Robert Greene (1558–1592) has been known as an adept plotter of plays, the developer of the double plot, a fast writer of prose narratives, and to some, a "Homer of women,"¹ one who created subtle, delicate moods to envelop his chaste heroines. Greene's dramatic heroines have traditionally been praised for their fresh realistic portrayal, but recently these women, often found in arbors singing exquisite lyrics to the pleasing sounds of a lute or discovered on stage in a cottage warbling a ditty while serving ale and milk, have been judged by critics to be little more than pasteboard figures. This essay seeks redress against the defamation of Greene's characterization, and intends to show how his dramatic heroines, like his fictional creations of about the same time, are important in that they share in the knowledge of Fate and the power of Love, and become romantic instruments of comic resolution. In both Greene's fiction and drama, Fate, with its Greek bias, is openly hostile to human activity and thought. The heroines so caught up rail against Fortune in good set Elizabethan terms; they emote as the situation demands, controlled by, yet reacting to, their essentially absurd human condition. The inconsistency of their actions, like the actions of most protagonists of Tudor fiction, bear ample witness to Walter Davis' observation that under such circumstances character and idea have little relation to action² (an interaction assumed essential by nineteenth and twentieth century psychological realists seeking verisimilitude). Though subject to Fate, Greene's heroines are, nevertheless, graced with the ability to love and be loved. That gift allows these romantic comic figures to resolve not only their personal misfortunes, but in so doing also to set right public affairs by restoring the body politic to its natural state of order.

Though literary fashions may have changed from Greene's day to ours, the basic philosophical questions have not done so. Greene's romances (medievalism in euphuistic and romantic dress) point up the absurdity of human frailty trying to exist in a universe ruled by Fortune, where the center apparently cannot hold. Greene's heroines are unable to put on true knowledge of their predicaments, but as females, and, as the proverb goes, soonest to love, they are able to put on the power of love. Their love, a mixture of eros and agape, allows them instinctively to bring about both personal and political order. Greene's purpose is not didactic, for as a good artist, he instinctively prefers the dulce before the utile, an aim quite different from that of Yeats. For this reason, when Greene gets his heroines out of a jam in present-day thriller fashion, he is not copping out literarily. He is preferring plot and action to speculation: the story must move on. He chooses to be vivid through action rather than philosophical through the pregnant symbol. To attack Greene because he was unable to yark up truly philosophical speeches for his comic characters is like criticizing Beatrice and Benedick or Hero and Claudio for engaging in battles of wit rather than wisdom. Besides creating romantic heroines, Greene offered a contribution through his characters to the comedy of manners, with its emphasis on the human condition.

How did Greene conceive his women? Just how do his heroines react to the hostility of Fate? These questions will be considered principally in terms of Fawnia and Sephestia, the heroines of Greene's most successful romances Pandosto (1588) and Menaphon (1589), and Margaret and Dorothea, heroines in his best plays Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1589) and James the Fourth (1588–92).³ In speaking for many,⁴ T. M. Parrott and R. H. Ball in their A Short View of Elizabethan Drama (New York: Scribners, 1943), p. 73, give the traditional view of the dramatic heroines of Greene: "More fully realized, lifelike, and credible than the shadowy women of Lyly's plays, they strike a note of true romance and are in a sense the forerunners of such romantic heroines as Rosalind, Viola, and Imogen." Sometime earlier, Robert Jordan in his Robert Greene (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1915), p. 52, observed that "fortune, not personality, is the moving power" of Greene's characters. That note has been repeated and emphasized recently. Norman Sanders, in "The Comedy of Greene and Shakespeare" (Early Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, No. 3 [London: St. Martin's Press, 1961]), p. 45, comments that since Greene consistently sacrifices character for effect, psychological realism is "much less important than what may be termed the psychology of the immediate emotional situation. For it is the situations and their place in the complete comic pattern that are significant." Similarly, Kenneth Muir in "Robert Greene as Dramatist" (see note 4) finds the character of Margaret in Friar Bacon wanting depth. Past critics, Muir says, have treated her "as though she were as three-dimensional as a character in a novel and praise her for qualities she does not possess" (p. 49). As for Dorothea in James the Fourth, Muir can take her only as "an incredible paragon…. Even if we make due allowances for the belief in the theory of wild oats and for medieval (and Elizabethan) admiration for patient Griseldas, such facile forgiveness, such inhuman lack of resentment, takes away from the reality of the character. She shrinks into pasteboard" (pp. 51–52). In his edition of the same play (London: Ernest Benn, 1969), p. xix, J. A. Lavin calls Ida and Dorothea "little more than personifications of feminine virtue…. Neither is psychologically moti vated, their function in the play being purely exemplary," as borne out in the latter character, who is "an emblem rather than a realistically motivated character" (p. xx).

