Robert Greene (dramatist)
Robert Greene (1558–1592) was an English author popular in his day, and now best known for a posthumous pamphlet attributed to him, Greene's Groats-Worth of Witte, bought with a million of Repentance, widely believed to contain an attack on William Shakespeare. Greene was a popular Elizabethan dramatist and pamphleteer known for his negative critiques of his colleagues. He is said to have been born in Norwich. He attended Cambridge where he received a BA in 1580, and an M.A. in 1583 before moving to London, where he arguably became the first professional author in England. He was prolific and published in many genres including romances, plays and autobiography.
Woodcut of Greene "suted in deaths livery", from John Dickenson's Greene in conceipt (1598)
Title page of Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594 edition)
Greene's Groats-Worth of Wit
Greenes, Groats-worth of Witte, bought with a million of Repentance (1592) is a tract published as the work of the Elizabethan author Robert Greene.
The three university-educated playwrights addressed by Greene were all notorious for their disreputable lifestyles: a polemical woodcut deriding Thomas Nashe as a jailbird in chains, from Richard Lichfield's The Trimming of Thomas Nashe, Gentleman (1597).