isunderstood, while their reflections against other dramatists
and actors are supposed to have been directed against him. Past critics
have been utterly oblivious of the fact that Florio, Roydon, and Chapman
and others colluded for many years in active hostility to Shakespeare.

In publications issued between 1585 and 1592 Robert Greene vents his
displeasure against various dramatic writers whose plays had proved
more popular than his, as well as against the companies of actors, their
managers, and the theatre that favoured his rivals. The writers and
actor-managers whom he attacks have been variously identified by past
writers. Mr. Richard Simpson, one of the most acute, ingenious, and
painstaking pioneers in Shakespearean research, whose _School of
Shakespeare_ was issued after his death in 1878, supposed that all of
Greene's attacks in these years, including those in which his friend,
Thomas Nashe, collaborated with him, were directed against Shakespeare
and Marlowe. Since Mr. Simpson wrote, however, now over forty years ago,
some new light has been thrown upon the theatrical companies, and their
connection with the writers of the period with which he dealt, which
negatives many of his conclusions. While it is evident that Greene was
jealous of, and casts reflections upon, Marlowe, to whom he refers as
"Merlin" and "the athiest Tamburlaine," Mr. Fleay has since proved that
several of Greene's veiled reflections were directed against others. Mr.
Fleay's suggestion that Robert Wilson was the Roscius so frequently
referred to by Greene and Nashe is, however, based upon incorrect
inference, though he proves by several characteristic parallels, which
he adduces between lines in _The Three Ladies of London_, _The Three
Lords and Three Ladies_, and _Fair Em_,--the last of which is
satirically alluded to by Greene in his _Farewell to Folly_, in
1591,--that they were all three either written, or revised, by the same
hand. While his ascription of the composition of the first two of these
plays to Wilson is probably also correct, his assumption that Wilson was
a writer and an actor for Lord Strange's company in 1591 was due to lack
of collected and compiled records concerning the Elizabethan companies
of players at the time he wrote, which have since been made
available.[20]

There is nothing whatever known of Robert Wilson after 1583, when he is
mentioned, along with Tarleton, as being selected by Tilney, the Master
of the Re