The Author ship of " King Henry VI." 193 



in Greene's prose work, Penelope's Weh} but not, apparently, in 

 any other Elizabethan author. Henry VI, Part II (IV, i, 108) 

 alters the name to " Bargulus, the strong lUyrian pirate." In de- 

 ciding a question of authorship between Marlowe and Greene, who, 

 after the same kind of school training, had passed through the same 

 Cambridge career at about the same time, no small piece of classic 

 or pseudo-classic learning can safely be held to be the peculiar 

 possession of either. Whatever Greene knew about Abradas he is 

 likely to have learned at Cambridge, where it is improbable that 

 Marlowe failed to gain precisely the same knowledge from the same 

 source. 



I believe that no value whatever attaches to the other putative 

 evidence laboriously collected by Miss Lee and her predecessors: 

 the facts, namely, that Greene as well as Marlowe uses words like 

 countervail and eternize, which are found in the Contention and True 

 Tragedy ; and that four passages in these plays, of which two are 

 closely paralleled in Marlowe, are remotely similar to passages in 

 Greene. Miss Lee is herself careful to avow the small stress she 

 lays upon such arguments.^ Indeed, the reading of her pages tends 

 to convince one the more strongly of the entire baselessness of the 

 Greene theory, as one observes what perfectly negligible results 

 have been attained by the most diligent inquiry backed by fervent 

 belief on the part of the investigator. 



It is not enough to say that there is absolutely no proof of Greene's 

 concern in the plays under consideration. There is the strongest 

 reason against believing that Greene collaborated with Marlowe at 

 any time. Though the latter is naturally included in the group 

 of scholar-poets to whom Greene's letter is addressed, the tone of 

 the words concerning Marlowe is covertly hostile. We know from 

 the apology of Greene's executor, Chettle, in his Epistle to the 

 Gentlemen Readers of Kind-Harts Dreame that Marlowe as well 

 as Shakespeare resented Greene's letter and made his resentment 

 known. Four years before the composition of the Groatsworth of 

 Wit, in the preface to Perimedes the Blacksmith (1588), Greene had 

 attacked Marlowe yet more openly : 



" I keepe my old course, to palter up some thing in Prose, using 

 mine old poesie si\\\,Omne tulit punctuni, although latelye two Gentle- 



^ " Abradas the great Macedonian Pirat thought every one had a letter 

 of mart that bare sayles in the Ocean," Greene's Works, ed. Grosart, vol.v, 

 p. 197. The entire passage is repeated verbatim in Greene's Menaphon, 

 vol. vi, p. 77 f. of Grosart's ed. 



'^ Transactions New Shakspere Society, p. 245. 



