Im tired of scrolling down the thread from hell so Im posting this in a new one. We’ve been through all this before. Suffice to say very few have been convinced that ‘Shake-scene’ refers to anyone else besides Shakespeare, which is an indication of how convincing your arguments are. Greene addresses the section mentioning Shakes-scene ‘to my fellow Scholars about this City, will I direct these few ensuing lines’, and the title of the section is ‘To those Gentlemen his Quondam acquaintance, that spend their wits in making Plays’, so it is addressed to playwrights—not the general public—who would be expected to know which playwrights he references. The first playwright Greene addresses as ‘thou famous gracer of Tragedians’ an avowed atheist who has studied ‘pestilent Machiavellian policy’. It is almost universally recognized as referring to Marlowe, especially given Greene’s references to Machiavelli, mentioned several times in Marlowe’s plays. The second playwright Greene refers to Thomas Nashe as ‘young Juvenal, that biting Satirist,’ a ‘Sweet boy’ who co-wrote Comedy with Greene. He goes on the admonish him about the perils of attacking ‘Scholars vexed with sharp lines’, an obvious reference to Nashe’s feud with Gabriel Harvey. Greene puns on the third playwright’s name, George Peele: ‘And thou no less deserving than the other two, in some things rarer, in nothing inferior; driven (as myself) to extreme shifts, a little have I to say to thee: and were it not an idolatrous oath, I would swear by sweet S. George, thou art unworthy better hap, sith thou dependest on so mean a stay.’ I won’t bother to reproduce Greene’s rant against the upstart crow, the actor-turned-playwright, but his reference to ‘Shake-scene’ is an obvious pun on Shakespeare in the same vein as the others. If Alleyn were ever a playwright it is lost to history, so the speculation that he was ‘Shake-scene’ remains just that in the face of a lot of convincing evidence for Shakespeare. exclassics/groat/groat.htm
Posted on: Sun, 13 Jul 2014 17:08:24 +0000