POETICKS

Greenes Groatsworth of Wit

Greenes Groatsworth of Wit (1592) was said to have been written by Robert Greene, but some scholars attribute it in part or entirely to Henry Chettle, writing from what he expected his readers to take as Greene’s point of view. It does not matter to my argument here who actually wrote the Groatsworth, however, because my argument is not that Greene identified the actor Shakespeare as the playwright Shakespeare in it, but that someone in 1593 did so.

For our purposes, the key passage in the Groatsworth letter is the following, two or three paragraphs into it:

Base minded men al three of you, if by my miserie ye be not warned : for unto none of you (like me) sought those burres to cleave : those Puppits (I meane) that  speake from our mouths, those Anticks garnisht in our colours. Is it not strange that I, to whom they al have beene beholding : is it not like that you, to whome they all have beene beholding, shall (were ye in that case that I am now) be both at once of them forsaken? Yes trust them not : for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you : and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrie.  O that I might intreate your rare wits to be imployed in more profitable courses: & let those Apes imitate your past excellence, and never more acquaint them with your admired inventions. I know the best husband of you all will never prove an Usurer, and the kindest of them / all will never proove a kinde nurse : yet whilst you may, seeke you better Maisters; for it is pittie men of such rare wits, should be subject to the pleasures of such rude groomes.”

The first commentators on this passage assumed that “Shake-scene” was Shakespeare, the known author of the line “O tygers heart wrapt in a Womans hyde,” which is parodied in the passage. It seemed obvious to them that the letter’s author was contemptuous of Shakespeare, a lowly actor, for taking up the writing of plays, something only university men were qualified to do. Some early commentators suspected a possible accusation of plagiary, too, because of the reference to the Crow’s being “beautified with our feathers.” But the Crow remained Shakespeare for them—and a playwright, if not necessarily a very ethical one. Once the Shakespere-rejectors came on the scene, though, everything changed. They could not concede that the Crow was intended to be Shakespeare, for—if true—it would pretty much scuttle the candidacy of Oxford, Marlowe, Bacon and most of the others put forward as The True Author. Oxford, for instance, almost certainly did not act on the public stage, nor would the Groatsworth narrator likely have dared insult a man of the highest rank like Oxford the way he insulted the Crow. Marlowe was not known to have acted, either. Worse for his candidacy, the Groatsworth-narrator treats him and the Crow as two different persons. Nor was Bacon an actor.

Hence, the Shakespere-rejectors have left hardly a word of the key passage of the Groatsworth letter uncontaminated with possible
secondary meanings that deflect the passage’s meaning every which way but sane. Even some Stratfordians have found idiosyncratic ways
to re-interpret the passage. Nonetheless, I continue to believe that the traditional reading, which I will be terming, “the Established Reading,” is, if not beyond reasonable doubt the only sound one, by far the most sound one.

The key to the passage, for the Established Reading, is the “tygers heart wrapt in a Players hyde” line, so I’ll begin with that. It is unquestionably a quotation , for the font used for it (changed above to italic) differs from the font used for the main text, and is used elsewhere in the Groatsworth for quotations, proper names, and foreign words and phrases. It is also pretty certainly a slightly altered line written by William Shakespeare, for the only work in which it appears whose author’s name is attached is Shakespeare’s 3 Henry VI, in the First Folio. And we are near-certain that versions of that play had been performed before 1592 (because, among other reasons, of Nashe’s 1592 reference to the great crowds being drawn by a play featuring Talbot, the hero of 1 Henry VI, which most scholars believe was written about the same time as 3 Henry VI, and Marlowe’s apparent knowledge by 1592 of Richard III, which scholars think would have been written after 3 Henry VI).

Against the proposition that William Shakespeare’s having written the line parodied makes him the Crow, numerous anti-Stratfordians have argued that the Crow could be a mere actor whose line that is because his is the part in which that line appears, not because he wrote it.  But the letter clearly states that it is with this line that the Crow believes himself equal to the best of Greene’s acquaintances (Marlowe, Nashe and Peele) at “bombasting out a blank verse.” Since these three are all playwrights who are not known to have acted, the only way the Crow could have used the line to compete with them is as a writer. QED?

No, because the Crow could have been an actor who improvised the tygers hart line and thought it the equal of anything Marlowe, Nashe or Peele could write. But the line is documented as Shakespeare’s (and rather more likely to have been Shakespeare’s considering its quality than that of some actor not known as a playwright). Moreover, the Crow as an actor improvising lines does not fit the context of the paragraph as a whole.

