Upon the question of the chronology of Greene's plays no editor can afford to be dogmatic. Yet so carefully have the varied spiritual forces of Greene's life been studied in connection with the manifest literary influences of his time, and so painstaking have been the deductions from those facts with which we are provided, that one feels safe in laying down, upon the researches of such scholars as Dyce, Fleay, Storojenko, Gayley and Collins,[6] an almost certain scheme of succession and chronology of Greene's extant dramas. A point of departure is provided by the theory of Collins, often vigorously insisted upon, that Greene did not begin to write plays until about 1590. In this belief Collins is joined by C. H. Hart,[7] who adduces the passage from Greene's _Farewell to Folly_, quoted two pages above, as a reason for thinking Greene took up playwriting near the end of his life. Against any such theory there are strong specific as well as important general objections. It would require that all of Greene's plays, in addition to half a dozen pamphlets, should have been written between the opening of 1591 and the time of Greene's death in 1592. In _A Groatsworth of Wit_ Greene all but certainly refers to himself as an "arch play-making poet," and in _The Repentance of Robert Greene_ he says, "I became an author of plays and a penner of love pamphlets." Certainly that total dissolution that follows the practices of his calling could not have taken place in two years, nor would one who thus joins the composition of plays and poems have waited until ten years after the licensing of his first tract in 1580 to write his first play. If _Never too Late_ and _A Groatsworth of Wit_ have any autobiographical value whatever those portions that treat of playwriting experience are worthy the most credence, and the theory that Greene should have taken up playwriting late is quite inconsistent with the purport of both of them.