Chettle's words seem incompatible with the man who, in 1592, had started his personal war with the Harveys and who had published The Anatomy of Absurdity and the ‘Preface’ to Greene's Menaphon. A closer look, however, bears out that Peele is a very plausible alternative to Shakespeare. Since he had returned from Oxford to London in 1581, he had every right to call himself both gentleman and scholar. To understand why Peele may have taken offence at Greene's pamphlet, it is necessary to turn to a related document. Prefixed to the second edition of Nashe's Pierce Penniless (1592) was published an epistle ‘of the Author to the Printer’ from which the following passage is excerpted: ‘Other news I am aduertised of, that a scald triuial lying pamphlet cald Greens groats-worth of wit, is giuen out to be of my doing. God neuer haue care of my soule, but vtterly renoũce me, if the least word or sillable in it proceeded from my pen, or if I were in any way priuie to the writing or printing of it’.²³ Even though Nashe is not one of the two playwrights referred to by Chettle, Nashe did take offence at the pamphlet. Like Chettle, he had been suspected with its authorship. His denial proves unusually harsh. He seems to have every interest in distancing himself from the ‘scald triuial lying pamphlet’. According to Alexander Dyce, the reaction is the result of what Nashe thought were ‘the probable consequences of such a publication to himself: he was vexed and irritated because its disclosures concerning men with whom he was well known to have associated—the dead Greene and the still-living Marlowe—had a strong tendency to injure his own character: and he boldly pronounced it to be a “lying pamphlet”, in the hope of shaking its credit with the world’.²⁴ At the time the second edition of Pierce Penniless was published, Nashe was engaged in the Marprelate controversy as the official antagonist to the Puritan pamphleteer. Nashe obviously had a reputation to defend. Even though a few years earlier he and Marlowe had been at Cambridge together and had collaborated in writing Dido Queen of Carthage, he now must have felt that to be associated with shady figures such as Marlowe and Greene could prove detrimental. A few years later, Thomas Kyd dearly paid for his former association with Marlowe. When the Privy Council found heretical tracts among Kyd's papers ‘w^ch. he affirmethe that he had from Marlowe’, Kyd was imprisoned, tortured and, for all we know, never recovered to die the year after.²⁵

To be associated with Marlowe and Greene did not argue for one's ‘honesty’ and ‘uprightnes of dealing’. Therefore, Chettle thought it necessary to clear Greene's target from this inference. E. K. Chambers was of the opinion that ‘there is nothing in the letter as we have it which could be offensive to any playmaker except Marlowe, who is spoken of as an atheist and Machiavellian, and Shakespeare, who is openly attacked. The others, presumably Peele and Nashe … are handled in a more friendly spirit’.²⁶ However, Greene calls upon all three playwrights to ‘despise drunkennes’, ‘flie lust’, and to ‘abhorre those Epicures, whose loose life hath made religion lothsome to your eares’ (lines 963-67) which, by implication, is less than a compliment. Also, as Nashe's harsh reaction to Greene's posthumous pamphlet suggests, to be associated with a literary clique that includes Marlowe and Greene was sufficient reason for Nashe to take offence.

Peele may have protested for similar reasons to Nashe's. As a director of courtly pageants and as a city poet, he too had a reputation to defend. Also, he may have been well provided with persons of rank and position to speak up in his favour. Peele was an established figure by 1592. The Arraignment of Paris, a pastoral-mythological play, was acted before the Queen by the Children of the Chapel not later than 1584 when the play appeared in print. By 1585, Peele probably turned to the writing of the annual Lord Mayor's show of which two pageants are extant.²⁷ As someone who, in the words of C. T. Prouty, ‘had acquired sufficient prominence and experience to be regarded as a man who might be called upon to produce the pageant as well as write the device for it’. Peele must have known ‘diuers of worship’ who thought highly of both his character and his art. The phrase ‘facetious grace in writting’ may aptly designate an artist whom we best remember for his graceful design and lyrical sweetness and who, according to one of his modern editors, was ‘a practised rhetorician, who embellished his writings with elegantly adorned sentences and choice fancies’.²⁸ Nashe, in the ‘Preface’ to Greene's Menaphon (1589), terms Peele ‘the chiefe supporter of pleasance nowe liuing, the Atlas of Poetrie, & primus verborum Artifex: whose first encrease, the arraignement of Paris, might pleade to your opinions his pregnant dexterity of wit, and manifold varietie of inuention: wherein (me iudice) he goeth a steppe beyond all that write’.²⁹ Elizabethans were rarely mean in their praise, but the important tasks Peele was called to perform argue that Nashe was not alone in his high opinion of Peele.