To see why, let’s consider the over-all purpose of the paragraph for its author. Surely, it is to warn his three play-making acquaintances that if any of them is “in that case that (he) is now,” the actors will forsake him as they are now forsaking the author. Now, we know from other sections of his letter that Greene, the author, is at his “last end” and left “desolate,” and “perishes now for want of comfort,” or claiming to be.

We also know that want was a chronic state with the real Greene and food, medicine and a roof over his head the only likely comfort that the Greene of the letter could be in want of in such a situation. So, the players are almost certainly forsaking him by not giving him money for those items. This, it stands to reason, they are doing in one, or a combination, of the following ways: (1) by turning down a play of hist like; (2) by refusing him an advance on a play he has proposed to write for them; (3) by refusing to give him extra money ford already sold them; (4) by refusing to find him some literary job like fixing a scene he could make a little cash from.  According to the author, they will do the same to Marlowe, Nashe or Peele if he is ever in Greene’s dire straits. To establish this as strongly as he can, the letter’s author presents three closely related arguments, saying:

(1.)    They have forsaken me; therefore, they will forsake you. (“Is it not strange that I, to whom they al have beene beholding : is it not like that you, to whome they all have beene beholding, shall [were ye in that case that I am now] be both at once of them forsaken?”)

(2.)    They held me in higher esteem than they hold you but nonetheless are forsaking me; therefore, they are even more likely to forsake you. (“if by my miserie ye be not warned : for unto none of you (like me) sought those burres to cleave . . .”)

(3.)    With one of them writing material he thinks as good as yours,        they have all the less reason to feel they have to treat you kindly; that is, if one of you ends up in my situation, the actors’ having a highly confident in-house playwright, with at least one hit to his credit, will keep them from feeling dependent enough on you to bail you out—even if the Crow is not a harbinger of a day when actors will get all their material from actor/play-makers. (“Yes trust them not : for there is an upstart Crow [who] supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse [or make plays] as the best of you . . .”) Can anyone believe the Groatsworth-author would climax a deathbed warning with, “Trust actors not, for one of them is now hamming up one of your lines,” or even, “Trust actors not, for one of them is now adding one of his own lines to one of your plays?” How would an actor’s hamming it up or padding his part demonstrate significant treachery? How could such trivial misdeeds devastatingly make the Groatsworth author’s point that the actors will forsake any of Greene’s friends (but wait to do so till he is dying?!), especially financially?

Have I now made my case? Not entirely, for—as some including non-anti-Stratfordian Gary Kosinsky and Oxfordian Mark Alexander have argued—the line could have been quoted only to describe the Crow as having a tygers hart. But why would the Groatsworth-narrator describe the Crow with a line of blank verse, then speak derisively of the Crow’s thinking he can work up blank verse as well as anyone in a locution that certainly makes it sound like the line is being used as an example of the kind of blank verse the Crow is responsible for? Could the Groatsworth-narrator have been unaware of how the line sounded, and left it that way if he truly didn’t intend it to have its most obvious meaning? Surely if he wanted only to characterize the Crow as being cruel-hearted, he would have written something along the lines of, “There is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, and possessing a tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, who supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you.” That tells the reader the Crow has a tygers hart without making the reader wrongly think that it is the line about the tygers hart that belongs to  the Crow.

Worse, what would having the cruel heart of a tiger, but not the line about it  have to do with being conceited, improvising lines, or whatever else the Crow is to be considered guilty of doing? As description, the line is a digression; as a sample of the Crow’s abilities, it makes an important point (with a gratuitous, not-too-relevant insult thrown in). In short, the passage works best, by far, if we consider the line not only to describe the Crow but to represent the kind of line he thinks makes him able to compete with the best playwrights around.

Mark Alexander has one problem with this interpretation, however.  For him, it would mean that the Groatsworth-narrator, who is obviously contemptuous of the Crow, was belittling the Crow for thinking his tygers hart line was a good one! He (and others) want to know how the Groatsworth-narrator could plausibly have thought that. The line “conveys dignity, beauty, and power,” says Alexander at his website. “It shows a command of language and imagery. Greene (or Greene’s stand-in, I’m sure Alexander would agree) could not have been ignorant of these facts.” Ergo, if Greene or whoever wrote the Groatsworth considered the Crow to have written the line, he would not have sneered at him for presuming on the basis of it to be first-rate at making up blank verse (as either an improvising actor or as a playwright). But who is Alexander to tell us what the author of the Groatsworth may have thought or said of the line, particularly if the author deemed the line’s originator a detestable, uneducated actor?

