Career
Other info : Bibliography
Greene is thought to have attended the free grammar school at Norwich, although this cannot be confirmed as enrolment documents for the relevant years are lost.[1] Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, provided scholarships for students from the Norwich grammar school, and for this reason Greene's matriculation as a sizar at St John's College, Cambridge, has been considered 'strange'.[4][1][5] A reason offered for Greene's enrolment at St John's is that some of the gentry of South Yorkshire attended St John's, and among the dedicatees of, or authors of commendatory verses for, Greene's books were members of the Darcy, Portington, Lee, Stapleton and Rogers families, all centered at Snaith, Yorkshire; according to Richardson, the Robert Greene from Norwich who was an innkeeper may have been an immigrant from Yorkshire connected to 'a large family of Greenes' who lived in the parish of Snaith, and may actually have left Norwich to reside at Snaith from 1571 to 1577.[6][1]
There is no record of Greene's having taken part in the dramatic productions at Cambridge in 1579 and 1580, although 18 of his classmates and Fellows of the Cambridge colleges acted in Hymenaeus, and 46 in Richardus Tertius.[7][8] His academic performance as an undergraduate at Cambridge was mediocre; on 22 January 1580 he took his BA, graduating 38th out of 41 students in his college, and 115th out of the total university graduating class that year of 205 students.[1][9] He 'apparently transferred to Clare College for his 1583 MA', where he placed 5th out of 12 students in his college, and 29th of the 129 students at the university.[1][9][10] It was 'rare for a student to migrate to another college (as Greene did) after he had received the baccalaureate',[11] and no record of Greene's transfer to Clare College has been discovered, nor does his name appear in the Clare Hall Buttery Book for 1580-84.[9] Greene's claim to association with Clare College is found in the second part of Mamillia, which was not published until 1593, after Greene's death, in which the dedicatory epistle to Robert Lee and Roger Portington is signed 'Robert Greene. From my Studie in Clarehall the vii. Of Julie'.[1][12]
According to Newcomb, 'Other events of [Greene's] youth must be derived from autobiographical remarks that may not be reliable'.[1] In The Repentance of Robert Greene, written in the first person, Greene claimed to have travelled to Italy and Spain; however, no evidence of Greene's continental trip has been found, 'or -- unless we take merely his word for it -- that he ever made the trip at all'.[9] Further doubt is cast on Greene's continental journey by Norbert Bolz, who after undertaking a computer analysis of the vocabulary of The Repentance, concluded that "The Repentance of Robert Greene was in fact not written by Robert Greene".[13]
In The Repentance Greene claimed to have married a gentleman's daughter,[14] whom he abandoned after having had a child by her and spent her dowry, after which she went to Lincolnshire, and he to London.[1] However "[E]xtensive searches of London and Norwich records by successive biographers have failed finally to locate the record of Greene's marriage".[15]
After his move to London Greene published over twenty-five works in prose in a variety of genres, becoming 'England's first celebrity author'.[1]
In 1588 he was granted an MA from Oxford University, 'almost certainly a courtesy degree'.[1] Thereafter the title pages of some of his published works bore the phrase Utruisq. Academiae in Artibus Magister’,'Master of Arts in both Universities'.[1]
Greene died 3 September 1592.[16][17] His death and burial were announced by Gabriel Harvey in a letter to Christopher Bird of Saffron Walden dated 5 September, first published as a 'butterfly pamphlet' about 8 September, and later expanded as Four Letters and Certain Sonnets, entered in the Stationers' Register on 4 December 1592.[18][19] Harvey attributed Greene's demise to 'a surfeit of pickle herring and Rhenish wine',[20] and claimed he had been buried in 'the new churchyard near Bedlam' on 4 September.[1] No record of Greene's burial has been found.
According to The Repentance of Robert Greene, Greene is alleged to have written Groatsworth during the month prior to his death, including in it a letter to his wife asking her to forgive him and stating that he was sending their son to her. No record of Greene's son by his wife has been found; however in Four Letters Gabriel Harvey claimed that Greene kept a mistress, the sister of the criminal Cutting Ball hanged at Tyburn. Harvey described her as 'a sorry ragged quean of whom [Greene] had his base son Infortunatus Greene'. According to Newcomb, a Fortunatus Greene was buried at Shoreditch on 12 August 1593, 'whose folk-tale name might lie behind Harvey's jest'.[1]