Greene's characters are clearly a function of their situation. They are indeed more fully realized than those of his contemporaries, but they still retain the symbolic function of character basic to the morality plays and look forward to the impressionistic function of character in the patterned ballets of the Stuart masques yet to come. His heroines can nevertheless speak meaningfully of the human condition. They are, like Yeats' Leda, characteristically put upon by Fate, most often incarnate as a male who catches them up, masters them, leaving us to wonder whether they had or gained any real knowledge from the encounter.

How do Greene's romantic heroines meet their fates? Greene's fiction can establish the context. Walter R. Davis observes that under the influence of the late Greek romances—Heliodorus' An Ætheopian History, Longus' Daphnis and Chloe, and Achilles Tatius' Clitophon and Leucippe—an Elizabethan character no longer simply railed against his capricious socioeconomic fate as commonly signified in the medieval emblem of Fortune's wheel; he had to fight for survival in what was a hostile universe where character and ideas absurdly cannot beget or control action:

To put the matter perhaps too simply, the writers of prose fiction in the 1580's, faced with the opposed models of the Euphuistic mode and Greek romance, were essentially confronted with a choice between dialogue expressive of character and ideas but devoid of action, and action devoid of meaning. But Robert Greene made just such a simple and radical choice…. [when he] accepted from Boccaccio the Greek romantic vision of a world governed not by the precepts of human reason but by the absurdities of chance. Then he produced some of the most impressive pure narrative fiction to come from the sixteenth century, in Pandosto and Menaphon. [Pp. 166–67]

That observation informs not only Greene's fictional protagonists but his dramatic heroines as well. These ladies emote in Greek terms against the existentially absurd, divisive human situation, then by means of love are able to bring about union and order. This is the essential achievement of Greene's heroines, whether fictional or dramatic.

Love to Greene, writes Daniel Seltzer (Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1963), p. xvi, is

the major antidote for the vagaries of fortune…. the primary power for rejuvenation in nature. In this sort of comedy, the wedding march merges with the ceremonial march of kings and princes who rule happy and prosperous countries; human love, once tested, is instrumental in effecting such order. All of Greene's known plays (and a few others very likely by him) end with a comic celebration of natural order in the marriage, reunion, or reconciliation of lovers and, simultaneously, in the establishment of felicity in the state.

Likewise, J. A. Lavin finds in Bacon's prophecy (xvi. 42–62) "the point insisted on by all of Greene's plays, that human love is a necessary prerequisite for individual happiness, political stability and the preservation of the natural order" (Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, London: Ernest Benn, 1969, p. xxvii).

By embodying and promulgating the allegory of love, Greene's women are central to the action of their dramas. As personifications, even more as physical and emotional manifestations of love, they are subject to the rapes of fortune as their love is tried. Then by that love, now an uncloistered virtue, these heroines become the means by which humans can join together in what is a divisive and meaningless universe. Consider how Greene's typical romantic and dramatic heroines of the late 1580's and early 1590's effect reconciliation.