Unless . . . ? What about the possibility that the Groatsworth-narrator considered the tiger’s heart line a plagiary? In general, those who consider the Crow a plagiarist quote only the Groatsworth’s reference to the Crow as “beautified with our feathers,” neglecting to quote its
comparisons of actors to “Puppits” whom playwrights supply with words, and “Anticks” dependent, like the Crow, on others for their color, which pretty decidedly indicate that the feathers figure is merely one more jibe at the Crow’s station in life as a petty actor, dependent on his betters for whatever success he has, not an attempt to expose him as a plagiarist.

Eager to latch onto this way of denigrating the Crow, whom she accepts as Shakespeare of Stratford but not as The Author, Diana Price goes outside the Groatsworth to a little-known pamphlet called Vertues Common-wealth (1603), by a writer named Henry Crosse that scholars seem to know little or nothing about, even whether or not he was a real person. Price seems to think his work is evidence that Shakespeare was a plagiarist, but no playwright. To back her claim, she provides the following strongly Groatsworth-influenced quotation from Crosse:

“He that can but bombast out a blank verse, and make both the ends jump together in a rhyme, is forthwith a poet laureate, challenging the garland of bays, and in one slavering discourse or other, hang out the badge of his folly. Oh how weak and shallow much of their poetry is, for having no sooner laid the subject and ground of their matter, and in the Exordium moved attention, but over a verse or two run upon rocks and shelves, carrying their readers into a maze, now up, then down, one verse shorter than another by a foot, like an unskillful Pilot, never comes night the intended harbor: in so much that oftentimes they stick so fast in mud, they lose their wits ere they can get out, either like Chirillus, writing verse not worth the reading, or Battillus, arrogating to themselves, the well deserving labors of other ingenious spirits. Far from the decorum of Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, etc., or our honorable modern Poets, who are no whit to be touched with this, but reverent esteemed, and liberally rewarded.”

According to Price, “a ‘Battillus’ was an agent for writers who did not wish to see their own names in print.” That, plus the reference by Crosse to “He that can bombast out a blank verse” makes Shakespeare, the Crow, a front for some unknown noble. The main problem with this, aside from the fact that there is little reason to assume that the Groatsworth author’s use of “bombast out a blank verse” to describe Shakespeare means that anyone using that phrase again must also be referring to Shakespeare, is that Crosse clearly describes the bombaster, as had the Groatsworth-narrator, as a poet. Crosse’s “Battillus” is no front, either (nor was the original Battillus, a medicore poet said to have stolen lines from Virgil, not acted as a front), but a poet stealing from others. Moreover, Crosse is not describing a single poet but a class of incompetent poets who over-rate themselves. Their work fails to scan and is muddled–where is the work accepted as Shakespeare’s that does that more than rarely?

Price provides a strained reading of Jonson’s hostile poem, “On Poet- Ape,” to show that Crosse was not the only one of his times making veiled references to Shakespeare’s plagiary. (Funny how quick Shakespeare-rejectors are to accept documents unfavorably describing someone as applying to Shakespeare, even when their subject is left unnamed, but won’t go near one that favorably describes him by name.) But the poem is much too general to more than guess who Jonson was aiming at. Besides, Jonson referred to the only Shakespeare associated with the river Avon who was known to have been a friend of Heminges and Condell in terms of the warmest friendship. At any rate, the poem ends, “Fool, as if half eyes will not know a fleece/ From locks of wool, or shreds from a whole piece,” which—again—makes the plagiarist a writer, however unoriginal, for he is using shreds of others’ work, not whole works. The Crow would remain a playwright, which is all I’m trying to show.

There is better possible confirmation of the Crow-as-plagiarist thesis when, later in the letter, the Groatsworth-narrator begs his friends to boycott the actors, “and let those Apes imitate your past excellence, and never more acquaint them with your admired inventions.” This doesn’t hold up for me. The word “imitate” here almost certainly means simply “make a representation of, reproduce,” not plagiarize, for it is applied to actors, and actors (and apes) are trivial averbal mimicks, not plagiarists. More important, if the Groatsworth-narrator wanted to accuse the Crow of plagiarizing, why would he not have done so directly; and why would he not have accused him alone, rather than “those Apes,” not all of whom could have been plagiarizing him?

