vels, for the Queen's company. In an appended note I analyse
the literary evidence upon which Mr. Fleay associates Robert Wilson with
Strange's company in 1589-91.[21]

Robert Wilson must have been passe as an actor in 1589, if indeed he was
then living, while Strange's company was composed of younger and rising
men, all recently selected for their histrionic abilities from several
companies, amongst which, it appears evident, the Queen's company was
not then included, though it is likely that in 1591 some Queen's men
joined Strange's company. That Robert Wilson was not the Roscius
referred to by Greene and Nashe in 1589 and 1590 a further examination
of the evidence will fully verify.

The person indicated as Roscius by Nashe in his Address to Greene's
_Menaphon_ in 1589, and in Greene's _Never Too Late_ in 1590, was the
leading actor of a new company that was then gaining great reputation,
which, however, was largely due--according to Nashe--to the pre-eminent
excellence of this Roscius' acting. The pride and conceit of this actor
had risen to such a pitch, Nashe informs us in his _Anatomy of
Absurdity_ (1589), that he had the "temerity to encounter with those on
whose shoulders all arts do lean." This last is a plain reference to
George Peele, whom he had recently described in his _Menaphon_ "Address"
as "The Atlas of Poetry." In the following year Greene refers to the
same encounter in the first part of his _Never Too Late_. Pretending to
describe theatrical conditions in Rome, he again attacks the London
players and brings in Roscius--_who without doubt was Edward Alleyn_--as
contending with Tully, who is Peele. "Among whom," he writes, "in the
days of Tully, one Roscius grew to be of such exquisite perfection in
his faculty that _he offered to contend with the orators of that time in
gesture as they did in eloquence, boasting that he would express a
passion in as many sundry actions as Tully could discourse it in a
variety of phrases_. Yet so proud he grew by the daily applause of the
people that he looked for honour or reverence to be done him in the
streets, which conceit when Tully entered into with a piercing insight,
he quipped it in this manner:

"It chanced that Roscius and he met at dinner both guests unto Archias,
the poet, when the proud comedian dared to make comparison with Tully.
Why Roscius art thou proud with AEsop's crow, being prankt with the glory
of others' feathers? Of thyself thou canst say