The advertisement on the title page of Menaphon provides a scheme which informs our two romances and two plays: "Wherein are deciphered the variable effects of Fortune, the wonders of Loue, the triumphes of inconstant Time."⁵ In the same romance Greene enjoins the Gentlemen Readers to "take a little paines to prie into my imagination" (IV, 8). In so doing, we find that Greene's Fortune is not only proverbially fickle, but further variable as it interacts with Love and Time. Commonly Fortune attempts to dominate Love within the continuum of Time. But Pandosto or "The Triumph of Time" advertises that "although by the means of a sinister fortune, Truth may be concealed yet by Time in spight of fortune it is most manifestly revealed…. Temporis filia veritas" (VI, 227). Time is needed for Fortune's deceptions and for Love to unmask itself. Toward the end of Friar Bacon when Serlsby and Lambert vow their love for Margaret, already bethrothed to Lacy, the heroine replies how Fortune has dominated Love, and with it, her too; that Love will not be stayed; "nor can the flames that Venus sets on fire / Be kindled but by fancy's motion" (x. 52–53). She observes how "Fortune tempers lucky haps with frowns … Love is my bliss, and love is now my bale" (x. 90–92). Dorothea in James the Fourth similarly finds herself subject to Love, and hence to Fortune. "What should I do? Ah, poor unhappy queen, / Born to endure what fortune can contain!" (III. iii. 68–69).

Another way that Greene relates Fortune, Love, and Time is to have his heroines compare their present lots with those of some mythological heroine, frequently Helen, as Margaret does in Friar Bacon:

Shall I be Helen in my froward fates,
As I am Helen in my matchless hue,
And set rich Suffolk with my face afire?
[x. 93–95]

In Menaphon, Pleusidippus, holding the shepherdess Samela against her will and defending his castle against the shepherds, calls the Trojan war into comparison:

Why, what straunge Metamorphosis is this: Are the Plaines of Arcadie, whilome filled with labourers, now ouerlaide with launces…. the shepheardes hauing a madding humor like the Greekes to seek the recouerie of Helena, so you for the regaining of your faire Samela. Heere shee is, Shepheards, and I am Priam to defende hir with resistance of a ten years siege: yet for I were loath to haue my Castle sackte like Troy, I pray you tell me, which is Agamemnon? [VI, 130]

Pleusidippus intends this to be mock-heroic, but Greene also gains the perspective of time by using the classical analogy. In such historical context, all the "character" in the world is not enough to counter Fortune. Fawnia, in Pandosto, trying to resist the advances of Dorastus, says: "Thoughts are to be measured by Fortunes, not by desires…. No, lucke commeth by lot, and fortune windeth those threedes which the destinies spin" (IV, 285).

For Greene's heroines, especially those of the romances but also the plays, both Love and Fortune appear fickle and together with Time form an unstable triumvirate. Menaphon considers "how Venus was feigned by the Poets to spring of the froathe of the Seas; which draue him straight into a deepe coniecture of the inconstancie of Loue" (VI, 37). In Friar Bacon, Margaret pleads before Edward for Lacy's life, saying that her love is not mutable, and does not "hang in the uncertain balance of proud time" (viii.94). But in spite of a claim for extra-temporal love, Greene's heroines are still subject to the vagaries of Love. When Margaret gets Lacy's brush-off letter, she pulls out the emotional stops as she calls on Ate, asking: "Didst thou enchant my birthday with such stars / As lighted mischief from their infancy" (x. 141–42). In James the Fourth Greene, wisely relying on dramatic instinct, employs diversity of characters to produce an unpredictable situation. More typical is the intrusion of an openly malicious Fortune into human affairs as found in Pandosto: "Fortune enuious of such happy successe, willing to shewe some signe of her inconstancie, turned her wheele, and darkned their bright sun of prosperitie, with the mistie clouds of mishap and misery" (IV, 235). Like the fairies that begin, intervene, and end James the Fourth, Fortune, nearly personified, oversees Pandosto. The baby, put out to sea in a cockle boat, is allowed to survive the storm: "Fortune minding to be wanton, willing to shewe that as she hath wrinckles on her browes, so shee hath dimples in her cheekes" (IV, 264). Somewhat later in the story Fortune again intervenes, this time to spoil Fawnia's happiness: "Fortune, who al this while had shewed a frendly face, began now to turne her back, and to shewe a lowring countenance, intending as she had given Fawnia a slender checke, so she woulde giue her a harder mate" (IV, 270). King Egistus, we find, plans to have his son Dorastus marry the Danish princess. An elopment later, the lovers find further trouble. Pandosto, Fawnia's real father, has taken a fancy to her. She repulses his advances, exclaiming "Ah infortunate Fawnia thou seest to desire aboue fortune, is to striue against the Gods, and Fortune" (IV, 308).