One answer to this, suggested by Oxfordian Jerry Downs, is that the Groatsworth-narrator wanted to avoid a libel suit. Hence, he not only did not name the Crow, but made his libel general rather than specific.  But he had not previously named the Crow, so would have been fairly safe from that risk. Moreover, that he accused one of the playwrights he addressed of atheism in another part of his letter I’ll later touch on indicates that fear of (much less drastically) libeling the Crow, a mere player, could not likely have been a pressing motive of his.  Even if we accept the Groatsworth-narrator to have been accusing the Crow of plagiary, he can’t have thought he’d stolen the tygers hart line, for that is his, the Crow’s, line, not someone else’s.  Moreover, the Crow deems it evidence he can equal the best of Greene’s friends in fashioning (bumbasting out) blank verse lines. It’s not likely in such a case that the Crow would think that the line wasn’t his own work.

No further discussion would be necessary if it weren’t that an Oxfordian named Jonathon Dixon has found a meaning in the Oxford English Dictionary for “suppose” that was in use in Shakespeare’s time: “pretend.” This, according to Jerry Downs, “clearly enables a different reading from the modern tradition — Trust them not; because there is an upstart player who pretends he is able to write blank verse with the best of you.” The player could be Shakespeare (and Downs accepts that he was). Of course, the passage would really be saying, “Trust them not, because there is an upstart player who, with his tygers hart, pretends he is able to write blank verse with the best of you.”  How having a tygers hart has any more to do with pretending to be a writer than it would have with bragging, and/or hamming up and/or padding a part beats me.

Nor can I make sense of a reasonably good writer like whoever wrote the Groatsworth’s not writing straight out, “There is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his stolen tygers hart wrapt in a players hyde, pretends he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you.” Why use “supposes” if the Groatsworth-narrator wanted the word to mean “pretends?” The OED has over a dozen entries for “suppose” that all define it as “take as true” or “believe” or the like, and only one entry, the thirteenth, defining it as  pretend.” “Pretend” is also an obsolete meaning of the word, which suggests it was never a very popular one. No one, including Downs, has come up with an instance of an Elizabethan writer’s using “suppose” to mean “pretend.” Shakespeare, for instance, never used it that way.

Moreover, the Dixon reading makes the passage less rhetorically sophisticated than the Established Reading when we consider the relation of the Crow’s “supposing” himself a fine writer of blank verse to his later being “in his conceit” a terrific “Shake-scene.” Taking “supposes” to mean “pretends,” we have an accusation of the Crow as (a), devious, and (b), conceited, whereas taking it to mean “believes to be the case,” we have the Crow as (a), conceited in one way, and (b), conceited in a second related way, to result in a fairly neat parallelism.

The problem of Greene, or someone acting as Greene, climaxing a rant against actors who have forsaken a dying man with a description of an actor doing something trivially dishonest and/or foolish (like pretending to be a writer of some sort) remains, as well. What it comes down to, finally, is that my common sense, straightforward reading of the passage, using “supposes” as “takes as true,” its normal meaning then and now, is unproblematic and makes perfect sense in the context: the Crow’s line about the tygers hart makes him think himself a great writer. It fits in well with all the other evidence, hard evidence, that the documented author of the line, Shakespeare, was an actor, too. The Dixon/Downs reading, on the other hand, teems with problems and fits only awkwardly in with a speculative authorship theory unsupported by any kind of hard evidence.

To solidify the identification of the Crow as Shakespeare, the documented author of the tygers hart line—indeed, almost to prove it by itself—is the Groatsworth-narrator’s mocking the Crow with the descriptive noun, “Shake-scene,” an obvious pun on “Shakespeare.”  Those Shakespeare-rejectors anxious to keep the Crow and Shakespeare separate can only protest that this term was used by chance, meant no more than “wonderfully exciting actor” or the like, and had nothing to do with Shakespeare. But there is no evidence that it was a term in general use circa 1593 and therefore likely to have been used by chance. There is no evidence, in fact, that anyone ever used it but the Groatsworth-narrator, this once—until Shakespearean scholars began quoting the Groatsworth over a hundred years later. In fact, the awkwardness of the word, “Shake-scene,” is further evidence that the Groatsworth-narrator did not use it merely to mean “wonderful actor,” with no intention of using it to allude to Shakespeare, as some have argued. Why? Because the Groatsworth-narrator had other much less awkward words for “wonderful actor” at his disposal (e.g.., “Roscius,” the name of an actor famed in antiquity) if all he wanted to do was suggest the conceit of the Crow as an actor. Why use a nonce-word like “Shake-scene” whose meaning is so unclear instead?