This is not to say that Peele was above the financial difficulties from which Greene and Nashe notoriously suffered. In Greene's words, he was ‘driuen (as my selfe) to extreme shifts’, a fact Peele may not have wished to become common knowledge. The initiated readership used to detect topical hints in contemporary pamphlets would not have failed to pick up the reference to Peele by means of the oath to ‘S. George’. The transparency of his portrait may have made it all the more compromising and may have further caused him to protest.

The passage does not make clear to what ‘extreme shifts’ Greene is referring. It is clear from other sources that Peele was in debt by 1587.³⁰ His writings for both the city officials and the public stage were probably motivated by financial trouble. The Battle of Alcazar is commonly dated 1587/88, whereas the remaining three plays that are today counted among his—Old Wives' Tale (1592-4), Edward I (1593-4), David and Bethsabe (1592-4)—are likely to have been written after Chettle's apology. Yet there are reasons to suppose that Peele, in 1592, was trying to earn some money as an actor.³¹ What Chettle means by ‘the qualitie [Peele] professes’ remains ambiguous. It may designate his temporary profession as an actor, if indeed he was one. Or it could signify his occupation as a writer and producer of pageants, particularly as a city poet, a reading which may be given further weight by Greene's preceding adjective ‘ciuill’.

Some critics have taken the word ‘qualitie’ as evidence that Chettle's apology is to Shakespeare, G. E. Bentley, notably, pointed out that he believed ‘the qualitie he professes’ to be denoting Shakespeare's profession as an actor.³² However, as the OED points out, ‘qualitie’ need not designate the occupation of an actor nor, if it does, is Shakespeare the only possible target. The OED cites four instances of the word ‘quality’, meaning ‘profession, occupation or business’ for the period from 1590 to 1630. In only one case the word stands for actors. Foroboasco, a cheating Mountebank in Fletcher's The Fair Maid of the Inn, cries out: ‘I am weary of this trade of fortune-telling, … it is a very ticklish quality’ (V. ii).³³ Shakespeare himself, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, has one of the Outlaws say: ‘A linguist, and a man of such perfection / As we do in our quality much want’ (IV. i. 55-56). Chettle's word ‘qualitie’ in itself does not prove anything.

As the long-standing mistaken consensus about Chettle's apologia demonstrates, coming to terms with Shakespeare's life is no easy endeavour. With possibly no other English author is there a greater discrepancy between the scarcity of extant historical documents that reliably deal with the author's life and the precision with which biographers have tried to trace his life. For all but specialists, this has created a gap between how much is generally thought to be known about Shakespeare's life on the one hand and the inferences that can be drawn from the known facts with a reasonable degree of certainty on the other. Apocryphal stories have contributed their share to this state of affair. More importantly, however, three centuries of interest in Shakespeare have produced results after which it seems impossible to approach his life from a neutral and disinterested point of view. Apart from the scraps of first-hand witnesses which a serious biographer explores in depth, the centuries of biographical concern which have helped to turn William Shakespeare into the ‘national poet’ inevitably contribute a further source which is fed into a modern biography. Stripping bare our image of Shakespeare of four centuries of (mis-)interpretation is hermeneutically impossible. If it were possible, the results of a biographer might be less than rewarding, both aesthetically and economically. Some of the evidence which generations of Shakespeareans have hardened into facts would become ambiguous, riddled with difficulties. The figure we seem to know might take on shady contours and the character hidden behind it would become difficult to relate to.

