Shakespeare

He first attacked Shakespeare overtly in 1592. But earlier and more circumspect criticisms were also directed against him and Thomas Kyd. In 1587 Greene condemned those “scabd lades” who among other things “write or publish anie thing … [which] is distild out of ballets.”¹ The argument still continues whether the plot of Titus Andronicus is derived from a ballad. It was a slight and fleeting reference, but suggestive. In the following year Greene’s companion and fellow wit, Thomas Nashe, continued the assault with an attack upon those writers who “seek with slanderous reproaches to carp at all, being often-times most unlearned of all.”² Kyd and Shakespeare were the only “unlearned” playwrights who had achieved success upon the public stage by this time. In 1589 Greene composed a romance entitled Menaphon in which a “countrey-Author” “can serve to make a pretie speech”but his style is “stufft with prettie Similes and far-fetched metaphors.”³ These would become characteristic criticisms of Shakespeare’s style.

In the preface to Menaphon, Nashe amplified the attack. In 1589, Shakespeare was twenty-five years old. Nashe had just come down from Cambridge, and had decided to live upon his wits; he was the son of a curate from Lowestoft, and his subsequent career seems to fulfil the Greek proverb – son of a priest, grandson of the devil. He colluded with his friend Greene, and soon carved out a career for himself as a satirist and pamphleteer, poet and writer of occasional plays. He was well acquainted with Shakespeare; he hovered in the immediate vicinity of Lord Strange and the Earl of Southampton, looking for patronage and praise, and did not always evince the benign spirit of his contemporary. He was three years younger than Shakespeare and seems to have possessed the hardness or cruelty of early ambition; he resented the success of Shakespeare, and wished to rival or even surpass it. He never could accomplish that goal, and quickly became a bitter and disappointed young man. He was incarcerated in Newgate and died at the age of thirty-four or thirty-five.

In the preface of 1589 Nashe first attacks certain unlearned writers who are happy to appropriate the work of Ovid and of Plutarch and “vaunt” it as their own. “It is a common practice now a daies,” Nashe writes, “amongst a sort of shifting companions, that runne through every arte and thrive by none, to leave the trade of Noverint wherto they were borne, and busie themselves with indeuors of Art, that could scarcelie latinize their neck-verse if they should haue neede.” The trade of Noverint was that of the law-clerk, to which we have tentatively assigned Shakespeare in his youth. The charge that he could scarcely Latinise may be an anticipation of Jonson’s remark about “small Latin and less Greek,” with the obvious implication that this unnamed writer had not attended university. Nashe goes on to remark that “yet English Seneca read by candle light yeeldes manie good sentences, as Bloud is a begger, and so foorth; and if you entreat him faire in a frostie morning, he will afford whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls, of tragical speeches. But o griefe! Tempus edax rerum, where’s that will last always?” So whom is Nashe attacking? The reference to “English Seneca”-the unnamed writer did not have enough Latin to read it in the original – would yield the thunderous melodrama of Titus Andronicus. The reference to Hamlet is self-explanatory, and in its original form this play may very well have tried to out-Seneca Seneca. And the quotation? “Tempus edax rerum” appears in The Troublesome Raigne of King John, the clear forerunner of Shakespeare’s more famous King John. It is now also a critical commonplace that Shakespeare adapted Ovid and Plutarch.

There is then a description of those dramatists who “intermeddle with Italian translations, wherein how poorelie they have plotted,” a plausible allusion to one of the earliest of Shakespeare’s extant plays, The Two Gentlemen of Verona. The playwright is also deemed to “borrow invention of Ariosto”; the plot of The Taming of a Shrew derives in part from I Suppositi of Ariosto. It concludes with a reference to those who “bodge up a blanke verse with ifs and ands”; then, on a more personal note, they are accused of “having starched their beards most curiouslie.” There are later references to starched beards, as well as other allusions to law-clerking and schoolmastering as the unfortunate attributes of a certain country writer. It is an interesting mixture, out of which seems to emerge the elusive form of Shakespeare – indeterminate, not yet full shaped, not yet wholly familiar or recognisable, but Shakespeare.