Furthermore, puns on people’s names were common then. Greene himself referred in an earlier pamphlet to Marlowe as “Merlin” (and if Greene didn’t write the letter to three playwrights, whoever did would certainly have wanted to sound like Greene). In short, “Shake-scene” had to be the Groatsworth-narrator’s way of emphasizing that the Crow was Shakespeare.

Other Candidates for the Role of the Crow

The only remaining obstacle my case must face is the possibility that an equally plausible case can be made for some other literary or theatrical figure of the time’s being the Crow. Needless to say, the Shakespeare-rejectors have put forward more than a few other candidates for the role. Only four of them, however, are not ridiculously unlikely. One—advanced by Oxfordian Winifred Frazer—is Will Kempe. He was multi-talented as an actor, clown, acrobat, musician, dancer, and even author—a regular Johannes fac totum (Jack of all trades). Frazer notes that in 1588 Kemp succeeded Richard Tarlton as the lead in a play called The Crow Sits Upon The Wall, which was popular enough to be published in 1592, a little before the Groatsworth came out. That would make Kemp, taking over a role formerly played by a famous actor, a sort of “upstart Crow.” Moreover, he was known to extemporize lines to “improve” his parts. But there is no record (I know of) of any play he was said to have authored, much less anything that would have aroused the deathbed jealousy of Greene (as actual person or fictional character), and one would be hard-pressed to find a way to connect him in any way to the tiger’s heart line. Nor does the “Shake-scene” pun work for him. In short, he lacked the occupation, reputation and name to be the Crow.

A second candidate is the actor Edward Alleyn, whom Oxfordian Stephanie Hughes puts forward, following A. D. Wraight, an advocate of Christopher Marlowe as the Bard. Hughes, like Wraight, claims that the Groatsworth is a coherent whole, and that the writer of the letter
should be taken as the character Roberto, the hero of the principal story in the Groatsworth, and the Crow as the actor in that story who talks Roberto into becoming a playwright (identified rather tenuously as Alleyn). Somehow all this leads to Alleyn (a sometime money-lender), as the Crow, refusing to lend Greene money.

But there is no warrant for taking the Groatsworth as a coherent whole. The pamphlet clearly consists, in order, of (1) the tale of Roberto in the third-person; (2) the letter to three playwrights in the first-person; (3) a version of the ant and grasshopper fable in the third-person; and (4) a letter,supposedly by Greene, to his wife in the first person. The four are not narratively-interconnected (except for such pedestrian transitional passages between them as the one between the first letter and the fable: “Now to all men I bid farewel in like sort, with this conceited Fable of that olde Comedian Aesop”) although the first three are thematically related, all having to do with repentance, poverty, and the importance of living a virtuous life, and the fourth is similarly from its author’s deathbed. In short, the pamphlet seems clearly a collection of miscellaneous texts such as Greene, when he died, might have left (separately or “organized” by an editor) in the possession of a bookseller (as Chettle, the editor of the Groatsworth) says happened).

As for the Player in the Roberto story, he lives in a storyland (however rooted parts of it may be in Greene’s life), the Crow in what’s really happening now. The two have nothing in common except main occupation (and the fact that both are characterized as boastful, although the Player in the Roberto story is less bitterly attacked for it).

And they differ from one another significantly. For one thing, the Player, who appears in Roberto’s adventures only briefly, does not mistreat Roberto; indeed, he befriends him by giving him a way to earn much-needed money. The Crow, on the other hand, is one of the actors forsaking Greene, and instrumental in making it difficult for Greene to procure much-needed money. And while the Player used to write plays but no longer does, the Crow is an upstart in the field, which suggests he is only now beginning his career as a writer of plays. Moreover, if the Groatsworth-narrator wanted us to take the Crow as the Player, he need only have continued his Roberto story for a page or two more, and told of Roberto’s last days, and had him warn his play-writing friends.  As the Groatsworth-narrator did that, he could have brought back the Player, and insulted him as the Crow. For all these reasons, it seems to me unnecessary to go outside the letter to three playwrights for help in determining the identity of the Crow.

