190 C. F. Tucker Brooke, 



that speake from our mouths, those Anticks garnisht in our colours ;" 

 that is, by the actors in search of dramatic material. Is it not likely 

 that the other poets, in spite of their services to the ungrateful 

 companies, will in the end be forsaken, like Greene, in their extre- 

 mities. Here Greene, in his anger, cites another cause for distrust 

 of the actors : " Yes, trust them not for there is an vpstart Crow, 

 beautified with our feathers {i. e., a presumptuous actor who makes 

 his fortune by repeating our lines) that with his Tygers heart wrapt 

 in a Players hide, supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke 

 verse as the best of you : and being an absolute lohannes fac totum, 

 is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrie." 



That the allusion here is to Shakespeare is unmistakeable ; but 

 the charge which Greene brings against him is not that of pla- 

 giarism. Greene is moved merely by pique that this upstart player, 

 accustomed to make his profit out of the ill-paid labors of the poets, 

 should now add insult to injury by venturing to enter the ranks of 

 dramatic authors and thus attempting to prove himself an absolute 

 Johannes fac totum. The line, " Tygers heart wrapt in a Players 

 hide," is clearly a parody of " Oh Tygers hart wrapt in a womans 

 hide " in the True Tragedy ^ and seems to have pertinence only 

 if we assume Shakespeare's revision of the play in question already 

 to have been made. Similarly, the next clause, " supposes he is as 

 well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you," indicates 

 that Johannes-fac-totum had definitely put his blank verse rendering 

 of the play into competition with that of " the best " of the poets 

 addressed by Greene {viz., Marlowe ?). For even a hint, however, 

 that Greene or Peele was connected in any way with the work quoted 

 the reader must look in vain. The very use of the second person 

 of the pronoun, rather than the first, in the phrase, " as well able 

 to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you," shows, it 

 seems to me, that Greene did not feel himself included in the 

 challenge involved in the actor-poet's revisionary work. 



After this not unnatural excursus upon the effrontery of an indi- 

 vidual actor who had dared in his revision of the Henry VI plays to 

 match his blank verse against that of the best of the professional 

 poets, Greene returns to his main theme : the unprofitableness of 

 the playwright's career : " O that I might intreate your rare wits 

 to be imployed in more profitable courses {i. e., that I might entreat 

 you to employ your genius in more lucrative undertakings than 

 play-writing) & let these Apes (the actors) imitate j^our past 



Facsimile of True Tragedy, 1891, p. 20, 1. 122; 3 Henry VI, I, iv, 137. 



