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Robert Greene

Robert Greene: a biographical sketch This biography was originally published in . Ed. William Allan Neilson. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1911. p. 869-870, 855. Greene was much given to the mingling of autobiography with his fiction, and this has resulted in a much larger body of possibly true biographical details than we possess concerning most of his contemporaries. He was born in Norwich of a respectable family, probably about 1560; entered St. John's College, Cambridge, in 1575; graduated B.A. in 1578; travelled in Spain and Italy, and, by his own account, lived up to the proverbial reputation of the Italianate Englishman; returned to Cambridge and took his M.A. in 1581; and during the rest of his short life busied himself in the production of the very considerable mass of romances, tracts, songs, and plays which today give him his place in literature. About 1585 he married a Lincolnshire woman, who bore him a son, and whom he deserted after spending her portion. The annals of literature hardly bear the record of a more sordid career than that of this university-bred man of letters; and his death was only too fitting a close to it. He died in 1592 in the house of a poor shoemaker, to whom he gave a bond for ten pounds, leaving the following letter to his deserted wife: "Doll, I charge thee by the love of our youth and by my soul's rest that thou wilt see this man paid, for if he and his wife had not succoured me I had died in the streets, Robert Green." Following his own wish, the shoemaker's wife crowned his head with a garland of bay.

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