About the first twenty-eight years of Shakespeare's life, next to nothing is known for certain. His baptism was on 26 April 1564, he obtained a licence to marry on 27 November 1582, his first child Susanna was christened less than six months later (26 May 1583) and his twins Hamnet and Judith were baptized on 2 February 1585. Nothing beside remains. It is widely held that Shakespeare was born on 23 April 1564. Granted, three days was not an uncommon age for a child to be baptized. But Shakespeare may just as well have been born on 22 April. The idea of the birthday of the national poet providentially coinciding with the day dedicated to St. George has proved too tempting to be resisted. As Richard Dutton puts it, ‘this mixture of fact, guesswork, legend and sentiment is all too typical of our knowledge of Shakespeare's life and career’.³⁴

In his biography of Shakespeare, Dennis Kay wrote that ‘the Shakespeare myth has its own vitality, its own self-sustaining energy’,³⁵ a point which the reception history of Chettle's apology forcefully supports. For over two centuries, the myth has effortlessly kept alive Malone's misinterpretation and stifled any attempts to question it. It may be no accident that it was at the end of the eighteenth century that Shakespeare was first equated with the ‘scholar’ and ‘gentleman playwright’ of whom ‘diuers of worship haue reported his uprightnes of dealing … and his facetious grace in writting’. The eighteenth century, as Michael Dobson has recently demonstrated with great expertise, ‘made’ the national poet.³⁶ For Shakespeare's biographers, approaching Shakespeare after the eighteenth century this poses an obvious problem which Richard Dutton has elegantly formulated: ‘Feeling the lack of direct access to Shakespeare the man, later ages have filled in the picture with guesswork, legend and sentiment. If we are to write a reasonably detailed narrative of his career, there is no avoiding a considerable amount of guesswork—inferring, for example, what he is likely to have done from what we know that other, better-documented, contemporaries did. We can only aim to make the guesswork as judicious and well-informed as possible. But we must be far more circumspect about the legend and the sentiment’.³⁷

A biographer's job is further complicated if guesswork is disguised as a well-established fact as in the case of Chettle's Kind-Harts Dreame. I have tried to demonstrate that nothing in Chettle's apology argues that it is not addressed to Peele. On the other hand, if we advocate the case for Shakespeare, we have to do considerable violence to what Chettle appears to be saying. We would have to account not only for a certain looseness in Chettle's language but also, more surprisingly, in his social etiquette. Critics may not have rightly weighed the significance of Chettle's word ‘schollers’. The cumulative effect of the evidence against Shakespeare is such that it partakes of mythography, rather than biography, to keep drawing inferences about Shakespeare's early years in London from Chettle's apology.

Notes

1. This, of course, is a matter of great consequence. Textual studies on Shakespeare's plays were bedeviled for many generations by the assumption that Greene accused Shakespeare of plagiarism who, it was inferred, probably started his career as a dramatist with revisions of plays by other playwrights. Consequently, The Taming of a Shrew, The Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster as well as The true Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke were long mistaken to be earlier plays by other dramatists rather than ‘bad quartos’ of The Taming of the Shrew, and 2, 3 Henry VI. For a discussion and a survey of past criticism, see Greene's Groatsworth of Wit, ed. D. Allen Carroll (Binghamton, 1994), pp. 131-145. Subsequent references to this edition will appear in my text.

2. Lodge sailed in Cavendish's second expedition which left Plymouth 26 August 1591 and did not return before June 1593.

3. Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (Oxford, 1904), II, 324.