Fortune is strong, and Fortune is fickle, as Sephestia sings to her child, telling him of his father's love, "last his sorowe" that was "first his ioy": "Weepe not my wanton, smile vpon my knee, / When thou art olde, ther's griefe inough for thee" (V, 43). Like Greene's other heroines, she too finds Fortune a strong adversary: "Sephestia, thou seest no Phisick preuailes against the gaze of the Basiliskes, no charme against the sting of the Tarantula, no preuention to diuert the decree of the Fates, nor no meanes to recall backe the balefull hurt of Fortune" (VI, 45). Similarly the nobleman-shepherd Democles grieves that love "should be ouermatcht with Fortune, and your affections pulde backe by contrarietie of Destinie" (VI, 121). With Sephestia-Samela the center of the conflict, Fate is able to work through her to ruin her father Democles: "Fame determining to applye her selfe to his fancie, sounded in his eares the singular beautie of his daughter Samela; he, although he were an olde colt, yet had not cast all his wanton teeth" (VI, 113). These heroines seem to draw Fortune's bolt as effectively as lightning rods: "Unfortunate Samela, born to mishaps, and forepointed to sin ister fortunes, whose bloomes were ripened by mischance, and whose fruite is like to wither with despaire" (VI, 133). Fortune, Love, and Time relate in ever-varying ways, generally to bring disaster through Love upon Greene's heroines. But Love is the one element that allows these heroines to accommodate themselves to Fortune.

According to the Elizabethan proverb, women are the soonest to love, yet out of their love comes the salvation of all. Recent criticism that points out the flatness of the characterizations of Greene's heroines suggests that perhaps Greene had other ideas than creating full-bodied females when he introduces a character. Imbued with intuitive capacity, his women act out Fortune-Love-Time's plan. These extraordinarily beautiful creatures inhabit a protean middle state facilitated by their disguises, applying art to nature, fusing intellect with the body, a combination of the chaste and cerebral Diana or Vesta with the Venus, earthy and passionately sexual. Unlike Shakespeare's persona, Greene's heroes saw many a goddess go.

Greene typically idealizes his mistresses through hyperbolical mythological comparisons. When, for example, Dorastus first sees Fawnia "he was halfe afraid, fearing that with Acteon he has seene Diana: for hee thought such exquisite perfection could not be founde in a mortall creature" (IV, 274). Her stepfather Porrus, shanghaied aboard the ship of the eloping lovers, finds her metamorphosed into a goddess: "He scarce knew her: for she had attired her selfe in riche apparell, which so increased her beauty, that shee resembled rather an Angell then a mortall creature" (IV, 298). Another goddess is Sephestia-Samela. Menaphon moons for "such a heauenly Paragon" (VI, 55) like Endymion. He describes her in a sensuous Ovidian vein that suggests Antony's infatuation for Cleopatra: "Nor could Menaphon Hue from the sight of his Samela; whose breath was perfumed aire, whose eyes were fire wherein he delighted to dallie, whose heart the earthlie Paradice wherein hee desired to ingraffe the essence of his loue and affection" (VI, 57). The nobleman in disguise, Melicertus, woos Samela in this fashion: "Mistres of al eyes that glance but at the excellence of your perfection, soueraigne of all such as Venus hath allowed for louers, Oenones ouermatch, Arcadies comet, beauties second comfort; all haile" (VI, 81).

