188 C. F. Tucker Brooke, 



that source is highly improbable, since he seems clearly to have 

 printed from one of Millington's editions, merely correcting that 

 text here and there from the results of an inattentive collation of the 

 manuscript. It is worth noting that extensive changes in ed. 1619 

 appear only in the first two acts of the earlier play (the Contention). 

 For all the rest of the work of collator seems to have contented 

 himself with the insertion of one or two omitted lines and the 

 alteration of an occasional single word, doubtless marking his cor- 

 rections in the margin of a copy of Millington's text as he glanced 

 carelessly through the manuscript. 



II. The Greene-Peele Myth. 



Near the close of Robert Greene's last work, Greens Groats-worth 

 of Wit, bought with a Million of Repentance, is printed a letter ad- 

 dressed " To those Gentlemen, his Quondam acquaintance, that 

 spend their wits in making Plaies." Upon a complete misinter- 

 pretation of this passage, which altogether extends to about three 

 pages, is based alone the current idea that Greene and Peele 

 had a concern, along with Marlowe, in the earlier version of 2 and J 

 Henry VI. Here, as in so many other cases, interest in an entirely 

 incidental, though important, aUusion to Shakespeare has tended 

 to blind readers to the true significance of the document, and has 

 led to wholly unfounded conclusions. 



Greene's main purpose is, indeed, made sufficiently clear in the 

 heading. To his former acquaintances, who, like Greene, " spend 

 their \vits in making plays " and of whom three are specifically ad- 

 dressed, Greene wishes " a better exercise," that is, a more profit- 

 able occupation and the avoidance thereby of the extremities 

 brought upon the writer, as he asserts, by his connection with the 

 ungrateful trade of playwright. The purpose, therefore, of these 

 last words, written by Greene in his poverty and sickness, was not, 

 as it is generally explained, the expression of a mean-spirited grudge 

 against Shakespeare because of a paltry piece of borrowing by that 

 poet. The purpose was rather the arraignment of the very unfair 

 relations existing in Greene's day between the writers of plays, 

 nearly always dependent and necessitous, and the prosperous actors 

 who built their fortunes upon the ill-paid product of the others' 

 genius. The allusion to Shakespeare, which has so much distorted 

 the view of critics, is quite subordinate, and it certainly does not 

 contain the slightest possible suggestion that Shakespeare had 

 plagiarized from Greene, either in Henry VI or elsewhere. 



