Review of Darren Freebury-Jones’s Reading Robert Greene: Recovering Shakespeare’s Rival

The first part of this book (Routledge, 2022) leads to chapter 5 and the subsequent chapters look back to it, so we begin there. Freebury-Jones believes that Robert Greene wrote Locrine (1591) unaided, Selimus (1591) with Thomas Lodge, and had no hand in two plays sometimes attributed to him, George a Greene (1591) and A Knack to Know a Knave (1592).[1] His conclusions are based on batteries of familiar stylometric tests that have established that, to give just two examples, Thomas Middleton was the author of The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607) and Pericles, Prince of Tyre (1609) was a collaboration between William Shakespeare and George Wilkins. To these he has added the N-Gram matches pioneered by Pervez Rizvi and his own observations about inventiveness, spectacular stage directions, and other factors.[2]

For those who do not know, Greene was a contemporary of Shakespeare’s who some claim was England’s first professional writer. His best-known works include five plays: Alphonsus, King of Aragon (1587), Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1589), James IV (1590), Orlando Furioso (1591), and A Looking-Glass for London and England (1589), the last co-authored with Thomas Lodge. There is an autobiography, The Repentance of Robert Greene (1592), but questions about its authenticity were raised by Norbert Bolz in 1979.[3] Greene wrote several pamphlets. Those especially well-known are about Conny-Catching (1591-2) and the infamous Greene’s Groats-worth of Witte, bought with a million of Repentance (1592). It is here…