Of the two plays, Friar Bacon presents its heroine, Margaret, as a goddess containing both Diana's and Venus' voluptuousness. In James the Fourth, however, those characteristics are parcelled out to Dorothea (chastity) and the lesser character, Ida (both voluptuousness and chastity). This diversification is probably what makes James the Fourth Greene's best play (just as Marlowe's Edward II is his best-balanced drama). When Greene finally came to write his plays, realizing the need for sharply differentiated characters he heightened the Vesta-Venus dichotomy of his heroines. Margaret in Friar Bacon is akin to Samela and Fawnia in that she contains both goddesses. The double image of Margaret allows her to resolve the formal pattern of this festive comedy through her semidivine status. Such a view of her, argues Peter Mortenson in his article "Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay: Festive Comedy and Three-Form'd Luna," follows an important mythological tradition that conflates the moon goddess with Venus.⁶ Edward describes her in terms more Ovidian than Petrarchan in their sensuality, then exclaims: "Tush, Lacy, she is beauty's overmatch, / If thou surveyest her curious imagery" (i.60–61). Yet this heroine, as all of Greene's, maintains her chastity. She "stands so much upon her honest points, / That marriage or no market with the maid" (i. 120–21). Later when Edward sees her in Friar Bacon's glass, she becomes Venus' equal, "as brightsome as the paramour of Mars," but attended by "a jolly friar" (vi.13–14); the description is both chaste and lascivious. As Henry describes Margaret to the Emperor, her beauty once again is composed of the divisive and antithetical qualities of lust and chastity: "Her beauty passing Mars' paramour, / Her virgin's right as rich as Vesta's was" (xii.45–46).

With everyone believing this keeper's daughter a goddess, it is no wonder that she comes to act like one. Greene's characters frequently assume a disguise only to find that they become the character they impersonate. In a way this is true with all these heroines. Margaret the maid becomes Margaret the lady. She rises to Edward's accusation, and replies as an equal in rank: "'Twas I, my Lord, not Lacy stepped awry; / For oft he sued and courted for yourself" (viii.36–37). Edward continues to try to win Margaret, but she will not be bought off: "Not all the wealth heaven's treasury affords, / Should make me leave Lord Lacy or his love" (viii.72–73). Greene's heroines, though unable to control Fortune, Love, and Time, are always steadfast in their loves. In the face of an absurd situation where man's ideas and character may relate to each other but not to his actions, the role of the female gives meaning to the situation. Especially in the earlier work she appears as a goddess embodying passionate virginity.

These romances and plays are comedies; hence there is an interaction of characters to bring about a happy end. The heroine's job is to seek reconciliation of private and public quarrels. Paradoxically, her love is divisive, separating passion from reason but nevertheless able to return things to a state of natural order. How does Greene allow his goddesses to reconcile the potentially tragic situations into comedy? A factor in the intricate and volatile Fortune-Love-Time triangle, both good and harm can come from the force of Love. Pandosto, for example, mistakenly believes that "Loue was aboue all Lawes and therefore to be staied with no Law" (IV, 237–38). He mistrusts his friend Egistus, who observes that "in Loue and Kingdomes, neither faith, or Lawe, is to bee respected" (IV, 244), when he discovers that Pandosto intends to kill him out of groundless jealousy. Years later, Doratus falls in love with the shepherdess Fawnia, but what was for them a matter of pure love turns out to have political meaning too; their marriage reunites Pandosto and Egistus (IV, 316). As the romance opens, so it closes, with the general population celebrating the marriage of love and policy, the citizens making "Bonfires and showes" and the courtiers and knights "Justs and Turneis" (IV, 316). The marriage for love that unknowingly turns out to be advantageous politically is also found in Menaphon. The foundling child Pleusidippus unknowingly becomes instrumental in bringing about political reconciliation (VI, 98). Within the last half dozen pages of Menaphon, Greene, in the lyric, "What thing is Loue," comes out and speaks in his own person as to the fateful nature and insidious force of Love, calling it a "power diuine," or a "wreakefull law," a star of compelling influence. Love is thus a discord between feeling and reason, a desire left unfulfilled, "a secret hidden and not knowne. / Which one may better feele than write vpon" (VI, 140–41). Love's duality in Greene's romances leads his characters from a heaven to a hell, then back to a heaven. The heroines are both the damnation and the salvation of their personal and their political affairs. In Menaphon, thanks to Sephestia and a mysterious old woman who unravels all, the characters, under the sign of Venus, reveal their true states. The son finds a mother, a husband a wife, and a father a daughter. Moreover, Sephestia's father, Democles, "impald the head of his yong neuew Pleusidippus with the crowne and diadem of Arcadie," makes his brother Lamedon a duke, and they all plan "to passe into Thessaly, to contract the mariage twixt Pleusidippus, and the daughter of the Thessalian King" (VI, 145). So much for the romances, where the heroines Fawnia and Sephestia are the prime movers (as Fate's playthings) of political reconciliation.

