Writing Robert Greene

Essays on England's First Notorious Professional Writer

Kirk Melnikoff, Edward Gieskes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754657019
• eBook ISBN: 9781134787739
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Robert Greene, contemporary of Shakespeare and Marlowe and member of the group of six known as the "University Wits," is the subject of this essay collection, the first to be dedicated solely to his work. Although in his short lifetime Greene published some three dozen prose works, composed at least five plays, and was one of the period's most recognized-even notorious-literary figures, his place within the canon of Renaissance writers has been marginal at best. Writing Robert Greene offers a reappraisal of Greene's career and of his contribution to Elizabethan culture. Rather than drawing lines between Greene's work for the pamphlet market and for the professional theatres, the essays in the volume imagine his writing on a continuum. Some essays trace the ways in which Greene's poetry and prose navigate differing cultural economies. Others consider how the full spectrum of his writing contributes to an emergent professional discourse about popular print and theatrical culture. The volume includes an annotated bibliography of recent scholarship on Greene and three valuable appendices (presenting apocrypha; edition information; and editions organized by year of publication).

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Introduction: Re-imagining Robert Greene
• 1 Robert Greene and the Theatrical Vocabulary of the Early 1590s
• 2 “That will I see, lead and ile follow thee”: Robert Greene and the Authority of Performance
• 3 Staging Professionalism in Greene’s James IV
• 4 From Homo Academicus to Poeta Publicus: Celebrity and Transversal Knowledge in Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c. 1589)
• 5 Robert Greene, “Author of Playes”
• 6 Forming Greene: Theorizing the Early Modern Author in the Groatsworth of Wit
• 7 A Looking Glass for Readers: Cheap Print and the Senses of Repentance
• 8 Robert Greene and the Uses of Time
• 9 Transplanting Lillies: Greene, Tyrants, and Tragical Comedies
• 10 Recent Studies in Robert Greene (1989–2006)
• Appendix A: Apocrypha
• Appendix B: Edition Information
• Appendix C: Editions Published by Year
• Index