Robert Greene Biography Quotes 4 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Robert Greene, born around 1558 and dead by 1592, is widely identified as an English author who worked across poetry, prose, and the stage. The precise details of his birth and family are uncertain, though tradition places his origins in East Anglia, and his own writings suggest a provincial upbringing before academic advancement. He studied at Cambridge, where he took his degrees and absorbed the rhetorical fashions of the day; later he was incorporated Master of Arts at Oxford, a mark of status that he brandished on his title pages. From his earliest publications, Greene presented himself as a university-trained wit entering the burgeoning London book market, one of the first English writers to rely primarily on his pen for income.

Forming a Literary Identity
Greene emerged amid the circle later called the University Wits, a loose cohort that included Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, George Peele, Thomas Lodge, and, a generation older, John Lyly. He adapted Lyly's fashionable euphuistic prose to his own ends and rapidly became a recognizable brand for stationers and readers. His prose romances, often framed as cautionary love tales and moral reflections, appeared in quick succession and established his command of narrative ornament. Pandosto: The Triumph of Time (1588), one of his most enduring fictions, later furnished Shakespeare with the plot of The Winter's Tale, an emblem of Greene's shaping presence on the drama that followed him. Other romances, such as Menaphon and the paired sequences Never Too Late and Francesco's Fortunes, refined his style and showcased his feel for alternating pastoral elegance with urban immediacy. Nashe prefaced Menaphon with a spirited epistle to the learned reader, a sign of the camaraderie and competition that bound Greene to his contemporaries.

Work for the Stage
By the late 1580s Greene was writing for the playhouses, and his dramatic voice proved as distinctive as his prose. The Honorable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay blended learned magic, romance, and farcical byplay in a structure that looks forward to the multi-threaded comedies of the 1590s. Alphonsus, King of Aragon and The History of Orlando Furioso brought pageantry and heroic extravagance to the public stage. He also turned to recent British history in The Scottish Historie of James IV. Collaboration was common, and A Looking Glass for London and England, written with Thomas Lodge, mixed biblical exemplum with satirical observation of the city's moral hazards. Through these works Greene helped define the tonal variety of the commercial theater just before its greatest expansion.

Print, Pamphlets, and the City
Greene knew the London streets and made them his subject. In a set of cony-catching pamphlets, he anatomized the tricks of cheats, pickpockets, and swindlers, imagining himself as a guide to readers eager to understand the city's shadow economies. Titles such as A Notable Discovery of Coosnage and its sequels promised practical knowledge while staging moral edification. The pamphlets show him negotiating a precarious livelihood in partnership with stationers and printers, supplying timely copy that balanced entertainment with admonition. They also reveal his instinct for persona: the urbane insider who both exposes vice and confesses entanglement with it.

Circles, Rivalries, and Addresses to Fellow Writers
Greene's pages are populated by his peers. He alluded to and competed with John Lyly's prose courtliness; he shared satiric energies with Thomas Nashe; he moved within the same theatrical world as George Peele and Christopher Marlowe. The pamphlet Greene's Groats-worth of Wit, published shortly after his death and associated with the stationer Henry Chettle, contains memorable addresses to fellow playwrights that readers have long connected with Marlowe, Peele, and Lodge. The tract also launches the famous complaint about an "upstart crow", commonly understood to refer to William Shakespeare, an early witness to Shakespeare's rapid ascent and a glimpse of frictions between academically credentialed authors and a newcomer making his name on the stage. Chettle, caught in the controversy, later issued a conciliatory note in his Kind-Harts Dreame, a sign that Greene's posthumous words had unsettled the community.

Confession, Persona, and the Self-Fashioning Author
Greene was as much a character as a writer, at least as he fashioned himself in print. In penitential tracts and prefaces he confessed to wasteful living and urged reform, shaping a narrative of sin and repentance that worked as moral theater and as marketing. He mentions a wife whom he had wronged and from whom he lived apart, a confession that adds a human dimension without dissolving into romance; he also claimed to have traveled abroad, although modern scholars are cautious about taking every boast literally. The voice is unmistakable: urbane, rueful, and performative. This composite persona made him legible to readers who valued both the sweetness of his style and the sour lessons it contained.

Final Years and Death
Greene died in London in 1592, by every report in straitened circumstances. His end quickly became a matter for pamphleteers. Gabriel Harvey, a learned adversary in contemporary polemic, relished the chance to describe Greene's death and debts, adding vivid details that later retellings repeated; yet Harvey's relish makes his testimony contentious. What is clear is that Greene died young, leaving behind unsettled accounts, a publisher's pipeline of copy, and friends and collaborators faced with the awkward business of shaping his reputation. The appearance that same year of Greene's Groats-worth of Wit and The Repentance of Robert Greene, Master of Arts, confirmed that even in death he spoke through print, admonishing the community in which he had hustled for space and income.

Reputation and Legacy
Greene's renown rests on three pillars: his role among the University Wits at the threshold of the great Elizabethan stage; his shaping of the city pamphlet and the English prose romance; and his durable impact on drama as a technician of swift, interlaced plots and lively characters. Shakespeare's later adaptation of Pandosto attests to Greene's narrative potency; the structure of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay points toward the comedies that would dominate the 1590s; and the cony-catching series helped fix a way of writing London that other authors extended. The people around him mattered to that legacy: Marlowe's audacity, Peele's fluency, Lyly's polish, Lodge's versatility, Nashe's sting, and Shakespeare's rising craft together compose the backdrop against which Greene's voice is heard. Even the adversarial energies of Gabriel Harvey and the uneasy interventions of Henry Chettle show how tightly social and professional networks could bind a writer's fortunes in the 1590s.

Assessment
Greene wrote fast, varied widely, and courted contradiction. He could moralize and mock, redress wrongs and rehearse them, flatter patrons and flay pretenders. The volatility that made his career precarious also made his art responsive to a rapidly evolving marketplace. For all the uncertainties of his biography, the printed record is abundant, and it locates him at the center of a pivotal moment in English letters. To read him is to witness the making of a professional author in England, working shoulder to shoulder with Marlowe, Peele, Lodge, Lyly, and Nashe, with Shakespeare emerging just behind them, and to see how the theater and the press together fashioned reputations that outlived the precarious lives from which they sprang.

Our collection contains 4 quotes who is written by Robert, under the main topics: Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Free Will & Fate - God.

Other people realated to Robert: Thomas Dekker (Dramatist), Nicholas Breton (Poet)