a poor shoemaker near Dowgate, deserted by all except his compassionate hostess (Mrs Isam) and two women--one of them the sister of a notorious thief named "Cutting Ball," and the mother of his illegitimate son, Fortunatus Greene--he died on the 3rd of September 1592. Shortly before his death he wrote under a bond for L10 which he had given to the good shoemaker, the following words addressed to his long-forsaken wife: "Doll, I charge thee, by the loue of our youth and by my soules rest, that thou wilte see this man paide; for if hee and his wife had not succoured me, I had died in the streetes.--Robert Greene." _Four Letters and Certain Sonnets_, Harvey's attack on Greene, appeared almost immediately after his death, as to the circumstances of which his relentless adversary had taken care to inform himself personally. Nashe took up the defence of his dead friend and ridiculed Harvey in _Strange News_ (1593); and the dispute continued for some years. But, before this, the dramatist Henry Chettle published a pamphlet from the hand of the unhappy man, entitled _Greene's Groat's-worth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance_ (1592), containing the story of Roberto, who may be regarded, for practical purposes, as representing Greene himself. This ill-starred production may almost be said to have done more to excite the resentment of posterity against Greene's name than all the errors for which he professed his repentance. For in it he exhorted to repentance three of his _quondam_ acquaintance. Of these three Marlowe was one--to whom and to whose creation of "that Atheist Tamberlaine" he had repeatedly alluded. The second was Peele, the third probably Nashe. But the passage addressed to Peele contained a transparent allusion to a fourth dramatist, who was an actor likewise, as "an vpstart crow beautified with our feathers, that with his _Tygres heart wrapt in a player's hyde_ supposes hee is as well able to bombast out a blanke-verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Iohannes-fac-totum, is in his owne conceyt the onely shake-scene in a countrey." The phrase italicized parodies a passage occurring in _The True Tragedie of Richard, Duke of York_, &c., and retained in Part III. of Henry VI. If Greene (as many eminent critics have thought) had a hand in _The True Tragedie_, he must here have intended a charge of plagiarism against Shakespeare. But while it seems more probable that (as the late R. Simpson suggested) the upstart crow beautified with the feathers of the three dramatists is a sneering description of the actor who declaimed their verse, the _animus_ of the whole attack (as explained by Dr Ingleby) is revealed in its concluding phrases. This "shake-scene," i.e. this _actor_ had ventured to intrude upon the domain of the regular staff of playwrights--their monopoly was in danger!