4. Quotations are from William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford, 1986).

5. Henrie Chettle, Kind-Hartes Dreame, ed. G. B. Harrison, The Bodley Head Quartos, IV, (London, 1923), pp. 5-6.

6. See Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, I, 59.

7. A long time after Chettle diverted attention from himself and made his contemporaries believe that Greene's Groatsworth of Wit and the prefixed letter were indeed composed by Robert Greene, scholarship has voiced doubts as to the truthfulness of Chettle's claim. As early as 1844, J. Payne Collier suggested in a footnote that Chettle may have written Greene's Groatsworth of Wit (The Works of William Shakespeare, ed. J. Payne Collier [London, 1844], I, cxxxi). This point was fully argued by Warren B. Austin, A Computer-Aided Technique for Stylistic Discrimination: The Authorship of ‘Greene's Groatsworth of Wit’ (U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, 1969) and further developed in Greene's Groatsworth of Wit, ed. Carroll. Austin's and Carroll's arguments seem to support my case. Could we expect Chettle to be the author of both the attack on (even if only as a hoax) and the apology to Shakespeare? I choose not to problematize questions of authorship in this article lest they unnecessarily obfuscate my argument.

8. Lines 1766-76 in The Three Parnassus Plays, ed. J. B. Leishman (London, 1949).

9. The Life and Work of George Peele, ed. Charles Tyler Prouty (New Haven, 1952), I, 65.

10. The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, ed. Edmond Malone (London, 1790), I, 274.

11. A Life of William Shakespeare (London, 1923), p. 142.

12. A Life of William Shakespeare, rev. ed. (London, 1931), p. 117.

13. William Shakespeare: A Biography (London, 1963), p. 91.

14. The Essential Shakespeare: A Biographical Adventure (Cambridge, 1932), p. 48.

15. Dutton, p. 3.

16. Shakespeare: Man and Artist (London, 1938), I, 310.

17. Shakespeare (London, 1949), p. 73.

18. See William A. Ringler, Jr., ‘Spenser, Shakespeare, Honor, and Worship’, Renaissance News, XIV (1961), 159-61. See also OED: ‘In this Cloyster we buried many persons, some of worship, and others of honour. [= belonging to the nobility]’ (1598).

19. ‘A Mistaken Allusion to Shakespeare’, Athenaeum, no. 2415, 7 Febr. 1874, 193-94.

20. A Chronical History of the Life and Work of William Shakespeare (London, 1886), p. 111.

21. ‘Chettles Kind Heart's Dream und die vermeintliche Ehrenerklärung für Shakespeare’, Shakespeare-Jahrbuch, XLI (1905), 184-86.

22. W. H. Chapman, William Shakespeare and Robert Greene: The Evidence (Santa Monica, 1912), pp. 70-71, and Abraham Feldman, ‘Shakspere and the Scholars’, Notes & Queries, 194 (1949), 556.

23. Ronald B. McKerrow, ed., The Works of Thomas Nashe (Oxford, 1966), I, 154.

24. Quoted by R. Simpson in ‘Chettle on Shakespere’, The Academy, V (1874), 401.

25. Harleian MS. 6848, fols. 187-89, quoted by Arthur Freeman in Thomas Kyd: Facts and Problems (Oxford, 1967), p. 27. For a detailed discussion of this portion of Kyd's life, see Freeman, pp. 25-39.

26. William Shakespeare, I, 58-59.

27. The Life and Work of George Peele, ed. Prouty, I, 71.

28. Ibid. I, 72-74.

29. McKerrow, ed., III, 323.

30. Prouty, ed., I, 82.

31. See ‘The Account of George Peele’ in the introduction to The Dramatic and Poetical Works of Robert Greene & George Peele, ed. Alexander Dyce (London, 1861), pp. 330-31.

32. Shakespeare: A Biographical Handbook (New Haven, 1961), p. 97.

33. Quoted from The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, ed. A. R. Waller (Cambridge, 1910), IX, 210.

34. William Shakespeare: A Literary Life (London, 1989), p. 1.

35. Shakespeare: His Life, Work and Era (London, 1991), p. 46.

36. The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660-1769 (Oxford, 1992).

37. Dutton, p. 2.