The plays fit this same pattern. In Friar Bacon, Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, has left court and gone rustic, "disguised like a swain, / And lurks about the country here unknown" (vi.96–97). All this for the beautiful keeper's daughter, Margaret of Fressingfield. Edward, Prince of Wales, feels her influence and asks himself if his "plumes be pulled by Venus down?" (viii.115). Even the King praises Margaret: "Her beauty passing Mars's paramour, / Her virgin's right as rich as Vesta's was" (xii.45–46). After Margaret's fidelity and chastity have been tested (cruelly, as is usual in Greene's romances), Lacy comes back for her. As she is about to enter the nunnery and pledge her allegiance to God, to take Vesta, not Venus, Ermsby states the issue to Margaret:

Choose you, fair damsel; yet the choice is yours,
Either a solemn nunnery or the court;
God or Lord Lacy. Which contents you best,
To be a nun, or else Lord Lacy's wife?
[xiv. 81–84]

In marriage Vesta and Venus can meet, for as with that favorite proverb to Greene, women may be wantons in their husbands. And so under Fortune's will Margaret characteristically chooses to be Lacy's wife, thus uniting familial and political factors: "Off goes the habit of a maiden's heart … And all the show of holy nuns … Lacy for me, if he will be my lord" (xiv.89–92).

Although James the Fourth does not present its heroine as quite the goddess of the other works, Dorothea perhaps shows best how Greene uses his heroines to reconcile political differences. Half chaste goddess, half patient and meek Griselda, Dorothea (with apparently none of the Venus about her as that role is given to Ida in this play) is the means by which England and Scotland are reconciled. The play opens and closes on this note. Dorothea stands as the instrument and symbol of the new unity between England and Scotland. But in James the Fourth we again have the basic dichotomy that Greene invests in all his heroines: the Vesta-Venus paradox, here divided between Dorothea and Ida. As James is lusting after Ida, he is futilely reminded by the Bishop of St. Andrews that he is "allied unto the English king" (II.ii. 130–31). At the play's end Dorothea has fulfilled the role of marrying sense and reason in her husband James, but not before he is tormented like Macbeth, with his bad choice that has thrown his realm into chaos:

Alas, what hell may be compared with mine,
Since in extremes my comforts do consist?
War then will cease when dead ones are revived,
Some then will yield when I am dead for hope.
[V.vi. 8–11]

Sir Cuthbert Anderson enters with Dorothea, still alive, still a goddess, who because of her great love for James, is able to forgive him with:

Shame me not, prince, companion in thy bed;
Youth hath misled—tut, but a little fault:
'Tis kingly to amend what is amiss.
[V.vi. 159–61]

Her father, the King of England, accepts the reunion and bows to the ascendant rule of Nature: "Thou provident kind mother of increase, / Thou must prevail, ah, Nature, thou must rule" (V. vi. 173–74).

