Reading Robert Greene

Robert Greene holds a significant place in our understanding of Elizabethan literature. This book offers the most rigorous attempt yet undertaken to determine the scope of the playwrights canon through analyses of Greenes verse style, vocabulary, rhyming habits, and the dramatists phraseology in his attested plays and in comparison to four plays that have long been on the margins of Greenes corpus: Locrine, Selimus, George a Greene, and A Knack to Know a Knave. The book defines the ranges for Greenes stylistic habits for the very first time and proceeds to identify parallels of thought, language, and overall dramaturgy that reveal a single authors creative consciousness. This volume also casts light on Greene as a more collaborative dramatist than has hitherto been acknowledged. Through emphasizing the immediate surroundings in which Greene was writing the flourishing of popular theatres in two compact areas of London, in which each theatre company and their dra-matists kept a close eye on what their competitors were producing Greene emerges as an influential playwright, whose restored oeuvre enables us to establish new ways in which his dramatic methods impacted other writers of the period, including Shakespeare.