As for the Wraight idea that the Groatsworth-narrator’s central concern in the upstart Crow passage is usury, and that he was somehow accusing the Crow of betraying him as a usurer—refusing to give him a loan, I take it—there is nothing whatever in the one line concerned with the Crow to indicate that usury is on the author’s mind at that point.

The subject comes up only once in the letter, when the author writes “I know the best husband of you all will never prove an Usurer, and the kindest of them / all will never proove a kinde nurse.” So far as I know, no advocate of the usury charge, which includes Unknown-
Aristocratian Diana Price (who takes the Crow as Shakespeare, not Alleyne, but wants him a usurer, not a playwright), has made any attempt to show why the author is not obviously merely making a comparison; certainly, none ever says why the actors’ being usurers (and it is actors, plural, who are usurers, not just the Crow) does not by the same reasoning make Marlowe, Peele and Nashe nurses. But Price goes back to Vertue’s Common-wealth in an attempt to support her claim, quoting the following passages (plagiarized from the
Groatsworth):

. . . these copper-lace gentlemen [who] grow rich, purchase lands by adulterous plays, and not [a] few of them usurers and extortioners which they exhaust out of the purses of their haunters so they are puffed up in such pride as self-love as they envy their equals and scorn their inferiors.

. . . it were further to be wished, that those admired wits of this age, Tragedians, and Comedians, that garnish Theaters with their inventions, would spend their wits in more profitable studies, and leave off to maintain those Anticks, and Puppets, that speak out of their mouths: for it is pity such noble gifts, should be so basely employed, as to prostitute their ingenious labors to enrich such buckram gentlemen.

Price splices the two passages together to claim that the “copper-lace gentlemen” of the first one, some of whom are described as usurers, are the same as the “Anticks, and Puppets” of the second; that makes actors in general, and the Crow in particular, usurers. But why should one can take a plagiarized passage published eleven years after the Groatsworth as reliable evidence of much of anything? Who could know to whom Crosse may have been referring, if to anyone?

Furthermore, it is clear that the second passage is referring to all actors, and all actors cannot be reasonably thought the same as the “copper-lace gentlemen” who deal in the “adulterous” plays of the first passage, which had to include non-actors (and, literary history tells us, most certainly did), just as the class, actors of 1603, could not have included no one but “copper-laced gentlemen.” It is ever-so-slightly possible that Crosse did, sloppily, think of some actors as dealers in plays, which would mean he may have also considered those actors who dealt in adulterous plays among those dealers in adulterous plays who were also usurers and extortioners. But it’s a stretch, and even if some actors were usurers and dealers in plays, it does not follow that the Groatsworth-narrator said the Crow was. There remains nothing in the single line in the Groatsworth directly about the Crow that has anything to do with his being a usurer or play-dealer (or extortioner).

Aside from all that, there is no evidence, to get back to Alleyn, that he wrote the tyger’s hart line, nor is there much evidence that Alleyn ever wrote plays, as I have established that the Crow did, and might consequently have endangered the livelihood of the Groatsworth
author—just the following entry in Philip Henslowe’s account-book:

pd vnto my sonne E Alleyn at the Apoyntment of the company…for his Boocke of tambercam the 2 of octob(er) 1602 the some of xxxx (shillings).

But we know that Alleyn bought many plays by others, making them “his,” because there is a 1589 deed of sale documenting his purchase of theatrical paraphernalia, including “play books.” Moreover, according to W.W. Greg, in his The Henslowe Papers (p.151), “Tamar Cam originally belonged to Strange’s men, and the second part was performed by them as a new play 28 Apr. 1592.” This Greg believes “was written as a rival to Tamburlain, which belonged to the Admiral’s men. Tamar Cam appears, however, to have belonged not to the company, but to Alleyn, and he brought it with him when he rejoined the Admiral’s men, probably in 1594. These revived it as a new play, acting the first part 6 May and the second 11 June 1596.

Finally, 2 Oct 1602, the company bought the ‘Boocke’ of Alleyn for £2. This was the usual payment for an old play, and therefore probably included only Pt. I, though this is not specified.” Greg goes on to speak of a “…revival for which doubtless the company purchased the ‘Boocke’ in 1602″. This sounds awfully like Alleyn owned the rights to the play as opposed to wrote it. If he had written a play formidable enough to arouse the Groatsworth-narrator’s jealous contempt in the early 1590’s, one would expect him to have written others—one of
which ought to be extant. None is. On top of all that, the Shake-scene pun does not apply to him (as a pun) which, for me, is enough by itself to rule him out.

