Pretty much all that relates to the gambols of sportive Kemp in the
foregoing pages is a mere transcription from the “Camden Society
Papers.”
Our prime object is to establish Kemp’s eligibility as claimant for
Greene’s censure, before alluded to. We are content to advance the
claim of another if found more decisive. We would elect to name
Robert Wilson, senior, an old enemy, doubtless, of Robert Greene, if
we did not think that Kemp has the better claim to that distinction.
According to Collier, Wilson was not only an excellent performer, but
also a talented dramatist, especially renowned for his ready repartee.
Some writers affirm that the authors of the dramas “Faire Emm” and
“Martin Marsixtus” were one and the same person, and that this person
was Robert Wilson, senior, author of “Three Ladies of London” and
“Three Lords and Ladies of London,” the first published in 1584, and
the other in 1590. “Faire Emm” and “Martin Marsixtus” having been
posthumously printed, Greene was severe on the author of the former
for his blasphemous introduction of quotations from the Bible into his
love passages. “We know that the author attacked Greene’s own works
in return and called them lascivious.” He had not read the works, but,
then, an anonymous writer may not very scrupulously confine himself to
the truth. “Loth I was to display myself to the world but for that I
hope to dance under a mask and bluster out like the wind, which, though
every man heareth yet none can in sight descrie.” “I must answer in
print what they have offered on the stage” are the words of Greene.
Robert Wilson may be advanced as claimant for Greene’s reproof by some
persons who are of the opinion that “upstart crow” was both actor and
playwright. Supposition says Kemp also wrote pamphlets and plays,
although at this time he had not given his first and only work to the
press. It matters little at whom he aimed, Kemp or Wilson, so long as
Shakespere was not the object of the aimer. In the Parish Register of
St. Giles, Cripplegate, we read, “Buried, Robert Wilson, yeoman, a
player, 20 Nov., 1600.”
These facts and concurring events in the life of William Kemp
convince us that Shakspere was not, and Kemp very probably was, the
person at whom Greene leveled his satire by bearing witness to his
(Kemp’s) extemporizing power and his haughty and insolent demeanor in
introducing improvisions and interpolations of his “own wit into poet’s
plays.”
From the foregoing, it is evident that, at the time the letter was
written, William Kemp enjoyed an unequaled and wide spread notoriety
and transient fame, extending not only throughout England, but into
foreign countries as well.
And further, by reason of his great prominence, in a calling which
Greene loathed, and despised, he was brought easily within the range of
the latter’s contemptuous designation, of “upstart crow.”
III
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