192 C. F. Tucker Brooke, 



of the facts ; for an author hired by one theatrical company to re- 

 vise a play manuscript acquired from another company could in 

 Greene's time no more be held guilty of plagiarizing from the ori- 

 ginal writer than could to-day the poet who adapted for the stage 

 another man's novel after the acting rights had been sold. Greene's 

 real accusation against Shakespeare is quite the reverse. Instead 

 of charging him with slavish imitation, he derides his effrontery 

 in essaying too boldly to match his verse, tyro and mechanical as 

 he was, against that of the leading professional dramatist of the 

 day. We shall see, in comparing the earlier and later versions of 

 the plays, that it is precisely this feature, the independence with 

 which Shakespeare alters both the metre and the thought of Marlowe, 

 that distinguishes the later poet's work. 



The arguments by which successive critics have sought to support 

 the idea of Greene's and Peele's interest in Henry VI, falsely de- 

 duced from the passage just considered, are admitted to be of the 

 most insubstantial nature, and they fall with the fall of the pre- 

 conception which avowedly suggested them. Grant White laid an 

 absurd stress upon the appearance in the Contention and True 

 Tragedy of the idiom jor to in infinitive phrases, erroneously asserting 

 that this idiom was a peculiar mark of Greene's style never employed 

 by Marlowe or Shakespeare. Miss Lee, herself an advocate of the 

 Greene theory, admits that for to, which occurs five times in the 

 Contention and four times in the True Tragedy, occurs also in Shake- 

 speare and in Marlowe's Tamhurlaine, Doctor Faustus, and Massacre 

 at Paris. In the last play alone I find six instances.^ Miss Lee 

 mentions examples from The Winter's Tale, Pericles, All 's Well that 

 EndsWell, Titus Andronicus, and the older (1603) version of Hamlet. 

 In regard to the last play, it is noteworthy that the earlier for to is 

 twice altered in the later version into the normal to. The fact is 

 that the old use of for to as sign of the infinitive was still generally 

 current at the end of the sixteenth century, but had come to be 

 regarded as slip-shod. Greene, a careless writer, employs it fre- 

 quently. Marlowe and Shakespeare also use it frequently in their 

 rougher works, but tend to eliminate it upon revision. 



The only other evidence even speciously favorable to the theory 

 of Greene's partial authorship of our plays is, I think, the circum- 

 stance that " mightie Abradas, the great Masadonian Pyrate," men- 

 tioned in the Contention (Facsimile, p. 44, 1. 51), is mentioned also 



1 LI. 518, 559, 1033, 1120, 1131, 1260. White, indeed, himself admitted 

 that his theory broke down in the case of this play. 



