ave entertained the strongest animosity, was a young man of
twenty-eight, who was just then becoming known, and whose fame was to
increase somewhat in after years, namely, William Shakespeare. Greene
beseeches the three principal friends he still had, Marlowe, Nash, and
Peele, to cease writing plays; what is the good of it? others come, turn
to account what has been written before them, give never a thank-you for
it, and get the praise. Let them stop publishing and these new-comers,
among them this "upstart" Shakespeare, unable as they obviously are to
invent anything, will have their careers cut short. Be warned by my
fate, says Greene, and mind "those puppits ... that speake from our
mouths, those anticks garnisht in our colours. Is it not strange that I,
to whom they al have been beholding: is it not like that you to whome
they all have been beholding, shall (were ye in that case that I am now)
be both at once of them forsaken? Yes, trust them not, for there is an
upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his _Tigers heart
wrapt in a players hide_, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a
blanke verse as the best of you; and being an absolute _Joannes fac
totum_, is in his owne conceit the onely shake-scene in a countrie. O
that I might intreate your rare wits to be imployed in more profitable
courses: and let those apes imitate your past excellence and never more
acquaint them with your rare inventions."[120]

This savage abuse of young Shakespeare, who had probably mended at that
time more plays than we know, and more, surely, than he had personally
written, must not pass without the needful comment that his abuser was,
according to his own testimony, as ready, for a trifle, to make an
acquaintance and start a friendship as to turn a friend into a foe.
"Though," says he, "I knew how to get a friend, yet I had not the gift
or reason how to keepe a friend." He quarrelled, in fact, with most of
them, not excepting Nash and Marlowe, to whom he is now appealing
against Shakespeare; and his prefaces contain numerous attacks on the
writers of the time. It must be remembered, too, how bitter was the end
of poor Greene, how keenly he felt, he the boon companion _par
excellence_, finding himself "forsaken" in his need, and left alone in
the shoemaker's desolate room. It is curious to think that among the men
whose absence from his bedside he most resented was Shakespeare, and
that this want of a visit whetted