His complaint was one of which the world of letters was to hear much more in after time, and which in fact is constantly renewed in our own day; it is the complaint of the novelist against the dramatist, claiming as his own incidents transferred by the playwright from readers to spectators. As novels proper were just beginning then in England, and as drama was also beginning to spread, Greene's protest is one of the first on record, and thousands were to follow it. Strange to say of all the men of whom he complains, the one he has picked out to hold up to disdain and to scorn, and towards whom in his dying days he seems to have entertained the strongest animosity, was a young man of twenty-eight, who was just then becoming known, and whose fame was to increase somewhat in after years, namely, William Shakespeare. Greene beseeches the three principal friends he still had, Marlowe, Nash, and Peele, to cease writing plays; what is the good of it? others come, turn to account what has been written before them, give never a thank-you for it, and get the praise. Let them stop publishing and these new-comers, among them this "upstart" Shakespeare, unable as they obviously are to invent anything, will have their careers cut short. Be warned by my fate, says Greene, and mind "those puppits ... that speake from our mouths, those anticks garnisht in our colours. Is it not strange that I, to whom they al have been beholding: is it not like that you to whome they all have been 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 _Tigers heart wrapt in a players hide_, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you; and being an absolute _Joannes 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: and let those apes imitate your past excellence and never more acquaint them with your rare inventions."[120]