The third of the four top candidates is, of all people, Ben Jonson.  Oxfordian Nina Green points out that in 1592, “Jonson, at 20, was in all likelihood an actor with burgeoning aspirations as a writer. His arrogance, his own considerable opinion of his talents, and his lack of charity toward other writers are amply attested to in his own words as recorded by William Drummond of Hawthornden. Drummond also commented on the excessive fondness for drink which could well have made Jonson one of the fairweather tavern companions of whom the
Groatsworth-narrator complains.  ”

But many of Jonson’s feuds have been reported to us, and there’s no indication in the records that he so much as knew Greene in 1592. Certainly he never fired off any comeback to anything Greene supposedly said about him, as he did to other attacks on him. He also had nothing to do with the tyger’s hart line, that we know of—and Jonson surely seems the type who would have taken credit for so good a line had it been his. Besides, if he had been responsible for the line in 1592 or earlier, and for the play it was in, his having taken so long to become a well-regarded playwright would be hard to account for. Nor is his candidacy helped any more than Alleyn’s or Kempe’s by the reference to a “Shake-scene.” There thus seems little reason to accept him as the Crow.

Then, there is Oxford, in his guise as actor/playwright, Will Shakespeare. I shouldn’t have called him not ridiculously unlikely to have been the Crow. First of all, how could the Groatsworth-narrator, a commoner, have addressed him so contemptuously if he were? More
to the point, how could the Groatsworth-narrator have viewed a man near 40 of Oxford’s educational background and family (which included an uncle who was a well-known author), with a fair amount of lyric poetry and, presumably, quite a few plays behind him, as an
“upstart” of any kind?

I should insert here that some Oxfordians point to the Groatsworth-narrator’s use of the word “upstart” to refute Shakespeare’s being the Crow for one of the reasons I consider it to refute Oxford’s having been the Crow: that by 1591 or 1592, when the Groatsworth would have been written, Shakespeare would have been already prominent in London theatre—and therefore not an upstart. But Shakespeare was not all that prominent by then. No work had yet been published under his name, and only one of the Henry VI plays of all that he eventually wrote (if that) had been mentioned in any records by then (that we have). Nor does Shakespeare himself show up as an actor or writer in any of the documents to that date that have come down to us. Most scholars believe he had written only five or six plays by then, and it is likely that they had been put on with no author’s name attached to them. Some may even have been collaborations. It seems near-certain that Shakespeare in 1592 was just coming into his own as a playwright after several years of obscurity as a minor actor, during which he was probably also for a time a play-doctor, then apprentice playwright.

There is no reason to think the Groatsworth-narrator would have known much, if anything, about him until the early nineties when the sudden great success of 1 Henry VI began to make his name. Finally, the adjective, “upstart,” occurs in a sentence that goes on not to speak of such ways of being an upstart as having recently gained wealth or status but only of having begun writing blank verse. In any case, the Groatsworth-narrator’s use of the word, “upstart,” is more a point in favor of Shakespeare’s being the Crow than anyone else’s since it is much more likely that Greene, a double M.A. professional playwright, or someone writing out of that persona, would have described a mere actor, with no university background, whom he has just become aware of as a rival author, with the adjective, “upstart,” than he would anyone else then on the scene, particularly a noble coming from a literary family who had been writing poetry for over a decade—and possibly plays, too. Or someone like Edward Alleyn who had become a manager of, and virtual heir apparent to, a highly lucrative theatrical business—but remained a mere actor.

As for Oxford, to get back to him, perhaps the biggest thing against his having been the Crow is (as I’ve previously written) the absurdity of a noble’s acting on the public stage without anyone’s ever finding out (either by recognizing the performer as Oxford while Oxford was
onstage, or recognizing Oxford somewhere else as the performer) and noting it somewhere. Nor, to repeat anothe rof my observations, does it make any sense for Oxford to have sought to keep people from knowing he was an author through the use of a pseudonym, and gotten up on the public stage as an actor, using that very same pseudonym!

All sorts of other questions arise, like who was the second actor calling himself Shakespeare and being recorded as such on legal documents after Oxford died: where’d he come from, and what happened to him? To be unscholarly about it, the Oxford-as-Crow hypothesis is tangledly nuts to be taken seriously. We are left, then, with the actor/playwright William Shakespeare as the Crow. This is supported, in my view, by the testimony of Henry Chettle, which I discuss in another essay.

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