Greene's dramatic and romantic heroines play a reconciliatory role. Under the sign of Fortune, Love, and Time, they take Love, divisive by nature as it separates sense from reason, and paradoxically after many misfortunes they use that divisive Love to reconcile opposing factions, both personal and public. To return things to a state of natural order, these heroines must be particularly attuned to Love, Fortune, and Time. They cannot control the trilogy, but through Love they can bring about a return to the natural state. Through disguises they can move as goddesses up and down the social scale from Arcadia to the court in their search for survival. Fortune ultimately allows them to unite sense and reason in their loves, hence in the state. These heroines have no control over their fates, though they react to them, generally moaning about Fortune's wheel and accepting the low life as more content than life at the top. These heroines combine the chastity of a Vestal virgin with the voluptuousness of Venus, and all are very beautiful. As symbols of Love they are instruments of fate, and as such are allowed in their conventional way to express their passions. Were Robert Greene's heroines of drama and romance, once caught up in Fortune, able to put on knowledge as well as power? Or put another way, are they cognizant three-dimensional characters? The answer is no, just as it probably was for Yeats' Leda. Power and knowledge, the province of Fate, were not granted human beings in Greene's view. Hence Greene's heroines, because of their close connection with Fate and Love, do not need to influence action through character. The gods took care of that. In their Petrarchan way, Greene's highly stylized heroines are half goddess, half human.

Greene's place in Elizabethan literature owes more than a little to his heroines, who, following after the creations of Lyly and Sidney, look forward to that aspect of Shakespeare's theatrics applauded particularly by the Restoration coterie audience, one attuned to a heroine's exquisite expression while caught on the horns of a dilemma. One constant in Shakespearean comedy is that salvation can come from the love of one woman—in spite of Fortune, and in defiance of Time. That view informs Greene's comedies and romances, too. It is perhaps a limited claim for them, but one that if Greene's heroines were merely cardboard figures, would require a metamorphosis that even Ovid would be hesitant to record.

Greene's self-nomination as "love's philosopher" does not make him an anatomizer of Lyly, for by 1587 Greene was several years past that influence, nor was he a literary raconteur of medieval philosophical abstractions as figured in Renaissance emblem books. His own hard life provided realities. His accomplishment was to create heroines who, by having a love that passed their own understanding and their misfortunes, are able with grace to bring forth comic resolution.

Notes

¹ Thomas Nashe's phrase "Homer of Women" (The Anatomie of Absurditie [1589], in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, 1904–10: rpt. ed. F. P. Wilson [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966], I, 12) has been thought to refer to Robert Greene, a defender of the sex; I point out that Nashe later specifically sees Homer as critical of women: "reade over all Homer, and you shall never almost see him bring in Iuno, but brawling and jarring with Iupiter, noting therby what an yrksome kind of people they are" (I, 15). The celebrated phrase should be applied elsewhere.

² Walter R. Davis, Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 166–67.

³ The conjectural dates of composition of Greene's plays generally accepted are Alphonsus (1587), Friar Bacon (1589), Orlando Furioso and James IV (1591), though some scholars reverse the order of Friar Bacon and Orlando. As for James the Fourth, it is wise to take note of what Norman Sanders says in his edition of the play (The Revels Plays, London: Methuen, 1970), p. xxv: "Efforts to date the play's composition more accurately than simply '1588–92' have produced a little factual evidence and a good deal of speculation based on literary judgments."

⁴ Kenneth Muir ("Robert Greene as Dramatist," in Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama in Honor of Hardin Craig, ed. Richard Hosley [Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1962], p. 53) and J. A. Lavin (Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay [London: Ernest Benn, 1969], p. xxv) cite the traditional view of Greene's heroines as expressed, among others, by J. A. Symonds, Churlton Collins, Thomas H. Dickinson, Ashley Thorndike, G. P. Baker, C. F. Tucker Brooke, F. E. Schelling, J. M. Robertson, J. C. Jordan, and Allardyce Nicoll.

⁵The Life and Complete Works in Prose and Verse of Robert Greene, M.A., ed. A. B. Grosart. 15 vols. (1881–86: reissued New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), IV. 3. Further references to Greene's romances will be to Grosart's edition and will be cited contextually, as will the references to his plays, taken from the editions noted above: Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, ed. J. A. Lavin, and James the Fourth, ed. Norman Sanders.

⁶English Literary Renaissance, 2 (Spring 1972), 203–205. This article came to my attention after I had written mine.